Susan Street Fine Art is pleased to announce WADE: to step in or through a medium (as water) offering more resistance than air or to move or proceed with difficulty or labor (through a crowd) or to set to work or attack with determination or vigor (wade into a task). WADE: Summer Invitational showcases Ben Anderson, Sheldon Greenberg, Joshua Jensen-Nagle and Richard & Judith Lang, a select group of accomplished and driven artists who have used water as a consistent ingredient in and or stimulus for their work.
Benjamin Anderson was born in Clearwater, Florida and received his Bachelors of Fine Art Degree at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, CA. Anderson, a Santa Barbara based painter, uses water as his visual vehicle to blend themes of beauty, war and materialism. Diluting and distorting the lines of perception, Anderson presents a pleasantly disorienting series of vibrant, large-scale oil paintings depicting a universe where water immerses and transforms familiar everyday objects. WADE will feature Anderson’s female ‘Swimmers,’ where he has used the waters natural distortion to capture simply the essence of the female form.
Bay Area painter and professor at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, Sheldon Greenberg’s new works evoke the artist’s continued nostalgia for swimming pools and the reflective hopes of his Palms Springs childhood summers. Greenberg approaches his subject of water as a source of passage and reflection, longing for the possibility of seeing what may have been missed the first time. Working with more minimal line work and color than his last series, Greenberg’s new work features fiery oranges and yellows, misty greens and blues that are broken up by a variety of sometimes hazy and sometimes sharp palm shadows splashed upon his large vibrant canvases.
Joshua Jensen-Nagle, a Toronto based artist from New Jersey, connects to our romanticized adherence to nostalgia and memory. This series features reconstructed scenes from mid-century American vacation destinations of beachside hotel pools atop sandy shorelines. Choosing imagery inspired by childhood memories and dreams, these works are evidence of Jensen-Nagle’s life and a reflection of his past, which he creates on urge, devotion, intuition and instinct. Continuing to explore different mediums in his production, this body of work begins with small painted poolside postcards and vintage slides, which are then re-photographed using expired sx-70 Polaroid film. Jensen-Nagle uses photography as a means to create rather than to document a reality. The enlarged images are then face mounted to plexiglass, creating the reflective dream like quality that embodies Jensen-Nagle’s work.
Since 1999, Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang have been visiting 1,000 yards of Kehoe Beach on the Point Reyes National Sea Shore gathering plastic debris washing up from the Pacific Ocean. By carefully collecting and “curating” the bits of plastic, they fashion it into works of art. The viewer is often surprised that the Lang’s colorful photographic collages are of the thermoplastic junk of our throwaway culture that is circulating the seas North of the Hawaiian Islands in a stew of floating plastic pollution, larger than the state of Texas. They state that Oceanic plastic does not biodegrade but photo degrades, rubbing itself to ever-smaller pieces, planktonic in size – a killing meal for the next in line on the food chain. The jellies absorb the gelatinous polymer mass, small fish eat the jellies, larger fish eat the smaller fish, and so it goes until it gets to us and is ‘What’s for Supper,’ the title for their current series of large scale minimal photographs featured in WADE.
