sharon kagan · emily dickinson), 2018 mixed media painting, (archival digital print on canvas,...

Sharon KaganMultimedia Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture

Hymn to the Living, 2016, Mixed Media Painting, (acrylic paint on digital photo on canvas on wood), 36 x 36 inches

A Walk in the Park: Yosemite (winter), 2018Mixed Media Painting, (archival digital print on canvas mounted on wood panel, acrylic paint)36 x 36 inches

A Walk in the Park: Joshua Tree (spring), 2017Mixed Media Painting, (archival digital print on canvas mounted on wood panel, acrylic paint)36 x 36 inches

A Walk in the Park: King’s Canyon (summer), 2017Mixed Media Painting, (archival digital print on canvas mounted on wood panel, acrylic paint)36 x 36 inches

A Walk in the Park: Central Park (autumn), 2017Mixed Media Painting, (archival digital print on canvas mounted on wood panel, acrylic paint)36 x 36 inches

the sky of the sky of a tree called life (after E.E. Cum-mings), 2018 Mixed Media Painting, (archival digital print on canvas, mounted on wood panel, acrylic paint)14 x 14 inches

this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart (after E.E. Cummings), 2018 Mixed Media Painting (archival digital print on canvas, mounted on wood panel, acrylic paint).14 x 14 inches

The Fluency of Crimson (after L.L. Barkat), 2018 Mixed Media Painting, (archival digital print on canvas, mounted on wood panel, acrylic paint)14 x 14 inches

Blazing in Gold and Quenching in Purple (after Emily Dickinson), 2018 Mixed Media Painting, (archival digital print on canvas, mounted on wood panel, acrylic paint)14 x 14 inches

Untitled, 2016Mixed Media Painting, (archival digital print on paper mounted to Dibond, acrylic paint)20 x 20 inches

Jewel of the Heart, 2019 Four-panel Mixed Media Painting, (archival digital print on canvas, mounted on wood panel, acrylic paint)72 x 72 inches

Untitled (Painting #1), 2016Mixed Media Painting(acrylic paint on digital photo on canvas on wood) 48 x 48 inches

Untitled (Color #6), 2015Mixed Media Drawing (color pencil, ink, archival print on Dibond)16 x 16 inches

Untitled, Black and White #1, 2008Mixed Media Drawing (hand drawn ink over plotter print)27.25 x 20.25 inches

Untitled, Black and White #7, 2014Mixed Media Drawing (hand drawn ink over plotter print)34.25 x 46 inches

Untitled, Black and White #2, 2009Mixed Media Drawing (hand drawn ink over plotter print)26.25 x 20 inches


Untitled, Black and White #5, 2012Mixed Media Drawing (hand drawn ink over plotter print)26 x 35.5 inches

Untitled, Black and White #8, 2015Mixed Media Drawing (hand drawn ink over plotter print)12 x 12 inches

& Circumstance, 2006Knit 170 lb. hemp twine and knitting needles9.5’ (h) x 3’ (w) , 3’ (d)

Pomp, 2006Knit hemp twine/ Crocheted yarn10’ (h) x 8’ (w) x 8’ (d)

Stress, 2006Knitted Cotton, Wood and Brass Plumb3’ x 4’ x 2.5’

Cut, 2007Knit hemp twineVariable dimensions

Gravity, 2008Knit hemp ropeVariable dimensions

Gravity, 2008Knit hemp ropeVariable dimensions

Fugue, variation #1, 2008Knit hemp string, chicken wire7’ x 5’Variable dimensions

Fugue, variation #2, 2008Knit hemp string, chicken wire7’ x 4’Variable dimensions

Commentary

We live in a time when artistic boundaries have begun to blur. Categories of art based on their medium, like painting or sculpture, have morphed until the hybrid is as familiar as the pure-bred specimen. Sharon Kagan is an artist who has worked in a range of modes including interactive installations, expressive performances, and inventive drawings. She brings to her work an awareness that art can emerge from deep levels of physicality and feeling, and show us the continuity between personal experience and the wider world.

Kagan’s drawings originate in tangible, observable reality, but are not simply renderings. Rather, they start with what can be seen, and go on to conjure a kind of alternate, expanded reality. A drawing begins with the artist knitting hemp string or rope into a loose mass that is then photographed in a way that disorients the viewer.

In the black and white drawings, the enlarged photographs have an atmospheric, soft-focus quality that allows us intimate entry into the fibrous interstices of the knitting. At a distance, the image suggests both an open, sculptural form and an animated organism. When we look carefully, we see that the drawing’s surface is articulated with many finely inked shapes, each of which encapsulates a specific tonality.

The effect is to bring the viewer close to an unfamiliar graphic reality, which is both strongly dimensional and mapped in a way that emphasizes its digital pixels. In this double consciousness we recognize our contemporary life in which images are constantly available yet equally unreliable.

In Kagan’s more recent drawings and paintings on canvas, she uses close-up details of drawings of knitted stitches and transforms them using color pencil. The resulting work moves far beyond the tonal subtlety of the black and white images into a realm that is psychedelic in the intensity of its color and patterning. The gridding of the image, a traditional method for artists to transfer images, becomes in Kagan’s hands a graphical fantasia, a quilted euphoric Eden where everything is animated.

By revealing what was once invisible, Kagan’s work embodies a life transmogrified into art, starting with her early installations and performances. Kagan began knitting to mourn the loss of her mother, an unbroken link evoked in yarn. She has cited perceiving the world around her as vibratory energy as a formative artistic experience. The drawings and paintings she creates suggest the image of the net, a fabric made of knots and emptiness, endlessly capable of growth, movement, and connection.

John Mendelsohn

Sharon Kagan

Biography Sharon Kagan was born in 1953 in Vineland, NJ. Her parents, who were recent immigrants from Lithuania and Holocaust survivors, owned a chicken farm at the time. The family moved to Los Angeles before she was a year old. Kagan was discouraged by her parents from being an artist, and did not take her first art class until she was already enrolled as an English major at the University of California at Los Angeles. At UCLA, she focused on interactive sculpture and earned a BA in Painting, Sculpture, and Graphic Design in 1976. After graduation she worked on The Dinner Party, Judy Chicago’s seminal feminist installation project. Kagan studied at the Otis Art Institute, receiving her MFA in Sculpture in 1979. For her master’s thesis she created a video installation in a porno hotel, inspired by the ancient Sumarian ritual known as the Sacred Marriage. The piece challenged the cultural paradigm of sexuality in a video that was extremely explicit. A turning point in her work occurred in 1983 when she attended a seminar moderated by the curator Germano Celant at UCLA titled “Art as Opera”. This lead Kagan to create five performances within two years. During the 1980s, she worked in performance, video, and installation, culminating in a piece about being the child of Holocaust survivors, performed in Joshua Tree National Park in California. The wartime experience of her parent’s as partisans, particularly the efforts of her mother who risked her life many times, has been a profound inspiration for Kagan. She notes that her mother didn’t think of herself as an artist, but says that she “inherited her amazing hand skills” that included knitting, sew-ing, and embroidery. In 1986, Kagan founded the Creativity Center in Santa Monica, and until its closing in 2012 it focused on the development of the personal creative vision of both artist’s and non-artists. During the 1990s, Kagan worked trying to transform what she call “the most pivotal experience of my life” into art. In 1986, after she had been meditating, she “woke up and for three days saw the world the way that physicists and mystics have described. Everything was vibrating … it was all just energy.” After her mother died in 2003, Kagan recounts that knitting became a way of “soothing the grief …. After the deepest part of my grief had passed, I realized that I found the way to translate that experi-ence” of vibrational oneness from decades earlier, joined with a personal sense of rupture, continuity, and the pursuit of inner freedom. The work that resulted began with knitting hemp string and rope, then photographing it, and drawing on the enlarged image. More recent drawings and paintings on canvas have introduced color and pattern into the enlarged images, to achieve the artist’s intention: “I am working to make the eyes dance.” Kagan’s installations have included the Love Chapel, housed for two years in a building in Los Angeles. In the 2000s she had two solo exhibitions at Gallery 825 in Los Angeles, where she also participated in Sweater, a collaborative project and exhibition with Tim Hawkinson and a group of five other artists. In 2003 Kagan co-wrote Healing a Broken Heart, a self-help book, published by Simon and Schuster. She teaches at Santa Monica College.

Sharon Kagan

Artist Statement

On first sight, these drawings seem to be photographs. From a distance, a drawing may appear to be an ambiguous image suggesting the body, weather systems, or patterns of organic growth. When the viewer gets up close to a drawing, it becomes completely abstract, a sea of small shapes.

A drawing begins with a digital photograph of intricate details of fibrous forms that are knitted by the artist in hemp string or rope. Shooting in low light results in out-of-focus photographs; enlarging the images exaggerates their blurriness. Using a Rapidograph pen, the pixelated shapes that emerge from the enlargement and printing of the photograph are then outlined in ink. One of the intentions of this work is to reveal the unreliability of the photographic image in mediating our perception.

Recently color has become part of the drawings and paintings on canvas. This work begins with a small section of a larger drawing, which is enlarged, printed, and then gridded. By working with color pencils, patterns within patterns emerge, with a faceted, jewel-like effect. The goal is to make the eyes dance.

The work is concerned with making tangible the knowledge of physicists and mystics, that all matter is composed of rapidly moving energy. Nothing is solid and nothing is separate. Everything is vibrating.

With this work, the hope is for the viewer to be uplifted and met in their deepest places. The black and white drawings are epic and theatrical, suggesting a mythological domain. Color takes the work in a different direction, as though the viewer has come to the other side of an inner journey. Color changes everything, allowing the work to become evocative and poetic.

Sharon Kagan

Resumé (Selected) For a complete CV go to www.sharonkagan.com

Selected Exhibitions/Installations/Performances2020 The Politics of Color (solo exhibition), Show Gallery, Hollywood, CA2019 Hardin Center for Cultural Arts (solo exhibition), Gadsden, AL2019 Yellowstone Art Museum (solo exhibition), Billings, MT2018 Ping Pong 2018 Miami, Alfred I Dupont Bldg, Miami, FL2018 Charles MacNider Art Museum (solo exhibition), Mason City, IA2018 Ping Pong 2018 Basel Projektraum M54, Basel, Switzerland2018 Northern Gallery (solo exhibition), Northern State University, Aberdeen, SD2017 Free Form Five, Five person show, Elga Wimmer, NY, NY2005-15 Incognito (annual event), Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA2013 Summer Salon, Fresh Paint, Culver City, CA2010 AVEC LE COEUR D’UN ENFANT, New Puppy Gallery2008 - 09 Venice Family Clinic Silent Auction, Venice, CA2008 Venice Art Walk, Venice, CA2007 Plays Well with Others, Exhibition of the collaborative group PiNK, Pete & Susan Barrett Gallery, SMC, Santa Monica, CA2007 Dancing Girls Don’t Need Safety Nets, Solo Exhibition Gallery 825, Los Angeles, CA2006 Sweater, Gallery 825, Collaborative installation under the direction of Tim Hawkinson2006 Biannual, LAAA South, Group show juried by Jeremy Strick2006 Entwined, Santa Monica College Gallery, Two-Person Show 2005 Newhall Art Walk, Temporary Public Art Project2005 OutAuction, Fundraiser for LA Gay & Lesbian Center2004 Gallery 825, Group Show2004 Faculty Exhibition, Pete & Susan Barrett Gallery2003 In Utero: What Were the Chances?, Gallery 825, Solo Exhibition2003 Faculty Exhibition, Pete & Susan Barrett Gallery2002 Faculty Exhibition, Pete & Susan Barrett Gallery2001 Faculty Exhibition, Pete & Susan Barrett Gallery2000 Faculty Exhibition, Pete & Susan Barrett Gallery2000 An Intimate Conversation, performance/installation, a collaboration with Terry Holzgreen, Market Gallery1999 Bone Kaddish, Site Specific Performance, Santa Monica Airport1999 A Husband/A Wife, a collaboration with Terry Holzgreen

Education1977-79 Master of Fine Arts, Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, CA Studied with Germano Celant, Betye Saar and Gary Lloyd1971-76 Bachelor of Arts, Painting and Sculpture, University of California, Los Angeles, CA

Grants/Fellowships/Awards1989-90 National State County Partnership II Matching Grant (declined)1985-86 The Brody Arts Fund Fellowship Award, California Comm. Fdtn. in coordination with the NEA1985-86 California Arts Council Artist-in-Residence

BibliographyDavid Ng, “More Than Just Dyed in the Wool,” Los Angeles Times, February 4, 2007, F8 (photo)Holly Myers, “Close-knit ‘Sweater’ Teamwork,” Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2006, E20 (color photo)Caryn Coleman, “Sweater Song,” art.blogging.la/archives/2006/06/sweater_song.phtml Beverly Cohn, “Entwined: Two Artists Weave Their Magic,” Westside Woman, Feb. 2006, p6(article and color photos)Malibu Times, exhibition description with photographThe Argonaut, exhibition announcement with photographDaily Press Staff, “The Tension Builds at SMC Exhibit,” The Daily Press, January 13, 2006 (photo)Beverly Beyette, “A Place of Respite in the Heart of the City,”

Sharon Kagan

http://www.sharonkagan.com

Exhibition Fact SheetSharon Kagan

The Macro and Micro Factor

Sharon Kagan is an artist who has worked in a range of modes including interactive installations, expressive performances, and inventive drawings. She brings to her work an awareness that art can emerge from deep levels of physicality and feeling, and show us the continuity between personal experience and the wider world. Kagan’s drawings originate in tangible, observable reality, but are not simply renderings. Rather, they start with what can be seen, and go on to conjure a kind of alternate, expanded reality. A drawing begins with the artist knitting hemp string or rope into a loose mass that is then photographed in a way that disorients the viewer. In the black and white drawings, the enlarged photographs have an atmospheric, soft-focus quality that allows us intimate entry into the fibrous interstices of the knitting.

NUMBER OF OBJECTS:

SPACE REQUIREMENTS:

PARTICIPATION FEE:

INSTALLATION:

TRANSPORTATION:

COMPLEMENTARY SUPPORT MATERIALS:

33 works including paintings, drawings and sculptures. Sizes, dates and media featured on pdf presentation (www.ktcassoc.com, Curators, Artists’ PDFs).

150-250 running feet depending on installa-tion and selection.

Round-trip shipping, wall-to-wall insurance of 50% of retail value, in-transit and on-premises.

Work will be sent ready to hang; standard 2D wall hanging apparatus required.

The exhibiting institution will provide all ship-ping and insurance for the exhibition and cover all related costs. This will include full responsibility for delivery to venue following and return to artist at the conclusion of the exhibition. Work must be fully insured during transport and on premises.

Katharine T. Carter & Associates will provide a $200 credit towards the production of a color announcement card, 200 complementary cata-logues, and museum wall text. All pre-written press materials, to include biographical sum-mary, artist statement, petite essay, press re-leases, media releases, pitch letters and radio/television spots, to be provided by Katharine T. Carter & Associates.

http://www.ktcassoc.com

CONDITIONS:

CANCELLATION:

1. Exhibiting institution must provide object insurance to cover replacement costs should items be damaged or stolen while on premises. Minimum insurance required: 50% retail value. Should loss, damage or deterioration be noted at the time of delivery of the exhibition, the artist shall be notified imediately. If any damage appears to have taken place during the exhibi-tion, the artist shall be informed immediately.2. Security: Objects must be maintained in a fireproof building under 24-hour security.3. All packing and unpacking instructions sent by (artist) shall be followed explicitly by competent packers. Each object shall be handled with special care at all times to ensure against damage or deterioration. 4. As stated above (see space requirements), the number of works to be exhibited can be dictated by the space and needs of the exhibiting institution. 5. Exhibitors may permit photographs of the exhibition and its contents for routine publicity and educational purposes only.Exceptions may be made pending discussion with the artist.

Any cancellation of this exhibition by the hosting institution, not caused by the actions of the artist, shall entitle Katharine T. Carter and Associates to an award of liquidated damages of $3,750.00. The hosting institution further agrees that any suit brought to recover said damages may only be brought in Columbia County, New York.

Contact and additional information:

Katharine T. CarterKatharine T. Carter & Associates518-758-8130 fax [email protected]

P. O. Box 609Kinderhook, NY 12106-0609

Exhibition Fact SheetSharon Kagan

mailto:[email protected]

For exhibition inquiries contact Katharine T. Carter & Associates

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 518-758-8130

Fax: 518-758-8133 Mailing Address:

Post Office Box 609Kinderhook, NY 12106-0609

Website: http://www.ktcassoc.com

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.ktcassoc.com

sharon kagan · emily dickinson), 2018 mixed media painting, (archival digital print on canvas,...

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