Raggedy Ann's Foot: Landscape, Landscape: Lilian Garcia-Roig, Ashley Bickerton, Leon Kossoff

Lilian Garcia-Roig in Hyphenated Nature, January 10 - February 14, 2022, at Gallery 114@HCC Ybor City Campus. Visit the event on the artist's website calendar here: Exhibition Link

"Who we are and where we are from—two seemingly simple inquiries—are complex territories for negotiation that shape the core of our personal identity. Florida-based artist Lilian Garcia-Roig (b. 1966, Cuba) uses landscape painting as a vehicle for examining notions like sense of place, belonging, and identity in both perceptually-based plein-air paintings and conceptually-based studio works."

"In Hyphenated Nature at Gallery114@HCC, Garcia-Roig displays her two approaches to landscape painting side-by-side, reconciling on-site works that capture dense, expressive vegetation with paintings made in her studio using Cuban soil. Seen through the lens of Garcia-Roig’s Cuban-American experience, these distinct bodies of work call to mind the intricate nature of one’s own attachment to time, place, and the lands we inhabit."

Watercolor of remembered space in Cuba.

Garcia-Roig's signature touch. She pulls her truck to the site, sets up a table, and paints all day in situ.

In contrast to newer works since a trip to her native Cuba followed by a Joan Mitchell Foundation Residency in New Orleans, where she began using Cuban dirt to depict landscapes remembered from the dual perspective of an immigrant.

Ashley Bickerton continues the theme of hyphenation in Seascapes at the End of History at Lehmann Maupin through March 12, 2022. From the press release: "As part of its bold reappraisal of the seascape genre, the exhibition features works from Bickerton’s Ocean Chunk series, which he first conceived of while living in New York City prior to his relocation to the Indonesian island of Bali in 1993."

Survivalist Idyll

River Vector, Big White, 2022, 90.94 x 90.94 inches--Ocean flotsam and beach detritus with stainless steel, etched glass, rubber, brushed aluminum, and plywood

"In a particularly elaborate, large-scale work from this series, Hanging Ocean Chunk (To Be Dragged Up Cliff Faces, Strung Across Ravines, and Suspended From The Forest Canopy) 1 (2022), a square ocean chunk encased in stainless steel rails is suspended from the gallery ceiling. Festooned with a panoply of accessories including carabiners, flags, coils of rope, and climbing equipment, the work suggests and provides for its own transportation through difficult terrain. Beyond its current gallery setting, Bickerton has prepared for possible future installations of this work on cliff faces, over gorges, and high in forest canopies"

"One of the exhibition’s most personal works, Floating Family Footprints (Flow Tide) 1 (2022), documents the trail of footprints left by the artist, his wife, and their child during one of their walks together on the beach. As in the Ocean Chunk series, Bickerton uses resin and fiberglass to create the impression of a surface of shimmering water, beneath which two sets of adult footprints are visible on either side of a smaller, toddler-sized set between them. Like other works in the exhibition, Floating Family Footprints (Flow Tide) 1 features a pair of flotation devices mounted onto the broad slab of preserved beach, indicating its potential use as a raft should the need arise."