Erling Sjovold and Emily Weiner
The Pre-existence of Landscape, January 2013
Grizzy Grizzly is pleased to announce the beginning of its 2013 gallery program with a luminous, two-person show entitled ‘The Pre-existence of Landscape,’ opening January 4th. The exhibition features the evocative paintings of Richmond-based Erling Sjovold and New York artist, Emily Weiner. The first time pairing of these artists invites viewers to contemplate the ‘nature’ of painted landscape, not as a historical trope but as a site for contemporary discourse.
Erling Sjovold will be showing four characteristically vivid paintings – his work employs the knock-out bravura of a seasoned painter with the visual innovation of an artist still deeply entrenched in material investigation. In response to this exhibition he states, “The title also suggests the paradoxical idea of landscape preceding the culture that constructs it, like purity…”
Emily Weiner will be presenting three pairings of paintings that are in dialog with one another. Her conceptually driven techniques include using the subject as the object of a painting: for example, a mark made with a feather represents a feather. The landscape for her is a space for collecting tools as well as images. Like Sjovold, she reinvents the potential of ‘plein air’ with a digital awareness. In her discussion of the title, she writes “while it points to some ambiguous past… it also implies the possibilities for (landscape) painting in the present and future. As if there couldn't be a definitive beginning or end.”
In conjunction with the exhibition, a short film by Emily Weiner will be debuted during opening night. The footage was shot on Super 8 film during her recent summer residency at The Banff Centre in Canada, and features sound by NYC-based musician Michael Hix.
Artist Bios
Erling Sjovold has been awarded numerous residencies and grants including the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Space Program, Ragdale, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Jessie Ball DuPont Summer Fellowship at the National Center for the Humanities, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship. He received his MFA from The School of the Art Institute in Chicago. A native Californian, Sjovold currently lives and works Virginia, where he teaches at the University of Richmond. He exhibits nationally with galleries including Page Bond (Richmond, VA) and Marcia Burtt (Santa Barbara, CA).
Emily Weiner is a New York based painter and writer. Recent and upcoming exhibitions of her work include: Kravetz Wehby (New York, NY), The Banff Centre (Alberta, Canada), Visual Arts Gallery (New York), Fleisher/Ollman Gallery(Philadelphia PA), Camac Centre d’Art (France), and Concrete Utopia (New York). She teaches painting at The School of Visual Arts in New York and at Pratt Institute. Her writing on art has appeared in Art Forum, Domus, and Time Out New York. She is a member of the Art Book Club.
