Inaugural Exhibition
July 18, 2003 – August 2003
Opening Reception: Friday, July 18, 2003, 6-9pm
Linda Warren Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of works by the artists Dale Edwards, Paula Henderson, and Patrick Maisano. Portion of the proceeds of this exhibition will go to the support Housing Opportunities for Women (HOW), a nonprofit organization located in Chicago that helps to provide homeless women and their families permanent housing solutions.
Dale Edwards, a self-taught artist, outsider and visionary, was born and raised in Beloit Wisconsin. Upon graduation from Beloit Memorial High School in 1958 Edwards joined the U.S. Army. His tour of service in Germany opened the world of art to him through the architecture he witnessed and the Museums he visited. After leaving the armed service Edwards moved to Los Angeles and entered Trade Technology as a student of welding. Edwards worked on the San Pedro shipyards until “art lead him down the path” and he began to employ his skills as a welder to create large-scale sculptures that conveyed his vision of history, religion, mythology and culture from the eyes and soul of an African-American man in contemporary society. Edward’s work varies in mediums of “add and take away” welding, stone, wood and ceramics. He chooses his medium based on the availability of materials in his immediate environment. Although this exhibition marks a thirty-year career he is little known outside Los Angeles. This is due to an internal apprehension stemming from the overriding desire for approval. The media exhibited covers the immensity of this growing collection and represents each period of his career. We are proud to grant Edward’s first introduction to the Chicago art market.
This exhibition marks the Chicago premiere of Paula Henderson’s new “The Next Migration” and “If You Lived Here” series. These two series document the demolition of Chicago’s high-rise public housing. Henderson explains the two series, oil and wax paintings on canvas and gouache on paper, as “these works attempt visual resonance for issues that obscure the relationship of the self to community and my interest in probing issues of useful knowledge as a manifestation of social relevance in contemporary art.” Henderson has chosen the thesis of urban decay to portray symbols of our failed society. Henderson explains “In these works, images are so loaded with social significance that to construct meaning is to take a position that serves to connect the viewer with the welfare of the social order.” The use of planar abstraction in the pictorial space lends the modernist grid to the idea of sociological deconstruction and to an elevated criticism of the history of art. The “If You Lived Here” series depicts the nature of gravity with the delicate force of drips evolving inside out. This extends the idea of the affects to the exterior public body, i.e. the viewer, and their relation to the social decay evolving from to poverty and alienation.
Patrick Maisano’s work is based in the language of myth. His iconography has been built up in the belief of the ideas of the “pure, instinctual, spiritual and primal.” Maisano, a self-taught artist, studied for a year as a religious vocation at the Franciscan Community in New York City. During this time of study and meditation Maisano decided that his calling was that of an artist rather than a priest. Maisano’s background can be seen in the transcendental effectuations on his figures and narratives. On display in this exhibition are two bodies of work that explore simultaneously and repeat similar iconography in different mediums. The series incorporate large scale acrylic paintings on canvas and mixed-media digital inkjet printouts using small scale text and drawings later enlarged digitally and applied like mosaics to large scale canvases using a polymer varnish. Each work is than further enhanced with additional drawing and painting using various carbon based pigments. The end results of all these works are pieces that work as both paintings, drawings, collage and poetry.
Dale Edwards is a visiting artist in Beloit Wisconsin. His works have been in such notable institutions as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Durango, Mexico, Museum of Cultural Diversity, Los Angeles, CA and the Museum of African-American Art, Los Angeles, CA. He was also commissioned to do a monumental piece for the Church of Scientology’s School of Higher Learning in Los Angeles. Paula Henderson is pursuing a Masters of Fine Art at the University of Chicago. For the past eight years Henderson has been the lead artist at Gallery 37 Center for the Arts, Chicago, IL. Henderson has an exhibition record which includes the Rockford Art Museum, Rockford, IL and solo exhibitions at Illinois Wesleyan University and Northwestern University. Patrick Maisano’s paintings are marked in major collections including the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL and Kingworld Entertainment in Los Angeles, CA. Maisano currently works and resides in California.