Gallery Y: Joseph Noderer, “ ’Neath the Light”
Gallery X: Heather Marshall, “Time and Place”
April 11 – May 17, 2014
Opening Reception: Friday, April 11, 2014, 6-9pm
Linda Warren Projects is proud to present solo exhibitions by Joseph Noderer and Heather Marshall –two artists whose relationships to the places they call home continually inspire their painting practices. Though they both engage with landscape to create dialogues about identity and self-exploration, Noderer and Marshall each approach their subjects with vastly differing means, aesthetically and conceptually. In Noderer’s exhibition, “ ’Neath the Light,” in Gallery Y, the Texas-based artist features lush, rural scenes of the American South rendered with a gestural hand, while Marshall’s controlled realism captures the nuances of her Virginia town in “Time and Place” in Gallery X.
Joseph Noderer, The Way to Bentonville, 2014, oil on panel, 30″ x 32″
For Noderer, the representation of a landscape is as much about objective observation as it is about a subjective point of view. In his fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, “ ’Neath the Light,” Noderer’s works are composites of what he sees and his intuitive experience, resulting in what the artist understands to be a more accurate likeness of his environment. Contributing a significant aura of melancholy, Noderer’s palette of mossy greens and murky neutrals is applied in heavy blotches and smears, his dense vegetation engulfing ramshackle structures, and merging fore- and background within its masses.
Punctuating the forest of green landscape paintings are a handful of figurative works. These bearded, haggard visages are painted with the same loose, visceral treatment as the foliage –a pictorialization of Noderer’s basic objective of paralleling the notions of self and surroundings. In works like Anguished Pennsylvanian, eyeless sockets beneath bushy locks of hair resemble the gaping, windowless holes of the overgrown lean-tos in Done and Burnt. The tendrils drooping from beneath Garage Man’s cap liken his portrait to the hanging branches and vines of Krause. Here, as in all of Noderer’s oeuvre, the eerie and the familiar intermingle, creating an interpretation of “home” that alternately comforts and unsettles.
While Noderer’s landscapes are a result of looking inward, Heather Marshall’s small, hyperreal paintings are a product of the artist’s remarkable attention to the details within the details of the world around her. Predominantly inspired by the intersection of the ordinary and the extraordinary, Marshall looks for familiar sights, like alleyway views of buildings laden with air conditioning units hanging out the windows, with fleeting instances of aesthetic wonder, like rose-colored light bathing the facade of an empty two-story home in Warm Memories.
The works in Marshall’s third solo exhibition at the gallery, “Time and Place,” have a distinct emphasis on age, wear and patina –elements that permeate the struggling industrial city in which the artist lives. Marshall applies her impeccable hand to these subjects, imbuing perfection into the representation of moments and places that are far from perfect. In works like Manifestation of Certain Conditions, an evening sun shines upon a house boarded up in darkened, aged plywood. This home, somewhere in limbo between repair and disrepair, care and neglect, stands at a poignant juncture, and like the light of the sky, headed towards its twilight.
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Heather Marshall, Afternoon Slant, 2014, oil on panel, 8″ x 10″
Joseph Noderer is a Texas-based artist whose work has been featured in venues throughout the country including the University of Arkansas, Tiny Park Gallery in Austin, and Corbett Vs. Dempsey and Devening Projects + Editions in Chicago. Noderer attended Yale at Norfolk School of Art and Music, received his BFA from Tyler School of Art and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This is his fifth solo exhibition with Linda Warren Projects.
Heather Marshall is a Virginia-based artist and educator, and her work has been exhibited in such venues as Hanover College Art Gallery in Indiana, The Snite Museum of Art at University of Notre Dame and Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago. Marshall received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from University of Notre Dame. This is Marshall’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.