“Tara Geer: Carrying Silence” Opens August 3rd at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller
Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce Carrying Silence, the first East Coast solo exhibition of drawings by artist Tara Geer, opening Saturday, August 3, and on view through September 3, 2013. A reception for the artist will be held on August 3, 2013, from 6-8pm.
For over a decade, drawing and its methodology have been both subject and object of Tara Geer’s work. She draws in pursuit of unmediated looking, to see the world and to question how we see it. From observation, Tara explores life’s quiet details, the heft of an object, the spaces between close parts, the feel of a thing — externally informed but internally impelled. Her drawings are often large and kinetic charcoal universes, neither bodies nor landscapes but microcosmic resolutions of form and psyche. Sometimes they are exploding webs of cells and scaffolding, thumbprints and scrawl, while other times they are more figurative, familiar, discrete.
The works on view are a series of recent charcoal, pastel, pencil, and chalk drawings, ranging from wall-sized flower “portraits” to sketchbook-scale, intricate compositions. They balance bold explanatory line with frenetic erasure or scrawl, and be they spindly or sure, dissolved or obtuse, Tara’s marks are inarguably alive.
Two acclaimed writers weigh in on these works with their own inspired texts in the accompanying publication, Tara Geer: Carrying Silence.Theater director André Gregory notes, “these mysterious meditations — elegant, disturbing, quite unlike anything else I have known. What are they? Where do they come from? Totally original, they are, for me, coded messages from the innermost, distant, topography of the psyche... her drawings, while inhabited by a ferocious knowledge of the way things are, are also amazingly calm. They have a dignified peace to them. They are the darkness and the light... her work reaches us from a place we don’t yet know, or can’t yet recognize.”
Rachel Cohen, art critic and author of A Chance Meeting and Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade, describes Geer’s process in intimate detail: “What she is drawing is not fruit in a bowl or a reclining nude but the folds in her backpack, the tar stains on the roof of her studio building, the lean of the city buses parked in the lot across from 133rd street. Over and over until something about line, space, shade, resonance seems telling, and then that caught stroke over and over, inverted, stretched, combined with other elements, until it has its own rightness.”
Tara Geer was born in Boston, and received from Columbia University both her BA - a double major in Art and Art History, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa — and her MFA, receiving a teaching fellowship as well as the Louis Sudler Prize for excellence in the arts and the Joan Sovern Prize from Columbia’s School of the Arts. Currently, she is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at Columbia and in Art and Art Education at Teachers College. Geer also trains teachers and staff in “Visual Thinking Strategies” at the Brooklyn Museum, El Museo, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, among others.
The publication Tara Geer: Carrying Silence will be available on August 3rd in an edition of 250: 200 in wrappers; 50 in cloth, signed by both authors and artist, 5 of which are slipcased with an original artwork.
For further information please contact:
Jess Frost, Director
Glenn Horowitz Bookseller
87 Newtown Lane
East Hampton, NY 11937
631 324 5511
easthampton@glennhorowitz.com
