| Introduction - |
| The forty-five artists featured in the 5th Pacific Coast edition of New American Paintings were selected from a group of over 600 who competed in our 1999 Pacific Coast Competition. The competition's principal juror was Lowery Sims, Curator in the Department of 20th Century Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Sims spent the better part of a week carefully reviewing artists' slides and making her selections. The result is one of the finest editions of New American Paintings to date. The book comes together in an inexpressible way that emphasizes both the quality of the work presented and the facility with which it was chosen. |
| Sims is familiar with artists of the Pacific Coast region. While she claims to have no preconceptions about art being produced in California, she does have expectations about work coming out of the Pacific Northwest. In jurying this competition, Sims was surprised by the dearth of work with a “conspicuously Northwest feel--work which has an emphasis placed on craft, or which makes an overt bow to Native American art.” It is an observation with which I concur. Since the release of our first Pacific Coast edition in 1994, there has been a marked decrease in the amount of “Northwest-style” art that has come through our doors. Many of the themes remain--Northwest painters still have a palpable respect for the forces of nature and a penchant for a type of mysticism that is often associated with Asian art--but the context has changed. The paintings of Marc Katano and Lance Morrison offer examples of this shift. |
| The two strains of work that make themselves most strongly felt in this edition are abstraction, and what Sims referred to as “juxtaposition art.” The former is represented by the work of artists such as Tom Bolles, whose stately monochrome canvases emit an inner light, and Michelle Ross, who combines various media and styles in order to critique the genealogy of abstraction. |
| Juxtaposition art, to use Sims' terminology, has its roots in collage, but really came into its own during the 1980s when artists like Sigmar Polke and David Salle popularized the format (the work of well-known California-based artists Lezley Saar and Carole Caroompas offer strong examples). Because of the complexity of such art, both on a formal and theoretical level, it tends to have more than its fair share of critics. By its very nature, such art does not lead a viewer to any specific reading; rather, it calls for viewers to construct their own meaning. Often, viewers are led into an aesthetic experience that demands an awareness of theoretical positions surrounding topical issues such as gender, race, the body, and sexuality. The work can be difficult, but ultimately rewarding. An artist such as Anne Siems can lead us into a clearer understanding of issues surrounding femininity while simultaneously offering us a strong aesthetic experience. |
| Every curator has their own unique way of approaching a jurying project. Sims was most interested in “getting at imagery that takes a genre somewhere else.” I was thinking about Sims' statement when I recently saw a painting by Marc Trujillo at the San Francisco International Art Expo. Trujillo is a young painter who is interested in the exterior and interior spaces of urban America. I find his paintings to be both striking, and somewhat insidious. On a formal level, the initial impulse to read them as photographs is quickly undermined by the work's insistence on laying its abstract structure bare. Yet that is not all they reveal. These images expose the detachment of late 20th Century existence with a subtlety that only the best art can muster. Trujillo’s paintings not only take the genre of interior painting somewhere else, they take us along as well. |
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- Steven T. Zevitas |
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