FALL 2009

Project Series 38: Constance Mallinson is featured in Times Quotidian article What is there There by Rita Valencia

In this new work of Constance Mallinson, the act of seeing goes into an imaginary forest from which an essence has been gleaned and transmogrified, but never explained. Mallinson actually picks up the objects which are the models for her work on morning walks in the wilds of the S.F. Valley, but nothing here, or there, is as it seems. These are paintings that are intricate, complex and luxurious, which invite long and languorous gazing. They also contain within them stories of an uneasily shifting reality, an ever-dying natural world, and primal acts of violence and regeneration embedded in the act of seeing. Read Article

 

Project Series 38: Constance Mallinson is mentioned in LA Weekly article Snips and Snails: Let the Fall Art Season Begin by Doug Harvey

 

	Constance Mallinson "Severed Limbs," 2009 Oil on paper 52 1/2 x 60 /2 inches

Arcim-who-do? Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593) was that Italian dude who made paintings of heads created from fruits and vegetables, and was adopted by the Surrealists as an early precursor. His strangely specific strategy also permeates the work of Constance Mallinson, whose recent paintings are the subject of a Project Series exhibit at Pomona College Museum of Art...Read Article

 

The New Normal is reviewed by Christopher Knight of the LA Times
 

	Kota Ezawa, Home Video II, 2007 (video still)

A new exhibition at the Pomona College Museum of Art features six grainy, black-and-white ink-jet prints showing passports used by CIA agents involved in the widely reported 2003 abduction of an Egyptian cleric in Milan. The CIA station chief claimed Abu Omar had perhaps fled to the Balkans, but Italian authorities later charged that the cleric had been taken to two American military bases and then transferred to Egypt, where he underwent torture.

The printed passport data, said to have been retrieved from Italian hotels where the American agents stayed, made me wonder two things:

First, could foreign agents — say, from Spain — be checking into California hotels right now with falsified documents, preparing to kidnap UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo to stand trial for war crimes in international court? (Yoo wrote Bush administration memos authorizing water boarding, an interrogation technique also employed by the Khmer Rouge.) And second, what relationship do grainy prints of passport photos have to the long tradition of portraiture in art? Read Review

 

Press Release: The New Normal

The traveling exhibition The New Normal, curated by Michael Connor, is an exhibition of contemporary artworks that reflect the state of privacy in the world today. Co-organized by iCI (Independent Curators International), New York, and Artists Space, New York, and circulated by iCI.

Touring April 2008 through June 2010, The New Normal will be on view at Pomona College Museum of Art in Claremont, CA August 25-October 19, 2009 with an opening reception Saturday, September 12, from 5-7pm. The New Normal also includes an Artist Lecture with Trevor Paglen, Wednesday, October 14, 4:15 pm; Lyman Hall Co-sponsored by the Scripps College Humanities Institute with reception following hosted by Intercollegiate Media Studies of the Claremont Colleges and a Panel Discussion: The Public and Private in Media, Wednesday, September 23, 4:15 pm; Lyman Hall and is Co-sponsored by the Intercollegiate Media Studies of the Claremont Colleges.

Touring April 2008 through June 2010, The New Normal will be on view at Pomona College Museum of Art in Claremont, CA August 25-October 19, 2009 with an opening reception Saturday, September 12, from 5-7pm.

iCI announces the tour of The New Normal, an exhibition that brings together 13 artists who use private information as raw material and subject matter. Each of the works in the exhibition offers access to the private sphere of the artists themselves, of strangers, and of public officials. The works take diverse forms—video, websites, novellas, found objects, and photographs—to question the forced and voluntary confessions that make the private sphere visible to the public eye.  More


 

Press Release: Project Series 38: Constance Mallinson

Constance Mallinson "Severed Limbs," 2009 Oil on paper 52 1/2 x 60 /2 inches

Project Series 38: Constance Mallinson Nature Morte will be on view from August 25 through October 18, 2009, at the Pomona College Museum of Art in Claremont. An opening reception will be held at the Museum on Saturday, September 12 from 5:00-7:00 p.m. Constance Mallinson will present a public lecture about her work on Wednesday, September 16, at 2 p.m.

Project Series 38 premieres Mallinson’s new paintings, which examine how we construct meaning from nature in an increasingly urbanized world. In a richly detailed, highly rendered trompe l’oeil style—a style of painting that gives the illusion of photographic reality—Mallinson’s newest works combine the beautiful and the grotesque in equally unsettling and intriguing measure. The life-size oil paintings—on paper or plywood—depict figurative imagery ranging from a pile of twisted dead branches resembling severed limbs; a naked couple composed of twigs and logs; to an exacting recreation of Édouard Manet’s 1863 seminal painting Olympia from natural materials reminiscent of the style of 16th-century Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo.  More