Kayla Guthrie, William J. O'Brien, McKeever Donovan, Annabeth Marks

October 4th-November 9th, 2014

Opening reception: 
Saturday, October 4th, 2014
6-10pm

For Immediate Release:

U.S. Blues is proud to present the collective works of Kayla Guthrie, William J. O’Brien, McKeever Donovan, and Annabeth Marks for its inaugural exhibition. All the works in this show examine time’s relationship to art making. Be it exploration of the phenomenological moment, our methods of recording, or the articulation of bodies in time, the objects in this show seek to articulate the ineffable and inevitable flow of the human time and the discourse we construct around it. Embedded in each artists’ process we can observe time’s unique ability to combine discordant elements in cohesive wholes.

Annabeth Marks’ paintings are fabricated through a geological layering process with paint. In Marks’ constructed canvas troughs, house paint is left to dry in the sun until it cracks, and thus rendering the newly matured paint as a literal ground for the paintings themselves. These powdery and rigid foundations become vivid vignettes of abstracted and emotional landscapes or temporal moments through an additive process of building up the painting layer by layer. The resultant “windows” evince the works' history through a palimpsest of serene washes and foggy pigments.

The material history embedded in William J. O’Brien’s work speaks to his complex relationship with process and American craft. His clay vessels function like records insofar as they substantiate the time it takes to produce an art object. While O’Brien’s process firmly resides in the contemporary tradition of American ceramics, his work, through their hand-rendered forms, registers as historical if not intergenerational.

Kayla Guthrie’s poetry and text works discursively portray the struggle to capture a single moment or memory of one’s own. Working through her own nostalgia, Guthrie has created a poetic ode to the synesthetic memory and its reconfigurations. Her work suggests that we make sense of our personal narrative through the emplotment of our relations, experiences, and emotions. Guthrie’s texts are not fixed characters or moments, but stages open to personal revision.

The metal and resin orifices of McKeever Donovan burst into the portals of latent digestion and mastication in which compositions of detritus are created by chance and chaos. The sculptural innards of Donovan’s works depict a moment of the art process betwixt the inchoate and the amalgamate where forms and objects fall and develop meaning in relation to one another. These works stand outside of the flow of time as both dynamic and static sculptural portraits of the arrested moment rendered through analogic forms. 

-John Arthur Peetz

McKeever Donovan

Annabeth Marks

Kayla Guthrie

William J. O'Brien