[Thinkspace]

Kelly Vivanco 'Inner Workings'

Plus in our project room:
Catherine Brooks 'The Wild Ones'

Opening Reception: Sat, Dec. 1st 6-9PM

Both exhibits will be on view through Dec. 22nd.



Thinkspace is pleased to present Inner Workings, a solo exhibition of new works by Escondido based artist Kelly Vivanco. Vivanco’s paintings are shaped by her intuitive associations and her openness to play. By gleaning inspiration from memory, dream, imagination, children’s books, and vintage photography, the artist’s imagery revels in a composite world of fantasy and magic. Vivanco embraces the whimsical, and gently subverts our expectations of habitual narratives, objects, and characters, through a dreamy and playful web of associative free encounters. In this world the familiar is transformed into the extraordinary and the beautifully odd. Drawing from the tradition of portraiture, and yet transforming its conventions in the service of the unusual, the artist’s imagined portraits, whether they be of people or animals, deftly combine affect and play. Vivanco’s dynamic combinations of ambiguously ageless characters, often betraying precocious moods, and Kenneth Grahame like animal creatures, lead us into a world beyond the confines of adult disenchantment. Vivanco’s world is lovely and strange, offering a host of alluring characters, creatures, and animal friends.

Often working in smaller formats, or incorporating sculptural environments to frame and house her imagery, Vivanco’s work is executed with the intimacy and personal detail of the dream. These “dreams” are disclosed through conventions akin to those of the fairytale. While Vivanco’s approach to the construction of her imagery is self-described as organic and without symbolic premeditation, the images resonate with personal feeling and intensity, and the strangeness of the subconscious. Fairy tale is the stuff of dream, affect, magic, and nostalgia, and Vivanco’s paintings can be likened to this tradition of delight in playful narrative and free association. Therein lies their endless charm. Vivanco’s paintings are playful glimpses into an otherworldly suspension of time and space; a realm of magic, ambiguity, and labyrinthine wonder.



Concurrently on view in the project room, Thinkspace is pleased to present The Wild Ones, featuring new work by Virginia based artist Catherine Brooks. Brooks’ work is driven by a fascination with the mythological, and an interest in the potential significance of myth to the representation of identity. The artist’s work is sensual and physical, focusing on corporeal imagery as a locus of meaning for the self. Deeply interested in the philosophical dimensions of the personal, Brooks creates work from impulse and empathy, exploring the boundaries between the self and the other, the wild and the contained. Viewing Brooks’ work one is left with a sense of holistic mysticism, as the artist incorporates imagery from the natural world that at times engulfs or seems to consume its subjects. The artist sensually explores the themes of love, self, other, and becoming, with a sensitivity to the historical archetypes of myth and to the conventions of pathetic fallacy.

Informed by her personal and sensitive identification with nature, the artist’s imagery often incorporates elements of the natural world as a thematic foil to activate the figurative. The association invokes a cyclical order of being, and by proxy a cyclical model of the “self”, central to the mythological structure. The natural elements in her work are evasively metaphorical, and their incorporation suggests a contemporary revitalization of the devices used in allegorical painting. Brooks’ beautifully rendered figures seem intensely tactile and proximate. They are hyper-real renderings of sensual subjectivities; holistic in their obvious connection to the continually fugitive larger “something”, and yet intimate in the seductive minutiae of their details.