The Gallery at Mountain Shadows
Cece Cole is the Curator at The Gallery at Mountain Shadows.
Explore museum-quality exhibitions, with new works debuting every two months. Visit The Gallery at Mountain Shadows website to see more information about current and upcoming shows.
CURRENT AND UPCOMING, 2024-25:
A two part exhibition featuring works on and of paper connecting AZ Based, National and International Artists:
Wheverever You Go There You Are, Part 1 - ON VIEW NOW - November 30, 2024
Where Ever You Go There You Are, Part 2 - December 03, 2024 - January 31, 2025
Gesture, touch, and visual languages are universally unspoken methods of understanding and communicating. Paper is often at hand for jotting notes, drawing diagrams, and illustrating ideas large and small. From October 2024 to January 2025 The Gallery connects Arizona-based, national, and international artists in a two-part exhibition of works on and of paper.
Malleable, transient, and handmade attributes of paper add to conceptual intrigue, while its properties speak to sturdiness and potentiality. Wherever You Go There You Are examines the concept of place and explores both physical and metaphorical spaces that influence ways of being. Artists push boundaries of structure and composition with energetic mark-making and performative manipulations of humble materials to conjure a sensory experience.
“It is the role of the artist to order the universe into comprehensible form, it is the role of the viewer/audience, to internalize/intuit/create/assign a philosophical meaning.”*
David Mamet, Three Uses of the Knife, a book of essays on drama in life and art.
ARTISTS:
PART 1:
Mike Stack, Tucson, AZ, Mónica Palma, New York, NY, Lena Klett, Phoenix, AZ, Sarah Hubbs, Tucson, AZ, Matt Magee, Phoenix, AZ, Kirsten Kindler, Richmond, VA, Auberi Zwickel, Los Angeles, CA
PART 2: Eric Sall, Tulsa, OK, Josh Doster, LaCrosse, WI, Michael Perrone, Doha, Qatar, Lena Klett, Phoenix, AZ, and more!
UPCOMING:
FEB/MAR, 2025: TEXT BASED
Featuring conceptual works by AZ artists who are also collections, gallery, and museums curators.
APR/MAY, 2025: Algae Farming
Ongoing Form•Space•Vision exhibition series, 2025 focuses on bio tech in art and industry.
Past EXHIBITiONS:
Spring Fever
ON VIEW APRIL 12 - MAY 31
For its newest exhibition, The Gallery welcomes four artists who incorporate digital and video elements into their varied practices. Allison Moyers’ work is rooted in nostalgia. With a cinematic approach and handmade props, she creates joyful enactments recalling everyday moments of connection. Patricia Sannit immerses her body in her surroundings to document performative interactions. Kara Brooks’ computer-generated drawings are printed and altered by hand using glitter and decorative design to expand narratives of strength and femininity. Krista-Leigh Davis focuses on research-based narratives, employing humor and fantasy to address the climate crisis and our relationship with nature.
This exhibition will include a series of shorts representing each artist that will stream throughout the resort.
Archive
SUNSHINE IN THE GARDEN
NANCY KRAVETZ
FEBRUARY 15 - MARCH 31, 2023
The Gallery welcomes artist Nancy Kravetz for the newest exhibition, Sunshine in the Garden. This exhibition highlights a lifetime of work by Nancy. From her early work to today, she embraces the experimental and innovates with form and color. Nancy forgoes the intention to illustrate her reality and breaks it down to its simplest structure, leaving the viewer a window to self-reflection.
Nancy Kravetz studied art at the Sargent School of Painting, the Prize Program of the School at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and Simmons College. She received her Bachelor of Science degree from Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1959. She raised her family in Phoenix and continues to produce work here in her Paradise Valley studio.
Nancy’s love of nature informs her skill as a colorist. She is struck by shifts in light as it moves across the landscape and is drawn to the tiny and often overlooked elements in her surroundings. Her paintings and constructions zoom in on moments in time and experience.
ABSTRACT ATHLETE
JANUARY 10 - FEBRUARY 13
In celebration of the big game, The Gallery welcomes back The Abstract Athlete. All artists featured in this exhibition are represented by The Abstract Athlete, an organization that showcases artists who are former and star athletes as well as military veterans. It seeks to examine the physicality of the creative process and highlight the art of an athletics discipline.
Featured artists for the exhibition will include former NFL players Don Hasselbeck, Percy King, Brian Poli-Dixon, Tony Mandarich, and more.
SOUVENIRS FROM PARADISE
JESSIE RIESER
OCTOBER 1, 2022 - JANUARY 6, 2023
Jesse Rieser is an award-winning and nationally recognized photographer based in Phoenix. His thematic works celebrate the often-overlooked in our day-to-day American experience. With the use of light and bleached color, Rieser constructs an illusionistic existence where the lines between fact and fiction are blurred.
For his exhibition Souvenirs From Paradise, Jesse intertwines divergent narratives to find meaning in the meaningless. The familiar becomes foreign in his examination of our rituals and the artifacts we leave behind. One-time paradisal places are framed by our modern anxieties about the past, present, and future. Intentionally omitted information evokes a sense of absence or loss and illuminates the surreal in our surroundings.
Jesse was born in the Ozarks and attended Arizona State University, where he majored in photography and art history while attending the Herberger Institute of Art and Design. His work has been profiled by The New York Times, NPR, Washington Post, Wired, and NatGeo. He has been recognized by Communication Arts and AP Annual, and is a Critical Mass top 50 artist (awarded three times), a One Club Young Gun, a Magenta Foundation Flash Forward recipient, and a winning artist of the Klompching Gallery Fresh Award and exhibition.
ABSENCE/PRESENCE, PRESENCE/ABSENCE
LUCAS J. KNOWLES
AUGUST 8 - SEPTEMBER 30, 2022
Lucas J. Knowles combines accomplished skill sets of design and craftsmanship, plus versatility in cutting-edge, mechanical, and technical processes to create mixed media sculpture, drawings, and paintings that traverse lines between traditional and boundary-crossing art methods.
In this exhibition, Knowles examines dichotomies metaphorically and figuratively, through invention. He interweaves personal narrative throughout his multidisciplinary approach and confronts issues of mortality and grief within the subversive lure of light and color, function, and craft. He engages in the conceptual nature of play, provoking the curiosity that compels you to look further. Whimsy is the passageway to the existential. Meanings appear slowly and sweetly. With simple yet controlled gestural mark-making, Knowles's works are earnestly human and otherworldly. The power lies in the discovery and unites us in our collective pursuit of understanding and longing for connection.
Lucas J. Knowles is based in Phoenix, Arizona. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with a focus on Ceramics and Sculpture from Florida State University. He is currently an MFA Candidate in Ceramics at Arizona State University School of Art. Knowles has exhibited nationally and abroad, including at the Humboldt University of Berlin for Berlin Science Week and the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts in both 2018 and 2019, respectively. In 2019, he was selected to participate in the NCECA National Juried Student Exhibition. In 2020, Knowles received the International Sculpture Center's Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, earning features by Sculpture.org, ARTSY, and Sculpture Magazine.
FORM + PRACTICE
VARIOUS ARTISTS
JUNE 2 - JULY 31, 2022
Scholar Elizabeth Eisenstein recognized the revolutionary power of the printing press calling it “an agent of change”*. Its functions of dissemination, standardization and preservation give rise to cultural and human shifts. Politicians, political dissidents, literary publishers, artists, and historians utilize print as methods of documentation and record-keeping. Also, as a tool for multiplication, a catalyst for collaboration, and a vehicle for self-expression. Print is an accessible medium that allows free exchange, sanctioning the circulation of information and imagery that instigates thought and action.
In an age where print media is being eclipsed by virtual content, it is particularly relevant to explore the medium of printmaking as an art form. Artists choose the risks that come with materials known for unpredictability. Flowing inks must be manipulated to adhere to its matrix and perform. There is an element of chance inherent in the act of printmaking that yields each hand pulled print unique in its existence. The evidence of the maker becomes a point of connection for the viewer.
(The title) FORM + PRACTICE allows the space for each artist to speak for themselves and provokes us to listen as we look. The exhibition includes work by artist and collaborative printer Brent Bond and a selection of artist editions printed by his Santo Press studio, also, limited edition prints by multidisciplinary artist Matt Magee, a limited edition series created by Merryn Omotayo Alaka and a work done in collaboration with artist Sam Fresquez (Courtesy of Lisa Sette Gallery), an installation showcasing a screen printed and hand-tinted project by research-based artist Adriene Jenik, and a series of limited edition screen-prints by self-taught graphic artist Jared Kee Yazzie.
-Cece Cole, Curator
*The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, by E.L. Eisenstein. Published, 1979
HEART OF STONE
LENA KLETT AND CHRISTY WHITTMER
APRIL 13 - MAY 31, 2022
In this exhibition, Phoenix-based artists Lena Klett and Christy Wittmer present their singular visions, as well as a collaborative installation that reflects their combined interests in themes of impermanence, architecture, nature, and human interaction with space and landscape. Christy implements traditions of craft and design with clay constructions that challenge expectations of function and notions of stability, while Lena explores abstraction and play, utilizing economical and ephemeral materials as tools to reimagine an object and bring it out of a readily understood context.
Lena Klett Installations at The Gallery at Mountain Shadows. Curated by Cece Cole.
https://lena-klett.squarespace.com/heart-of-stone-christy-wittmer
AVENUES OF SCRAPING STEEL
MARK VINCI
JANUARY 25 - 31, 2022
This exhibition featured work from four-time, Emmy award winning graphic designer and artist Mark Vinci. Vinci’s design sensibilities shape his interest in car culture and mechanics. He literally uses crushed car parts to create sculptural wall pieces that capture the feeling of motion. He employs unconventional techniques and often collaborates with transportation professionals using steamrollers to flatten metal, transforming the material to resemble sinuous fabrics.
With concepts informed by the mid to late 1950’s Pop Art Movement, Vinci brings objects and images together to comment on popular culture and mass media messaging. He recontextualizes recycled billboard material to create dynamic large scale, collaged compositions that challenge viewer perceptions and create new meaning.
"My work is dynamic visual abstraction about urban movement and the transient visual moments captured at high speed. The snippets and fragments framed and defined by the cityscape, quickly forgotten, leave a residual imprint that is an unconscious distillation of our collective experience."
- Mark Vinci
COLOR STORIES
ERIC SALL AND RACHEL HAYES
DECEMBER 9 - JANUARY 25, 2022
This exhibition featured work from husband-and-wife duo Eric Sall and Rachel Hayes. Though their practices are distinct, Sall — a nationally recognized painter, and Hayes — a world-renowned textile-based sculptor, share a fearlessness in their approach to scale, use of color, and materials.
Eric’s conceptual paintings are influenced by both street culture and the natural environment. His time spent in the prairies of South Dakota, the desert landscapes of New Mexico, and the urban surroundings of New York are all represented in his examination of pattern and graphic versus painterly abstraction. He combines his knowledge of formal methodologies with expressive mark-making and celebrates elements of play and experimentation.
Rachel employs the mechanical techniques of sewing and fabric construction to explore the interaction of color, light, and transparency. Wall sculptures and assemblages inform her colossal land interventions. Hayes’ ephemeral yet architectural abstractions stand out in contrast to landscape and are reflections on themes of memory, fragility, and form.
LOGICAL CONSTRUCTS
JAMES ANGEL
OCTOBER 1 - NOVEMBER 30, 2021
James Angel is an internationally recognized studio artist based in the Phoenix area. He specializes in the creation of original fine art, sculpture, and limited-edition prints.
Angel regularly exhibits his work and collaborates with interior designers on large-scale and commercial, site-specific projects. He is also credited as a major contributor to the Downtown Phoenix arts scene and is one of the founders of the artist collective 3CARPILEUP as well as Chaos Theory, a local event going on its 22nd year of engaging local contemporary artists in the region.
Drawn by the "unlimited access of exploration," James creates futuristic, dimensional worlds that are an extension of collaged compositions on shaped panels. For his exhibition in The Gallery, James collaborated with Boston-based company Hoverlay to create an interactive, augmented reality experience for the viewer.
FUTURE ECOLOGIES
ERIKA LYNNE HANSON
AUGUST 3 - SEPTEMBER 30, 2021
Erika Lynne Hanson’s research-based, contemporary practice is driven by a sense of wonder and purpose. She upends traditional interpretations of weaving as a feminine or craft-centered tradition and employs soft power to address ominous concerns of ecology, climate, and human nature.
Hanson’s titles often read like scientific notations, lists, and reminders. Her weavings space in space, orbs or perimeters or perspectives (2020) and Arches may or may not be overrated: something about time travel, wind and dowsing rods (2020) sound like seeds for future projects or the contents of a visionary’s notebook. Intentional loose threads and impromptu inventions make us more conscious of our surroundings. Each work is a prelude to what is to come or an avenue toward new discovery.
Her multi-disciplinary approach includes performative, site-specific encounters with architecture and landscape. The process of creating gallery installation requires an openness to adapt. Every movement through the space is considered, and careful placement of each object is strategic. For her exhibition "Future Ecologies" at The Gallery, Erika approached the space holistically. The idea of the gallery as a corridor provided a poetic backdrop as Hanson took into account objects and their relationship with one another, the architecture, and its inhabitants.
Hanson’s landscape interventions are documented in videos that have been included in her installations. They are choreographed studies of topography and geology, as well as mindful reflections on fragility and temporality. For her work, Initial Encounters: selenite and desert rose (2017), woven flags were placed at White Sands National Monument, a possible or imagined origin site for these coveted crystals. Icebergs have been recurring themes in her ongoing meditative series of time-lapse videos titled Glacial Observation. Homemade glaciers staged in various landscapes melt slowly. We are lulled visually and acoustically, becoming subtly aware of our own complacency.
In like a model for a monument (2019), Hanson presents a portrait series of cotton balls crudely crafted to embody entangled systems of big industry, property, and labor. This work reminds me of Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco’s My hands are my heart (1991). Erika Lynne Hanson’s weavings, installations, and videos are gestures of love as much as they are necessary mediums for change.
Erika’s video works activated areas of the resort beyond the gallery walls, connecting visitors to the exhibition. Streaming on the big screen in the Hearth living room and on all guestroom screens was a selection of Hanson’s new media projects:
Gesture to the occupants of time (tree, rock, human), 2020
Glacial Observation, 2011
Initial Encounters: selenite and desert rose, 2017
RECENT WORK
MATT MAGEE
JUNE 1 – AUGUST 1, 2021
IT’S A RED-LETTER DAY!
The phrase “red-letter day” originated in the late 1300s. Historically, handmade ecclesiastical calendars were highlighted with red ink to signify days of importance and opportunity. Today, we use the phrase to express our delight in any day that is memorable.
Matt Magee’s “Recent Work” is a celebration of the color red — the color of energy, passion, and action. Drawing inspiration from the 1960’s minimalist movement, Magee combines his fascination with language and his command of design sensibilities in carefully arranged compositions and sculptural installations. He intentionally utilizes throwaway materials with an emphasis on accumulative and iterative processes, such as stacking, repetition and sequencing. Intended as a means of recordkeeping, Magee’s works evoke secret codes and symbols, which become signposts of our times.
Matt Magee was born in Paris, France in 1961. His visual vocabulary was shaped by years of traveling the world with his geologist and archaeologist father. Together, they took annual drives exploring Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and First Nation States in the American Southwest. As a young artist, Matt moved to New York City. There he formed long-lasting and valued connections. His experience as the one-time assistant to Robert Rauschenberg was a springboard to his four-decade long career. The spirit of the New York club scene and vibrant art culture of the 80’s and 90’s permeates his aesthetic.
Magee’s work of the past year has become the basis for future projects and upcoming print editions. He is expanding on his ongoing series Abecedarium, a word he coined to indicate a starting place. With a sense of humor and an economy of mark making, he elevates simple letters to positions of status and power, as seen in the painting All of You (2017). Illegible, layered text and shapes are intended to confuse in Red Poem for Dublin (2019). This piece is reminiscent of the CAPTCHAs we are asked to translate when accessing websites. Magee’s works conjure themes of time and lost civilizations. He explores the new and the unknown with imagery inspired by high technology as well as the ancient pictographs and petroglyphs he viewed during his westward excursions.
Magee engages the viewer with his use of positive and negative space, repeated lines and forms. When viewing Red Oracle (2007), the eye is activated by a series of red dots, shifting from small to large and embedded in the graphic composition. His interest in space extends beyond the canvas in his mixed media installations. Employing methods of iteration and improvisation, Magee created Blue Hanger (2020) with laundry detergent bottles. A series of simply cut shapes is connected to form a floating composition activated by light, shadow and subtle movement. The animated Aluminum Circuit 4 (2017) undulates with polished and recycled, manicured metal rectangles.
The Arizona landscape has long appealed to Magee’s formalist instincts. In 2012, he and his partner relocated to Phoenix. Magee’s studio is currently located at the historic Cattle Track Arts Compound in Scottsdale. Matt maintains an extensive national and international exhibition schedule. His most recent solo exhibition, "Random Order," was featured at Zane Bennet Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was also awarded a printmaking residency in Paris, France at Michael Woolworth Publications in 2019 and 2020. A printed collection of Magee’s work, from 2012-2018, was recently published by Radius books and focuses on his prolific practice since moving to Arizona.