DIRECTOR'S CHOICE

Thursday, December 8, 2011 - Sat, February 4, 2011
Opening Reception: Thursday, December 8, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm

Cain Schulte Contemporary Art is pleased to present a group exhibition featuring works by gallery artists David Buckingham, Will Marino, Jessica Drenk, Shawn Smith, and introducing Gyöngy Laky and Ruby Wescoat.
The art works present a span of media that ranges from sculpture and drawing to site-specific sculptural installation to conceptual works.
All of the works are being shown for the first time in the gallery.

David Buckingham will astonish and delight old and new collectors alike with his deceptively simple found metal sculptures, which reveal a humorous and semiotic ambiguity, and remark on modern American culture. His cohesive work often recalls the aesthetic principles of Pop Art, text-based Conceptual Art and the mischievous theories of the Situationist International.
David Buckingham lives and works in Los Angeles. He was educated at the Rivington School in New York City, and has shown nationally and internationally. His work has been included in an exhibition at the Riverside Art Museum, and in several private collections throughout the United States.

Jessica Drenk will present one of her dazzling installations, created by manipulating common materials in unexpected ways, reminiscent of the natural world, but entirely unique. Drenk's manufactured artifacts force the viewer to focus on mundane, commonly used objects and materials and to ponder on identity, technology, and the creation of a conjured unnatural history. Jessica Drenk is the recipient of the prestigious International Sculpture Center's Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, 2006. She currently lives and works in Clemson, South Carolina.

Will Marino creates images and objects from common materials that reference intricate spirals and circles, numbers and text to represent, patterns, constellations, and abstract compositions. His new series of work features his custom dartboard and mixed media pieces, this time layered with cut-up pieces of skateboard, and devoid of any frames to constrict the paper swirls.
Will Marino lives in Santa Cruz and is the recipient of the 2006 Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship, Santa Cruz, California.

Shawn Smith’s conceptual and material practice humorously explores the juxtaposition between the natural world and the digital world and the changing relationship between technology and natural history. Starting from the observation that images of “nature” on TV or on a computer screen are really only seeing patterns of pixilated light, Smith recreates three-dimensional sculptural representations of these two-dimensional images with small wood cubes, resembling 8-bit pixels. A recipient of the Clare Hart DeGolyer grant from the Dallas Museum of Art, Smith has an upcoming show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2012. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, including the Austin Museum of Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Oakland Arts Museum, Holter Museum of Art (Montana), and the Armory Art Center (Florida). Smith lives and works in Austin, Texas.

And introducing:

Gyöngy Laky's work is a personal examination of our complex relationship with nature. Sculptural pieces containing words, letters, and symbols are made of painted and stained branches and twigs combined with screws, nails, wires, and plastic figurines. The organic essence of the natural wood contrasted with the spiky industrial elements draws upon the ambivalence of the natural and artificial, organic and industrial, and encapsulate co-existing feelings of violence and serenity, aggression and sanctuary.
San Francisco-based GYÖNGY Laky has exhibited in museums and galleries nationally and internationally. A past recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Laky’s work is in museum collections in Europe and the United States, including the San Francisco MOMA, The Smithsonian's Renwick Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum, and the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu. The Smithsonian Institution is currently assembling a collection of Laky's personal papers, photographs and documents for the Archives of American Art.

Ruby Wescoat’s representational sculpture meanders between neoclassicism’s obsession with myth, pop art’s focus on the product, and naturalism’s study of the organic. She sculpts cakes, dogs, Greek statues, robber barons, stingrays, six packs, dividing cells, eggs crates, caterpillars, pyramids, and lunar landers, all in cast cardboard. Her ambitious goal is “to make portraits of the history of the planet in all its oddity, and to pack all that (time /energy) into a single, quiet moment”. Wescoat received a BFA from Rochester Institute for Technology, a certificate of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and an MFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University. She has received several public and private commissions and has participated in numerous exhibitions including “Art on Paper” at Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC, where she currently resides.