Artist Talk: December 13th, 12-1 PM

Artists: Tish Noel, Brian Kapernekas

Uncertainty is something that is always present in our day to day lives. We find ourselves navigating around it, being pushed up against it, anticipating it or just simply accepting it. This begs the question, where do we find ourselves in these scenarios and in what ways can we respond to them—paradoxically, through radical enchantment, relational liberation or intuitive urgency?

For this exhibition “When Ground Meets Light” artists Tish Noel and Brian Kapernekas find themselves responding to these questions through the intersections of painting, process, collage and objects during times of uncertainty, impermanence and liberation. A meeting place of sorts is formed between layers of paint, material exploration, abstraction, the unfamiliar, color, process and transformation.

For Tish Noel the focus in the studio for the last decade, maybe longer, has been on experimentation that is united through process. Materially, I’ve introduced spray paint and stencil. Thematically, I’ve re introduced my earlier study in observational work that records what I see –elements of light, color, built structures and forms of nature — as I continue to straddle memory and abstraction. I remind myself to stop thinking and to be perceiving instead. I look for a hint of something as I’m working on it such as where it may go.

This recent series of work explores the dichotomies between what we discard versus what we treasure. Dialectical in nature as two truths can exist at the same time. It can be trash and it can be art. Since 2020, I have been using materials that have properties that are considered to be waste and have been working almost exclusively on surfaces that have been disrupted in some way such as catalog and magazine pages. Most recently, I’ve been distracted by the shiny silver of Amazon thermal grocery bags in the recycling bin. Dismantled and flattened, they too provide a strangely patterned surface for painting. When not starting with disrupted surfaces, I’m also altering the surface of clear polyester film and creating finished work on both sides of the material. These related practices inform one another through the use of spray paint and various acrylic mediums.

Brian Kapernekas navigates between the familiar and unfamiliar, the re-presentational and abstraction, composing and assembling materials and processes associated with the studio and his own present and past. Through the experimentation of materials, process and various supports and grounds, he is in search for the invention of forms, serendipitous moments and the constant re-examination of painting’s history relative to his own personal observations of light, form and the everyday. For this installation, cut cast off panels are prepared with canvas, linen and mixed media. Powdered pigmented paper pulp finds itself encapsulated in and on fragments of wire mesh. Cut polyethylene sheets become transitory surfaces that allow for a series of exploration and fragmentation in charcoal, oil and acrylic. The results are a holistic amalgamation of shaped paintings and objects formed out of relational chance, cast off materials, experimental processes and transient gatherings.

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Tags: Brian Kapernekas, Chicago, Heaven Gallery, Non-Profit, Tish Noel, West Town, When Ground Meets Light