Vinyl Frontier: Container Gallery, June 2017
My show with Bill Jamison and Adam Montoya in Phoenix featured 72 tiles with linear designs in silver that formed a panoramic experience in the shipping container gallery.
Vinyl Frontier
Despite its urban sprawl Phoenix is surrounded by natural beauty. Vinyl Frontier’s immersive panorama brings these landscapes back into the heart of the city through the perspectives of three Arizona transplants. These artists share a common, intrinsic relationship with the outdoors that was developed from childhood and is reflected in their art practices. The sweeping line work of a mountainside, the disorienting relationship between a desert sky and ridgeline, and the complex contours of singular rocks and sticks are each presented through digital abstraction and commercial techniques. This contrast between subject matter and process reflects the artists’ own complex relationship to the natural world.
Emily Longbrake (top row) is a creatively omnivorous artist from Palmer, Alaska. Although she has studied ceramics, printmaking, and design, Emily is happiest when combining past experience with a new medium or technology. Despite its wide breadth, her work often employs the patterns, repetition, and fragility inspired by internal and external landscapes.
Adam Antonio Montoya (middle row) was born and raised in Salt Lake City, where he was surrounded by the vistas, histories and stories of the American Southwest. Montoya received his BFA in Printmaking from the University of Utah and an MFA from Arizona State University. In Phoenix, he is continuing his explorations of the oddities, subtleties and grandeur of the American West’s desert lands.
Bill Jamison (bottom row) is a structural engineer turned ceramic & mixed media artist from Anchorage, Alaska who received a BFA in Ceramics from the University of Alaska Anchorage and an MFA from Arizona State University. His work represents a pursuit to reconcile various dichotomies of self through an exploration of contrasting processes and materials.