Past Exhibitions

Michelle Cooke, Lora Fosberg and Shaun Gilmore
September 30th – December 3rd

Nancy Youdelman: Outside the Realm
August 12th – September 17th

Bart Johnson: The Truth Hurts
June 17th – July 31st

Erik Benson: Eminent Domain
April 15th – June 4th

Erik Benson's contemporary landscape paintings are simultaneously dystopian and romantic, exhibiting a discerning intelligence and graphic punch. He works with acrylic paint, which he spreads in thin layers on a glass table to dry before using an X-Acto knife to cut it into shapes. Benson peels off these decal-like pieces and collages them into the picture, building up the surface of the canvas into a low-relief in a process that mirrors the constructed nature of the buildings and urban sites that he depicts. The artist explains "I am interested in the mimetic relationship between the architectural subjects in the paintings and the process in which they are produced. I'm interested in how this construction process allows in a painting vocabulary an exploration of unexamined things."

Benson was born in Detroit, MI and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. He is a former NYFA fellowship recipient and has an upcoming residency scheduled for 2011 at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.

David X Levine: She Kept Her Heart Parked on a Hill
December 17th – January 29th

Katherine Lee: Animal Violence and Topless Women Eating Jam
October 29th – December 4th

Teo González: New Work
October 8th – November 20th

Ted Larsen: Brand New, Slightly Used
July 30th – September 25th

A long-time Santa Fe resident and recent Pollock-Krasner grant recipient, Ted Larsen creates abstract constructed objects from salvage material. In this show, Larsen not only explores the detritus of consumer culture, but also critically examines cherished modernist principles and hierarchies.

Jason Salavon: Arrows and Dice
June 18th – July 25th

One of the leading practitioners of computer-based art, Salavon uses software of his own design to capture and transform data and images drawn from art history and popular culture. The resulting works obscure the distinctiveness of their sources while revealing the hidden patterns that unite them.

Lance Letscher: The Perfect Machine
April 2nd – May 15th

Letscher harvests defaced textbooks, children’s readers, vintage album covers, magazine clippings, handwritten notes, recipe cards, business ledgers, and other bits of found paper from closeout bins, yard sales and the dumpster behind a nearby used book and record store in his native Austin. In his studio, the artist winnows through and organizes these odds and ends, cuts them into strips and shapes and then pieces together the scraps of paper into remarkable collages.

Jan Adlmann: Latter-Day Fabergé
December 11th – January 30th

Jan Ernst Adlmann is a Santa Fe resident well-known as a former museum director and curator, lecturer and writer, whose strange and wonderful sculptures have attracted a strong following over the last decade. Adlmann will present both new work and a selection of past favorites on loan from some of his collectors.

Fay Ku: Double Entendre
November 20th – December 31st

Ku pairs a sexually-frank wit with uncanny tableaus featuring solitary reveries and mysterious social rituals enacted by an array of id-dominated young adults and children. Her graphite, ink and watercolor drawings are characterized by vital and expressive linework, exquisite detail, and a judicious application of color and pattern. This exhibition coincides with the artist’s invitation to create a limited-edition lithograph at the University of New Mexico’s Tamarind Institute.

Linda Whitaker: The Floor of the Sky
September 4th – October 11th

"Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky."
--Willa Cather, Death Came to the Archbishop

Curator David Hundley, an independent design consultant and the exhibit designer for the show "Hearst the Collector" at LACMA, sees Whitaker's works play out in front of him every day in New Mexico. Linda Whitaker's oil pastels were created in 1985-86 and 1990, when the artist was the recipient of two residencies from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos. Rendering the shapes and colors in a style reminiscent of early modernists such as Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove, Whitaker's powerful landscapes remain fresh and vital.

Redefining the Canvas: Edda Renouf, Ramona Sakiestewa & Marie Watt
July 24th – August 30th

The three artists in this exhibition each use media and techniques associated with textiles but conceptualize their work in a way that blurs and redefines traditional understandings of the 'canvas.'

Katherine Lee: The Brazil Series
June 15th – July 19th

Katherine Lee's paintings transform familiar settings into scenes at once familiar and unnerving. In 2006, the artist spent a semester in Brazil studying art and language. During her time abroad, she produced a series of imagined landscapes using a signature combination of spray paint, transfer paper and oil paint. The resulting images, entitled "Exteriors," depict spaces of suspended action and endless possibility, unmanned but not abandoned.

Roger Shimomura: Minidoka on My Mind
March 6th – April 18th

Minidoka is Shimomura's fourth series of paintings about the internment experience of the 120,000 American citizens and residents of Japanese descent who were held under military guard after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Shimomura's clean, flat style, drawn from American comic books and Japanese ukiyo-e, draws viewers in with its pop art appeal, before confronting them with bold, pointed tableaux of racism and ignorance.

Portrait and Place: Contemporary Latin American Photography
January 30th – February 28th

Robert Fantozzi, Flor Garduño, Graciela Iturbide, Rachelle Mozman and René Peña

This exhibition brings together a group of artists from Mexico, Peru, Panama and Cuba whose photographs explore their subjects' connections, both expected and unexpected, to their cultural and geographical context.

Mind the Gap
November 21st – January 3rd

"Mind the Gap" is a ubiquitous warning to passengers on the London Underground to watch their step and avoid a potentially calamitous fall between the platform and the train. It represents a simple warning, a reminder to follow the rules and play it safe. But what of those who carelessly - or defiantly - do not mind the gap?

Curator Cyndi Conn, Visual Arts Director of the Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, has selected six artists who dwell in the gap between fact and imagination: Rita Bard, Jennifer Hoag, Fay Ku, Katherine Lee, Kim Russo and Tuscany Wenger. These artists create distinct mythologies of striking, strange creatures, disjointed everyday imagery and stories half-told in rebellious, hallucinatory narratives. By choosing to work in the gap, rather thatn on either side of it, they explore and enlighten the tenuous space between transparency and mystery, humor and tragedy.

Ronald Davis: All the Presidents' Rooms
October 17th – November 15th

Matt Magee: Thought Forms
October 3rd – November 16th

New York artist Matt Magee creates graphic systems of language based on an internal, undefined lexicon of shapes and colors. His art is inspired by his Texas childhood, much of which was spent accompanying his geologist father to sites of Native American ruins and pictographs throughout the American Southwest.

Ramona Sakiestewa: Vortex of Color
August 15th – September 21st

Ramona Sakiestewa’s exquisite tapestries and works on paper have long been celebrated for their seamless synthesis of abstraction with ritual imagery and traditional techniques. Sakiestewa is noted for layering and blending color, giving her weavings a painterly quality.

A central figure in the Native American arts community, Sakiestewa has won numerous
awards, including multiple first-place prizes at the Santa Fe Indian Market. She has also consulted on numerous public design projects, including the National Mall facility of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. The artist’s work is in numerous public collections, including those of the Smithsonian Institution, the Heard Museum, the Denver Art Museum and the New Mexico Museum of Art.

Ming Fay: Jungle Tango
August 8th – September 21st

Born in Shanghai but based in New York, Ming Fay creates mythical folk gardens from wire, foam, papier mâché and paint. Evoking a utopian vision of the jungle, the artist explores the contentious and sometimes collaborative relationship between humankind and nature. Fay has described Jungle Tango as “a piece about movements, connections and mysterious shapes and forms.” He draws on extensive research in botany to create colorful, fantastical, mock-organic eco-systems.

Fay has had solo exhibitions at MOCA Shanghai and the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris and has received commissions for numerous public works, including the Delancey/Essex subway station in New York. He is a professor of sculpture at William Paterson University.

Built: Constructed Objects by Ted Larsen
June 13th – July 20th

Larsen's evolving exploration of the detritus of consumer culture and minimal sculpture reaches a remarkable culmination in his first solo exhibition at Eight Modern. Larsen transforms salvage material into intimate, evocative forms that he calls constructed objects. Larsen, a longtime resident of Santa Fe, was awarded a grant from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation earlier this year.

Threads of Memory: Recent Work by Nancy Youdelman
April 11th – May 18th

Nancy Youdelman has been transforming vintage clothing with found objects - photographs, letters, jewelry, buttons and even plant material - for close to 40 years, ever since her involvement with the CalArts Feminist Art Program and Womanhouse in the 1970s. Youdelman's mixed-media sculptures and reliefs explore the threads that connect memory and objects, interweaving broader themes such as love, death, history and femininity.

Artist Reception: Friday, April 11, 5:30-7:30

3D/CG Ronald Davis: Three-Dimensional Computer Graphics, 2004-2007
December 16th – January 31st

This solo show focuses on three-dimensional computer graphics on aluminum and paper produced by Davis from 2004 to 2007.

Efren Candelaria: Hardly Smooth
November 12th – December 11th

This solo exhibition of works by Efren Candelaria features an array of minimalist graphite drawings on wood veneer and paper as well as a multi-media installation. The artist eschews geometric perfection for the inevitable curves and bumps of freehand drawing, and takes inspiration from ideas about numbers, time, space and seriality.

Once There Was, Once There Wasn't: Fairy Tales Retold
October 14th – November 6th

With works by a number of artists, including Jim Dine, David Hockney, Peregrine Honig, Fay Ku, Elizabeth "Grandma" Layton, Adela Leibowitz, David Levinthal, Paula Rego, Kiki Smith, and Richard Tuttle the exhibition illuminates and challenges the traditional interpretations of fairy tales. Stories heard in childhood exert a powerful pull on the artists participating in Once There Was, who take on the powerful role of storyteller and the task of mythopoesis, of creating and renewing meaning. Their modern reworkings of old tales draw upon familiar narratives and imagery for their cultural resonance.

East Meets West: Ramona Sakiestewa & G. Peter Jemison
August 17th – September 16th

Featuring works by Ramona Sakiestewa and G. Peter Jemison, two of the United States' most celebrated Native American artists, this exhibition specifically confronts issues of cross-cultural communications and interdisciplinary practice.

Artists' Reception on August 17, 5:30 - 7:30 pm

Carlos Pérez Vidal: Time As Metaphor
August 20th – August 16th

Carlos Pérez Vidal, founder of the independent art group La Campana, is a central figure of the Cuban Renaissance. Addressing the issues of personal identity, historical memory, and cultural stereotyping, Pérez Vidal communicates his sociopolitical observations in a visual language that surreally compounds parodic, tragic, and uncanny elements. The artist is known for creating confrontational dialogues between diverse iconographies and the specific framework of the Spanish Colonial altar. Drawing upon the cultural diversity of the Americas, "Time as Metaphor" reveals unexpected connections between seemingly disparate religious, political, and art-historical icons.

Modern Dimensions: Contemporary American Sculpture
June 4th – August 15th

Eight Modern will celebrate its grand opening with the inaugural exhibit, Modern Dimensions: Contemporary American Sculpture. The exhibition brings together works by seven American sculptors: Walter Dusenbery, Ming Fay, Robert Lobe, Robert Mangold, Celeste Roberge, John Ruppert, and Nancy Youdelman. Each of these highly-acclaimed artists explores diverse facets of contemporary sculpture and integrates conceptual and aesthetic ideas in bold, new terms.