exhibitions - supernatural
Ann Tarantino: SuperNatural
May 19 – June 25, 2011
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 19, 6:00 – 8 pm
Curator's Office is pleased to present an exhibition by Pennsylvania-based artist Ann Tarantino. Entitled SuperNatural, the exhibition features works on paper produced by airy means. Whether using her breath, paint sprayed from a bottle, or an air compressor, the end results reveal delicate tendrilly forms and marks that evoke a host of recognizable yet not-quite-nameable things that you are sure you have seen or felt in nature but cannot quite place. Shadowy whisps, organic globules, and tiny fastidious dots share the page creating a sensorium of networks, webs, and growth. Her cool blue and grey palette conjures deep-sea musings.
Energy is at the heart of the work, and the artist's intimate process of blowing ink through a straw or judiciously directing inky whiskers with an air compressor reveals a relationship between chance and control. More recently, the artist has been teaching basic design skills and vocabulary to beginning students of landscape architecture, and it has sensitized her to the mapping and structuring of environments on both a macro and microscopic scale. The overall compositions, while seemingly spontaneous, are indebted to her ideas about overlapping systems.
Of her work Tarantino says, "I make drawings on paper and on the wall that suggest lonely figures in unknowable landscapes, underwater creatures, unknowable beings, neural networks, and maps of cities real and invented. My methods include pouring and dropping ink onto a surface or blowing it through a straw to create intricate patterns, using an air compressor to propel paint across a surface, and drawing repeated concentric circles reminiscent of ripples on water, growth marks on trees, or early cartographic drawings of an imagined cosmos.
I reference different kinds of systems in my work, from the delicate patterning of nervous tissue revealed through Golgi's method of staining brain cells, to the emotional ties revealed through contemporary social networks, to the intricate web of parasitic and symbiotic relationships required to maintain healthy ecosystems and the labyrinthine streets of ancient cities.
Having grown up as a serious competitive swimmer, training and racing from a young age through early adulthood, I return continually to the experience of weightlessness while moving through the water. I am interested in the experiences of the body as it moves through space, meeting and evaluating stimuli both internal and external. Inspired by source material ranging from botanical illustrations, contemporary information visualization strategies such as geotagging, musical scores, knitting patterns, and cracks in the sidewalk, my work suggests infinite replication and growth, exploring what it looks and feels like to be alive."
Ann Tarantino earned her MFA in Painting at Penn State University and her BA in Visual Arts from Brown University. She has exhibited her wall drawings, works on paper and paintings at Flashpoint, Washington, DC; Vysehrad Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic; Schlow Centre Region Library, State College, PA; neutron, Kyoto, Japan; Carinho, Kyoto, Japan; Kisara-do, Kyoto, Japan; Zoller Gallery, Penn State University, University Park, PA; Allegheny College, Meadville, PA; Katherine Nash Galleries, University of Minnesota, MN; French Art and Cultural Center, Boston, MA; the Drawing Room, Portland, ME; Lloyd Dobler Gallery, Chicago, IL; Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids, MI; University of Richmond Art Museums, Richmond, VA; Kent State University Galleries, Kent, OH, Curator's Office, Washington, DC; and Mixed Greens, New York, NY among others.
She has had artists' residencies at Soaring Gardens and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work is in the collection of the DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities, and she has been featured twice in New American Paintings. Her last exhibition at Curator's Office, a collaboration with Kate McGraw, was called "one of the fall's strongest shows" by The Washington Post.
Ann Tarantino CV