PORTLAND, OR.- Adams and Ollman is presenting two solo exhibitions: New Works by Vince Skelly and Overlook by Mariel Capanna, both on view through March 13.
Vince Skelly (b. 1987, Claremont, California; lives and works in Portland, OR) creates carved wooden sculptures, both formal and functional. Using wood from a variety of trees native to the Pacific Northwest in addition to American chestnut and eucalyptus, Skelly works reductively to shape each stool, chair, or abstract form from a single block. Following grain, patterns, knots, and other irregularities inherent to the material, Skelly highlights simple and essential abstract shapes informed by intrinsic characteristics of the material. The sculptures are inspired by various traditions of wood carving—which is one of the oldest artforms—as well as by a history of objects that extends back to megalithic dolmens, ancient figurines, the sculptures of Brancusi, and paintings of Phillip Guston. With a chainsaw and traditional hand tools, Skelly slowly reveals biomorphic volumes, off-kilter angles, and carved portals within his glyph-like forms, each bearing their own spirit, rhythm and personality.
Skelly received his BA from San Francisco State University. This is the artist’s debut solo exhibition.
Inspired by moving images, Mariel Capanna (b. 1988, Philadelphia, PA; lives and works in Salt Lake City, UT) explores the subtleties of place and perception in her paintings. Working from films, documentaries, slideshows of found photos, and home videos, Capanna employs a collagist’s approach to composition and imagemaking. With quick gestures and marks that toggle between representation and abstraction, Capanna captures fleeting images as they move off-screen or into the past. The accumulation of marks record the evolution of an image or sequence of vantage points with harmonizing color and gesture; the image unnameable, but the painting field littered with their traces.
In Capanna’s work, the perception of distance is a key theme: the distance between one geographic place and another, between present and past, between first and last painted mark, between real and mediated experience. Flat marks float against an illusionistic depth; the flatness a reference to the past several months when so much has been experienced through a screen, the depth a reference to a memory of the sky in Utah where these works were painted. These competing gestures—a depth of field and marks that live on the surface— balance in exquisite tension. In the new series of oil paintings on view in Overlook, the viewer is situated in the foreground where one looks past the immediate surroundings to find a background dense with detail and information. Our fixed perspective provides a simultaneous awareness of both speed and stillness, near and far, past and present, and experiences across place and time.
Coinciding with her presentation at Adams and Ollman is a site-specific installation of Capanna’s work in the artists’ dining nook in Salt Lake City—a space with a built-in table and benches facing a window that frames the outside world. Presented by Good Weather gallery, the works in this intimate setting echo key concepts found in the works on view in Overlook.
Capanna received a BFA and Certificate of Fine Art from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and an MFA from Yale University. She has been an artist in residence at the Guapamacátaro Art and Ecology Residency in Michoacan, Mexico; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; and at the Tacony Library and Arts Building (LAB) in Philadelphia. Capanna has also been the recipient of the Robert Schoelkopf Memorial Traveling Fellowship and an Independence Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship.
