IN THE DORMANT SPLENDOR
GROUP SHOW: SYDNEY CROSKERY, SHANNON RAE FINCKE, AMY MACKAY, AMANDA MEARS, HOLLY WONG
AUGUST 23-25, 2024
TORRANCE ART MUSEUM TRYST ART FAIR
HELD AT DEL AMO CROSSING IN TORRANCE, CA
FRIDAY 8.23 FROM 4-6PM|SATURDAY 8.24 FROM 12-6PM|SUNDAY 8.25 FROM 12-6PM
Thank You
If you find yourself half naked
and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,
again, the earth's great, sonorous moan that says
you are the air of the now and gone, that says
all you love will turn to dust,
and will meet you there, do not
raise your fist. Do not raise
your small voice against it. And do not
take cover. Instead, curl your toes
into the grass, watch the cloud
ascending from your lips. Walk
through the garden's dormant splendor.
Say only, thank you.
Thank you.
—Ross Gay
The Middle Room Gallery presents In The Dormant Splendor – a 5-person show
The Middle Room is pleased to present In The Dormant Splendor, a group exhibition of contemporary California women artists Sydney Croskery, Shannon Rae Fincke, Amy MacKay, Amanda Mears, and Holly Wong. This luminous, enveloping, and conceptually installed exhibition will be on view at Torrance Art Museum’s TRYST Art Fair from August 23-25, 2024.
In The Dormant Splendor is an immersive five-woman show featuring diverse and complex works, ranging from small to large-scale abstract and abstract-figurative paintings, anchored by a major fiber installation—tightly juxtaposed together to illuminate the tension between minute to magnificent human experiences within an unpredictable natural environment. Curated by Shannon Rae Fincke, the interwoven works in this exhibition reflect on fragility, peace, time, ephemerality, and evolution—and contextualize the distinct practices of five female artists, unified through their uniquely personal, yet interconnected emotional responses to color, space, light, materials and mark-making. The paintings are installed in unconventional placements and arrangements—creating a dialogue with the massive fabric work they are encompassed within, and about human life within the overwhelming wildness of earth, water, fire and air—offering viewers a new way to experience all exhibited works’ individual and collective presence and meaning.
Sydney Croskery is an artist born and living in Los Angeles, making paintings that are both materially and conceptually rigorous. With a process involving detailed action painting coinciding with writings, Croskery uses abstraction as means to make sense of our political, emotional, overwhelming and hilarious aspects of life. Title and essay for the paintings connect the personal to the societal to our moment in time, creating a visual record for the complexity of contemporary life. Croskery has presented solo shows at The Bakersfield Museum of Art, Craig Krull Gallery, boxoProjects, and Citrus College Art Gallery. She has participated in group exhibitions at Over the Influence, Monte Vista Projects, Baik Art, Central Park Gallery, Charlie James Gallery, The Fellows of Contemporary Art, The Bakersfield Museum, The Torrance Art Museum, and The Indianapolis Museum of Art. She has presented performance pieces at the Getty Museum, Jack Tilton Gallery, the Deitch Art Parade, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. She was a proud member of the LA Art Girls and is one half of The World Famous Wiener Girls of Chicago. Croskery was a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant for 2018.
Shannon Rae Fincke is a Los Angeles-based artist who creates paintings on wood, clay, canvas and yupo paper. Her work explores ephemerality, interconnectivity, memories, emotions and psychology, and are influenced by motherhood and interpersonal and ancestral trauma. Focusing on the alchemy of mixed water-based media and how it interacts with various substrates, she concentrates on control and intentionality versus the organic nature of the media. Her intimate and colorful figurative and landscape paintings range widely in scale and push the limits of materiality, surface, and abstraction. The act of making is a dialogue between herself and the materials to create a bond between the image, color and spatial relationships, media, surface, and scale—be it intimate or encompassing. Fincke’s work is in private and public collections throughout the U.S., has been exhibited in solo and group shows at museums and galleries internationally, and has been featured in print, film, and television. She attended the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts in high school, completed her undergraduate degree in Studio Art between Washington & Jefferson College and Susquehanna University, both in Pennsylvania, and The Marchutz School of Fine Arts in France, and earned her master’s in painting and art education with high honors at New York University, where she was the recipient of a Gallatin Dean’s Graduate Scholarship and studied intensively with Arnold Mesches.
Amy MacKay is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles. She earned her MFA from UC Irvine in 2015 and BA from Bard College in 2007. Her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in spaces such as La Beast Gallery, Baert Gallery and the Honolulu Museum. Through an intensive research based process, she makes paintings based on documentation of site-specific, performative events she stages with people in her life. These experiences are structured around fictional stories (e.g. the Greek myth of Asclepius and the American folklore creature the Hidebehind) that have been told over and over with evolution and distortion over time. Unlike a photographic transcription, the paintings privilege feelings and affects, as source materials are abstracted past the point of recognition. Each image is made and destroyed repeatedly, so that the surface becomes a site of performed forgetting. It is a process that is highly physical, almost gymnastic, as additive and subtractive marks trace her working memory. Within this iterative exchange, she is interested in the gaps formed across a shared experience over time—questioning the interaction between past and present, and how do images create absence.
Amanda Mears is a British-born, Los Angeles based painter and bookmaker. Before focusing on her art practice, she filmed and directed factual television for the BBC, Discovery Channel, History Channel and many others. She was trained in film-making at the BBC in England and the American Film Institute (AFI) in Los Angeles. Her AFI film drama won several awards in Japan and Los Angeles. Mears went on to study painting for three years at a traditional Atelier School in Los Angeles and at ‘Turps’ - Marcus Harvey’s London-based independent painting school. She was awarded the Dean’s Fellowship and the Walker/ Parker Memorial Fellowship by Claremont Graduate School and received her MFA from CGU in 2020. Her work has been exhibited in London and Los Angeles and is held in private and public collections including the Cedars Sinai Foundation. She makes paintings and books about climate-challenged wild spaces, connection and loss. Her paintings and sculptural books explore the idea of landscape as fragile, mediated, specific and intimate. Grounded in her documentarian’s practice of gathering and editing materials, her process begins with drawing and photographing in nature. These gathered materials are reprocessed into paintings and books which investigate the powerful tension between the universal and the particular, and the real and the imagined—engaging with humans’ intertwined relationship with the natural world, investigating via materials and mark-making how we inscribe ourselves onto an idea of landscape.
Holly Wong is a San Francisco-based artist who creates fiber and drawing-based installations and collaged paintings that explore healing and resilience. She was educated at the San Francisco Art Institute where she graduated with a Master of Fine Arts. Holly has participated in over 100 exhibitions including group shows at the de Young Museum, the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum. A Presidential Scholar in the Arts, she has received grants from the California Arts Council (Established Artist category), the Puffin Foundation, the George Sugarman Foundation, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She is represented by SLATE Contemporary Gallery in Oakland, CA, Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, ELLIO Fine Art in Houston, TX, and is a member of A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Mind/Mountain is an installation of multiple sheets of suspended white polyester tulle that has been sewn through with variegated, light reflective thread. Natural daylight plays an important role in the work as it activates the surfaces of the tulle and the full range of color in the thread. The tulle serves as a metaphor for the thought process because the fabric surfaces are sewn through with hundreds and hundreds of interlinking and enmeshed lines. The drawing-like line of the thread serves as a kind of visual dendrite that travels in the work. It is a journeying of ideas in the mind with the fabric as a proxy for consciousness.