ATC GALLERY PRESENTS
Mutability
Servando Garcia, James Kao, Ann Toebbe
Opening Reception: September 13th 6-10pm
Continues through November 1, 2008

ATC Gallery is pleased to present the opening of their 2008 fall gallery season with Mutability featuring new and recent work from Servando Garcia, James Kao, and Ann Toebbe. These three painters converge to catalogue the many ways in which paint blurs the lines of subject and reality through muted palette, perspective and investigations of space.

Garcia describes his practice as concerned with the creation of space as an expression, and an absorptive visual experience. This exhibition showcases several of his new oil paintings and watercolors made after his transitional move from Chicago to San Francisco in 2007. The work often depicts scenes from his apartment and family life in solemn hues with the occasional flash of bright marks and imagery. Garcia's new work is greatly influenced by his daughter, familial surroundings and the writing of James Elkins.

All three artists share several similarities in the way their surroundings influence their subject matter, color and approach to painting. Toebbe seeks to create a personal lexicon of memory through repetition of familiar objects found in the various places she has called home over the last decade. Furniture arrangements, holiday decorations, and mealtime detritus can be found within her compressed picture planes that lay somewhere between abstraction and representation. Toebbe shows her Nativity paintings that celebrate family tradition, but also remind the viewer about the fleeting joy of life through the somber grays and blacks within the series; they are one Christmas tree closer to death

Kao's work cycles through varying phases of romanticism and convention within the context of his still lives and studio landscapes. He describes his work as recording direct and repeated observations; each reiteration of similar motifs marks an increasing intimacy with the world and moves an observational practice closer to a private meditation. Much like Garcia and Toebbe, Kao draws inspiration from his surroundings and daily encounters with ordinary household objects. He is particularly fascinated with dried and rotting oranges; they signify a sentimental offering, sacrifice or emotional presence within the paintings.




James Kao
Kao lives and works in Chicago. He received his Masters of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. Selected solo exhibitions include "James Kao: New Paintings", Gosia Koscielak Gallery, Chicago and "Dilations", Gosia Koscielak Gallery, Chicago. Selected group exhibitions include "Ten", Toomey Tourell Fine Art, San Francisco, CA, "artWork5", Gallery 2, Chicago, "Interstitial", Zhou B Arts Center, Chicago.