The Artists’ Garden

America Martin. Anna Kincaide. Audra Weaser.
Isabelle van Zeijl. Thai Mainhard.

Showing: Winter 2022
Location: 346 N Pacific Coast Hwy, Laguna Beach, CA 92651

JoAnne Artman Gallery is pleased to present THE ARTISTS’ GARDEN, an exhibition of works by America Martin, Anna Kincaide, Audra Weaser, Isabelle van Zeijl, and Thai Mainhard.

Inspired by Claude Monet’s renowned gardens at Giverny, the title celebrates the beauty and variety of the natural world while establishing the ‘artists’ garden’ as both a metaphor and point of departure to further understand the past, present, and self. Paying homage to the continued legacy of Giverny and natural inspiration, THE ARTISTS’ GARDEN plucks colors, textures, and subjects derived from floral and pastoral vistas. Exploring the dualities of organic and manmade creation, the true ‘artist’s garden’ is ultimately their resulting artworks.

Reimagining the still life tradition with fresh eyes, America Martin maintains her focus on the everyday objects that inform, inspire, and enhance ordinary existence. Continuously challenging her utilization of color and varied mark making, Martin evokes both smooth, bold curves as well as hard, geometric lines. Emphasizing the texture and grain of the paper or canvas, Martin explores the possibilities of the still theme. Visually notating her surroundings, Martin’s choice to either highlight or obscure particular elements reveals personal allegorical and symbolic significance in each composition. Her flowers and figures are given personalities and attitudes as their energetic marks and gestural lines reinvent each still life into a decisively modern, unexpected interpretation.

Communicating emotion and narrative with limited assistance from her figure’s facial expressions, Anna Kincaide creates cascades of flowers that cover her subjects to explore anonymity and transformation. Headless and bursting forth with florals, Kincaide’s figures showcase the idea of ambiguity between our bodies, identities, and thoughts. Incorporating elements of fashion photography and contemporary socio- cultural emblems of status and identity, her figures define the separation between body and mind. Through control and spontaneous disruption, she conveys femininity, confidence, beauty, and mystique.

Audra Weaser’s work echoes the aesthetic visions of the great American and European traditions of Romantic landscape painting. Utilizing a minimalist color palette, Weaser’s process-based paintings are collaged into seamless undulations pierced by lighter areas, reminiscent of dappled sunlight. It is these spots of brightness that the artist then excavates, exposing the base panel while re-connecting the layers of paint on top back into the whole of the image. Using a sander, Weaser takes away areas of color, cutting through to the bottom of the composition in organic movements that echo the direction of her brushstrokes, revealing the final composition.

Recognized for her mastery to create striking self-portraits with depth and meaning, Isabelle van Zeijl dips into the post-modern to craft a vision of feminine power that questions historical and 21st-century concepts of beauty. Van Zeijl produces the scenes entirely independently; she is model, creator, object, and subject. Inspired by the relationship between humanity and nature, her Flower Evolution Collection acknowledges the feminine life cycle and it’s parallel to that of a flower. Van Zeijl allows her practice to evolve as nature takes its course and offers an alternative concept of beauty, symbolizing the reinvention of the self.

Thai Mainhard’s abstract paintings combine expressive mark making with dense blocks of color to create complex and emotive compositions that navigate the space between chaos and calm. Mainhard works with a variety of media—including oil paint, oil sticks, spray paint, and charcoal—to create intuitive imagery that externalizes her feelings and personal experiences. In her diptych I Am Your Garden, Mainhard captures floral motifs along with shape, light, color and multiple planes that seize the complexities of human emotions on a two-dimensional surface.

These artists’ work will inspire, provoke, engage and mesmerize. With visual perceptions always changing, peek behind the stories told and you’re sure to find the right artistic expression.