September 17, 2008

PRESS RELEASE

 

Iao PROJECTS

925 EAST 900 SOUTH SUITE 40

SALT LAKE CITY UT 84105

T. 801.879.1971

http://www.iao-gallery.com/index4.html

http://www.rmartshow.com

 

 

ROCKY MOUNTAIN ART AND ANTIQUES SHOW
Amy Caron, Jeff Faerber, Mason Fetzer, Donald Fodness, Matt Glass, Jordan Jensen, Sibyll Kalff, Michelle Kurtz (Circlegal), Cat Palmer, Kurtz + peng, qi peng, Mark Phelan, Brett Sykes, RoByn Thompson, Kay Tuttle, Stacey Wexler, Barry Wolfryd, Jan Wurm
November 14, 2008 - November 16, 2008

Iao PROJECTS is pleased to present a selection of its gallery roster within its second international art fair this year. The 2008 Rocky Mountain Art and Antiques Show is a major art event being hosted at the Salt Palace Convention Center located in downtown Salt Lake City. Featuring a wide spectrum of museum-quality pieces ranging from the Old Masters to the most cutting edge contemporary art, this fair has been featured in ARTnews and Antiques & Fine Art periodicals.

 

Iao PROJECTS will be presenting its featured Mexican-American artist Barry Wolfryd along with selected inventory from various other artists within its primary booth. Curator Albert Wang expresses the gallery’s commitment to cutting-edge works that challenge the social norms of American culture. By selecting Wolfryd, the director focuses on the artist’s dual nature, whether it be the activist’s concern for the infiltration of American corporate marketing into international markets (especially those within Mexico) or the painter’s ability to juxtapose pop art icons within the context of our post-9/11 world. The artist also incorporates cultural artifacts/goods/idols that have displaced traditional religious icons within a developing Mexico and a well-developed America while revealing his fascination and repulsion with household brands that reflect an empty idealism like a Delillo novel. For example, the painting “Peace Offering” examines the gradual erasure of multiple cultures by a superimposed McDonalds French fries executed in grisaille. By showing the dominant “god” in the foreground using dull gray tones, Wolfryd laments the disappearing uniqueness and colorfulness of a particular country invaded by the aesthetics of a multinational corporation.

 

Wolfryd has studied painting and drawing in institutions within Mexico and the United States such as the University of the Americas (Cholula, Puebla) and the Art Institute of Chicago. The artist has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in various museums and galleries, particularly in Mexico, Europe, and the United States. Some of these places that display his work include The Diego Rivera House Museum in Guanajuato, Mexico and the Housatonic Museum of Art at Bridgeport, CT. Selected public interventions and exhibitions include the Cow Parade executed in 2005 in Mexico City and “Between Two Worlds” held in 2007 at the Department of Public Art in Palm Desert, CA. The artist resides currently in Los Angeles, CA while maintaining a studio within the artists’ area of Colonia Roma located in Mexico City.

 

Along with Wolfryd’s large-scale artwork in the primary booth, there will be selected pieces from other Iao PROJECTS/Iao Gallery artists including Amy Caron, Jeff Faerber, Mason Fetzer, Donald Fodness, Matt Glass, Jordan Jensen, Sibyll Kalff, Cat Palmer, Kurtz + peng, qi peng, Brett Sykes, RoByn Thompson, Kay Tuttle, Stacey Wexler, Barry Wolfryd, and Jan Wurm. Highlights from the art fair inventory will include a conceptual and minimalist photograph of the brain executed by award-winning Caron, photographic and political sculptures created by Palmer, cellular phone studies presented by Sykes, stencil-based vinyl records featured by Fetzer, psychological small works painted by Faerber, and the provocative body art documents photographed by Thompson. Iao Gallery, directed by Shadna in conjunction with Iao PROJECTS, will be featuring the controversial makeovers of other people’s boring paintings executed in spray paint and mixed media by conceptual artist qi peng.

 

In Iao PROJECTS’ secondary booth, Michelle Kurtz (Circlegal) and Mark Phelan will be providing artist instruction to the general public. Also within this booth, Kurtz will be presenting her socially conscious and satirical graffiti paintings and works on paper containing her signature stick figures whereas Phelan will be showing his lyrical and poetic monotypes containing psychological images of private fantasy. With hard-hitting works from two different artistic temperaments, the gallery director shows how much Iao PROJECTS is willing to engage with the art market with opposite forms of presentation and dialogue.

 

Iao PROJECTS hopes to provide a new forum for avant-garde contemporary art within the regional Southwestern context. The gallery offers a conduit for engaging political and psychological themes such as immigration, globalization, and the decline of civilization while providing high quality artwork that engages the eyes as well as the imagination and intellect. By going against the grain of traditional and mostly perfunctory figurative work that has been predominant within Utah and the surrounding areas, Iao PROJECTS challenges the expected norms of such an art fair (particularly in the context of high-end antiques) once again with provocative styles that vary from graffiti and stencil work to neo-expressionist painterly works.

 

For more information about Iao PROJECTS, please contact Albert Wang at (801) 879-1971 or albert@iao-gallery.com. For further information about the Rocky Mountain Art & Antiques Show, please contact Richard Lee at (888) 988-2787 or rmartshow@gmail.com.