An Orderly Line?
February 8 - March 19, 2022 Exhibition
Tom Dowling | Blue McRight | A.M. Rousseau
After two years of being closed to the public Coastline Art Gallery in Newport Beach hosted its first art show, An Orderly Line? This three-person exhibition focused on one of the seven elements of art: line. A basic gesture that has the power to be a complex tool of expression. The phrase, an orderly line, comes from the first half of a poster promoting safety procedures used for civil defense air raid drills, "An Orderly Line Is a Safe Line!" This slogan was a product of the WPA's efforts to ease congestion and assure that all members of the community found refuge in the event of a disturbance.
Reflecting back on the last few years, the idea that a line can move from A to B seems anything but simple. As art imitates life, the question is, can a line truly be orderly?
Artists
Tom Dowling
Southern California | West Cork, Ireland
- MFA, University of California, Irvine
- BFA, University of California, Santa Barbara
Artist Statement
Growing up and being schooled in Southern California left its mark on me. The particular types of minimal art that emerged here (Hard Edge, and California Light and Space) are the main influences on my aesthetic. Painting is at the core of what I do. I use the term minimalism to describe my work for lack of a better term. My preferred term would be reductive painting: a bare-boned formal approach to image making. I have a formally reductive sensibility that (in over 40 years of painting) has developed into a language of my own. This language has a particular color and compositional footprint. From the Cantos, which are mostly color field paintings, through my geometric abstractions and constructions, to the group of works I like to think of as baroque minimalism, I maintain a thread that is unmistakably mine.
Blue McRight
Venice Beach, CA
- Rhode Island School of Design
- Evergreen State College
Artist Statement
My world of artmaking is deeply immersive. I cross the wires of intention and chance to see what will happen, and the resulting shock rings me like a bell. I am struck, hollowed out, reverberating, transfixed until interrupted by dinner or some other distraction, whereupon my reaction is and always will be "five more minutes." I am dedicated to creating a visual, metaphoric language about water and the ocean, synthesizing years of witnessing the undersea wilderness as a scuba diver. In ways that are provocative, but more poetic than didactic, my work engages with major environmental issues including drought, sea level rise and ocean plastic pollution.
The organic processes of life behaviors, gender fluidity, reproduction, and death in marine creatures and their environments inspire me. These processes are timeless, unsentimental; outside of humans' shifting cultural and political values. They continue with or without us. I trust their beauty, their indifference, their violence and integrity.
A. M. Rousseau
Southern California
- MFA, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY
- BFA, Massachusetts College of Art
Artist Bio
A.M. Rousseau is a multi-disciplined artist and photographer who has exhibited her work in solo shows in New York, California, Texas, Ohio, and in Europe and Japan as well as museums in Lancaster, Bakersfield and Oklahoma. Her work has been published in magazines including Life Magazine, The Photo Review, Art in America, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times, and The Boston Globe among others.
She is the recipient of a National Endowment in the Arts Fellowship, The Djerassi Foundation Affymax Fellowship, the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Artist Residency, Yaddo Artist residency, the Virginia Center for the Arts residency, the Manhattan Borough President's Award for Excellence and Service in the Arts, and the Harc Foundation Award.
She received her undergraduate degree from the Massachusetts College of Art and a Master's Degree in Fine art from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. She also attended the New York Studio School for Painting and Sculpture and the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture. Drawings and paintings from the series, "A Hundred Points on a Line," were exhibited at Andi Campognone Projects in Pomona, CA. and in a solo show at the Lancaster Museum of Art and History. Her paintings from the series "Sight Lines" were shown in at the Bakersfield Museum. In 2015 her one-person show at the CMay gallery at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles traveled to Korea. She has exhibited work with the Ruth Bachofner Gallery in Los Angeles, Fresh Paint in Los Angeles and Scape Gallery in Corona Del Mar, CA and is currently with the Jason Vass Gallery in Los Angeles.