NEWS / ANNOUNCEMENTS

Press Release: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

William Siegal Gallery

A n c i e n t    C o n t e m p o r a r y 

Please join us for the Grand Opening of this new Railyard gallery space

 T H E N  &  N O W

 Contemporary Art of New Mexico
Curated by Bunny Conlon

Featuring:

Paula Roland, Signe Stuart, Tom Waldron
Polly Barton, Carlos Estrada-Vega, Collette Hosmer, 

Saturday, May 19, 2007  3-7PM
540 S. Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico

 

William Siegal Galleries, located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, specializes in ancient and historic museum-quality textiles and objects from Pre-Columbian, Aymara, Asian, and African cultures. For thirty-five years, William Siegal has concentrated on combining material of historical integrity and quality with the eye of a discriminating contemporary aesthetic.

In March of 2007, we will be moving to a new location in Santa Fe's recently developed Railyard District. In addition to our collection of ancient and historic works of art, we will begin representing contemporary art work with a focus on a minimalist aesthetic.

New Location as of March 1, 2007:
540 South Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501

 www.williamsiegal.com     email: info@williamsiegal.com     ph: 505-820-3300

 

Pulse
September 8- October 16, 2005
Opening Reception Friday, September 16, 5-7PM

Pulse
by Paula Roland
20" x 20" x 1.75
Pigment, PVA on Wood

 

Roland's pieces are at once lively and meditative—a catalyst for the senses and a window to one’s interior world. Their sensuous, interactive surfaces sometimes refract light and shift in color or depth as the light changes or as the viewer walks by. Because they suggest a complexity and order found only in nature, the viewer questions what is real and what is not. The abstraction helps to break our preconceptions and stir feeling and memory. New ideas are formed as we examine what we see through how we see. In a hurried world, these pieces make us stop and pay attention.

Roland states, "I believe that materials and processes transport ideas. I craft the paint myself using powdered mica pigment and PVA (archival white glue).  I'm using atypical tools to obscure the presence of the hand and to allow the process to inform the image. After extensive preparation, each piece is completed in one session and cannot be reworked. The cinematic movement of color, light, and form suggests ebb and flow between nature and artifice, spirit and matter, and the reductive and the maximal. The paintings evoke seemingly disparate sensibilities reminiscent of baroque play of light and Asian art. An underlying rhythm runs through the work, like a heart beat, assuring us that painting lives."

 

 

 

At the opening for Pulse, solo exhibition 2005.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

---

 

PAULA ROLAND: Strange Attraction
An exhibition at Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art

O P E N I N G    R E C E P T I O N   THURSDAY JANUARY 6, 2005   7-9 PM

 

Installation View Chiaroscuro Gallery, Scottsdale Arizona 

Strange Attractor Series

According to chaos theory, in dynamical systems, patterns called strange attractors form in what appears to be chaos. These reveal a hidden order. In my work, chance is introduced through a painting process that is intentionally slightly out of my control. When interrupted by chance, the patterning of some of the works begins to resemble nature. This is an ongoing source of fascination and inspiration. I think of my paintings as fantasy fractals, fields, waves, frequencies, cycles, currents, particles, and other dynamic and subtle energies—making the unknown visible.|

---

PRESS RELEASE:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

July 23-September 11, 2004

Exhibit Opening Reception July 23, 5:30 PM-8:00 PM

Paula Roland's work in the little-known process of encaustic printmaking has received acclaim and exhibition worldwide. Through the Open Studio,which she founded in 1996, Roland provides the only known classes specializing in encaustic printmaking.

Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art

136 G.E. Ohr Street - Biloxi, MS 39530
www.georgeohr.org  228-374-5547

 
Sari I - Encaustic Monotype by Paula Roland

Artist's Statement

While my works are abstract, most people see in them a connection to nature. I grew up on the Gulf Coast, with the beach and Gulf in my front yard, and a woodsy tangled area in my backyard. The freedom to roam and play that was important then carries over in my works. We first know the world through our senses. By using opaque and translucent surfaces, iridescent color, lush texture, and aromatic beeswax, I lead the viewer to a sensory experience that stirs feeling and memory and perhaps leads to new ideas or insight.

Much of my work involves a pattern interrupted by chance. Pattern creates order out of chaos, but at some point the interrupted pattern begins to mimic nature. This is a phenomena that if find intriguing. Fractals, a term from physics, are self-same patterns that repeat on different scales in nature, such as the branching networks of trees, rivers, and the veins in our bodies. Because my hand and body movements relate in a way that is particular to me, these pieces are “fractal” in their similarity. As in nature, a hidden order is revealed, making the unknown visible.

I find pattern and rhythm everywhere. In nature it is in the cycles of seasons, day and night, birth, death and rebirth. In our own bodies, our heart’s beat and blinking eyes are patterned rhythms. The series Chant  relates the patterned qualities of my work with the ancient healing properties of chants, which have existed throughout centuries and across cultures. Included in this tradition are Catholicism’s Gregorian Chants, Buddhist chants, and the chants of the Kabala, the Jewish mystical tradition. Less well known are the chants of the Shipibo Canibo peoples of Peru. There, the shaman’s repetitive incantations produce a healing transformation in those seeking a cure. The cure is complete only when the people of the village interpret these sound patterns in visual designs woven into cloth and applied to pottery. Similarly, I see my wax and pigment flower prints and drawings as prayers made visible—spiritual expressions for peace and the healing.

---

 

 

PRESS RELEASE:

Synesthesia an exhibition in three parts
Strange Attractor Series: Fractal Fields; Chant

Chant, encaustic monotype, graphite, and beeswax.
Synesthesia, June 20, 2003 exhibition
at Chiaroscuro Gallery
439 Camino del Monte Sol, Santa Fe New Mexico

June, 2003
             Synesthesia refers to a crossing, or mingling of the senses. For example, color may be linked with words or taste, or a sensation may be felt in one part of the body as a different part is stimulated. This apt title, borrowed from science, was chosen for its poetic metaphoric qualities and to unify three bodies of work.

               While my works are abstract, most people see in them a connection to the nature. The writer and Cultural Historian, Morris Berman, speaks of the world before the scientific revolution as a place of belonging, where the individual was a participant, not merely an observer. I long for this world because today, culture and nature collide in a faux universe of virtual reality and vanishing authenticity. These works remind us to question our expectations and to observe the interplay amongst reality, science, spirit and art.

               In Synesthesia, process and materials are metaphors for my ideas. I cultivate chance occurrence by utilizing the effects of movement, gravity, chemical action, or heat. In the Strange Attractor Series, liquefied powdered pigments and mica powders change radically and unpredictably as they combine with acrylic polymers and dry. These pieces cannot be reworked. I use “guided” chance, setting up situations, which force me to react and invent on the spot, leading to discovery.

           The Fractal Field, a series of encaustic monotypes where pigmented wax is heated and transferred to   paper creating over 60 one-of-a kind pieces —is another alchemical process. My gestural body movements become natural fractals. These are unique from the paisley-like fractal images that are computer-generated from mathematical equations.
            Chant, my most recent series, relates the patterned qualities of my work with the ancient healing properties of chants, which have existed throughout centuries and across cultures. I see these wax/pigment/graphite drawings and flower prints as prayers made visible—spiritual expressions for peace and the healing of the earth in a post nine-eleven world.. 

---

 

              "To most viewers, the paintings appear to be computer generated or photographic, yet I paint mostly using my hands as tools and craft the paint from scratch. I embrace this       contradiction and others, as the paintings ebb and flow between nature and artifice, spirit and matter, reductive and maximal, and evoke sensibilities reminiscent of baroque and Asian art."
Paula Roland, 2001

 

---

PRESS RELEASE                                  June, 7th, 2000
For immediate release

                      Passage for Two, encaustic print by Paula Roland.  Paula (center) and students at Chatauqua

Roland tapped to teach at Chatauqua Institute of Art

      Santa Fe artist, Paula Roland, has been selected as a Visiting Artist for the Chautauqua Institution in New York. Located within a 750 acre Victorian village, The Chautauqua School of Art emphasizes a period of in-depth study with a limited number of selected instructors and a close-knit group of graduate and advanced under graduate students. Founded in 1874, Chautauqua boasts many early participants in this program, including: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George Gershwin, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Ulysses S. Grant and recently Bill Clinton. "Collectively, the artist/teachers who participate each summer are represented in major museums and galleries throughout out the world. They are also highly respected artists who, altogether, have taught in virtually every art program in America." – Don Kimes, Director, Chautauqua School of Art. At Chautauqua, Roland will share the techniques she developed for encaustic (pigmented wax) printmaking.
       Paula Roland, life-long artist and art-educator received an MFA from the University of New Orleans. Roland taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts from 1989-1996 after which time she founded The Open Studio, Santa Fe. The Open Studio provides the only known program devoted to encaustic printmaking and other encaustic-on-paper techniques. Roland has developed a curriculum that extends and modernizes this process. In addition to The Open Studio, classes and workshops in encaustic printmaking have been taught at the Santa Fe Art Institute, The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and The Santa Fe Community College.
       Paula Roland says of her recent work, "My works represent transitions between states of being. They are the invented topography that exists in the fleeting moments just before concepts are formed, before a change is made or a course is set. They exist between feeling and intellect, beauty and the grotesque, the virtual and the real and other opposites or perceived dualities. My aim is to challenge our surface perceptions and and examine the nature of how we see."
       Roland's work has recently been acquired by two corporate collections. Novelle, Inc., Provo, Utah, (six paintings), and Agilent Technologies, Palo Alto, CA., has commissioned ten works. Notables such as Lowery Sims, Susan Krane, Louis Grachos, Roberta Smith, James Surls and Sylvia Lark, have selected Roland’s work for award or exhibition. Paula Roland has received several prestigious awards including one from the National Endowment for the Arts.
       An interview with Paula Roland and images of her work will be included in a new book, Encaustic Painting, Contemporary Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax, due out in the spring of 2001, published by Watson-Guptill.