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Sarkisian & Sarkisian: Side By Side Exhibitions of Two Contemporary

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  • Sarkisian & Sarkisian: Side By Side Exhibitions of Two Contemporary

    Sarkisian & Sarkisian: Side By Side Exhibitions of Two Contemporary Artists

    http://asbarez.com/121459/sarkisian-sarkisian-side-by-side-exhibitions-of-two-contemporary-artists/
    Thursday, April 3rd, 2014


    'Dusted' by Peter Sarkisian


    NEWPORT BEACH, Calif.--The Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) is
    presenting the long-overdue California survey of video artist Peter
    Sarkisian (born 1965, Glendale, Calif.) in the exhibition "Sarkisian &
    Sarkisian," which also includes a survey of the artist's father, Paul
    Sarkisian (born 1928, Chicago, Ill.), a member of the avant-garde
    movement in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s.

    For the exhibition, OCMA Interim Director and Chief Curator Dan
    Cameron selected 23 video sculptures by Peter Sarkisian along with 22
    paintings by Paul Sarkisian to develop a thematic bridge between the
    separate bodies of work; tying together two accomplished careers that
    achieved distinctively different practices. The exhibition is on view
    April 13 through July 27, 2014.

    Although it employs a single title, "Sarkisian & Sarkisian" is
    experienced as side-by-side survey exhibitions of two contemporary
    artists who happen to be father and son, working in different media.
    Paul has been an accomplished and dedicated painter for six decades,
    while Peter studied film directing at Cal Arts and has produced video
    installations since the mid-1990s. Within an exhibition layout in
    which an equivalent amount of visual attention is dedicated to each
    artist's work, a connection between the two bodies of work emerges in
    the shared artistic device of trompe l'oeil, whose translation as
    "fool the eye" is an apt summation of how both artists use pictorial
    illusion to achieve very different ends.

    "Sarkisian & Sarkisian" began as a straightforward overview of nearly
    twenty years of work by Peter Sarkisian, whose spatial integration of
    film, video and sculpture results in precisely calibrated multi-media
    works that consistently challenge the viewers' perception of reality
    and illusion. From the groundbreaking work Dusted (1998), which
    utilized projection on the five faces of a cube to create the illusion
    of a mother and infant son inside; to the comical/violent antics of
    Registered Drive, Full Scale #1, (2010), in which a full-size model of
    a Ferrari Modena body serves as the frame for a driving lesson from
    hell, Sarkisian's work employs video to punch through the spatial
    limits of pictorial space.

    One of the leading members of the generation of video-based sculptors
    that emerged in the 1990s, Sarkisian's work, while not as widely known
    as that of older video artists like Gary Hill or Bill Viola, is widely
    regarded among curators and writers within this still relatively
    specialized field. As Sarkisian's work follows its evolutionary arc to
    his more recent robotic and levitation pieces, the technical
    challenges he is forced to overcome become increasingly difficult for
    ordinary viewers to grasp, and more hypnotically engaging.

    Paul Sarkisian began his career in the mid-1950s as one of the
    founding members of a cooperative gallery in Pasadena whose members
    also included George Herms and Richard Pettibone. Although his work in
    the 1950s was heavily indebted to abstract expressionism, by the early
    1960s he was making assemblage-based paintings that led to large-scale
    figurative paintings of an almost photographic precision. Early
    exhibitions at Pasadena Art Museum (1968) and Santa Barbara Museum of
    Art (1970) cemented his growing reputation as one of the most
    promising of an emerging generation of painters, as did his
    participation in documenta5 in Kassel, Germany, curated by Harald
    Szeeman. In 1972, as a sign of his growing disillusionment with the
    increasingly commercialized art market and the pigeon holing of his
    work as 'photo-realism; Sarksian moved with his wife and son to the
    outskirts of Santa Fe, where the next decades of his artistic
    development remained all but hidden from the art establishment.

    As Sarkisian's painting developed from realism to trompe l'oeil to
    what became even more erroneously labeled as 'abstract illusionism,'
    his exploration of illusion was gradually supplanted by an a growing
    emphasis on exploring the qualities of surface in abstract painting,
    and his work increasingly emphasized large, open expanses of saturated
    color and dense, opaque polymer resins. With less than twenty examples
    of his work covering the years from 1971 to 2009, it is only possible
    to touch on the high points of this development, but the monotypes
    that occupied his attention in the 1990s, his giant monochromes of the
    early 2000s, and his recent collaged abstractions are all sufficiently
    represented to give viewers a taste for his unique artistic
    trajectory.
    "Sarkisian & Sarkisian" is curated by Interim Director and Chief
    Curator Dan Cameron. Significant support for the exhibition is
    provided by Dick and Dottie Barrett and the Levy Foundation


    From: Baghdasarian
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