Toomey Tourell Fine Art: Josh Keller, Jeesoo Lee, Michael Russell and Brant Vest: Works On Paper

Josh Keller, Jeesoo Lee, Michael Russell and Brant Vest: Works On Paper

Toomey Tourell Fine Art is pleased to announce a four-person exhibition entitled “Works on Paper”. The four artists exhibiting are Josh Keller, Jeesoo Lee, Michael Russell and Brant Vest, all new to Toomey Tourell and all approaching the medium of paper with distinct methodologies and intentions.

Dates of Exhibition: Tuesday, August 4th through Monday, August 31st, 2009.
Reception with the artists: Thursday, August 6th from 5:30-7:30 PM.

Josh Keller, a San Francisco based artist, systematically investigates the tension between normal routine, what has not yet happened, and the quotidian systems that define them. This body of work examines the storage strategies that help us navigate this territory – using photography, information and object, he re-investigates our relationship with known material and day to day assumptions, and the cracks that arise when they collide.

Jeesoo Lee, a New York based artist, bases her work on psychological states of being (including fear of water, suffocation, emptiness and liberation) and redefines them through the physicality of her material. The deconstruction/construction of her imagery investigates the search for enlightenment and reason. Her use of contrasting mediums (thread, color, line) continues this investigation while exploring the tensions of abstract painting with her current contemporary practices.

Michael Russell, a Los Angeles based artist, explores by lengthy sessions of concentrated repetition, pattern and mark making the search for introspection and meditative thought increasingly unattainable in our global world. Here gesture documents the complete focus and clarity of the process, including specific moments of interruption that are reflected by impulsive change of color and/or line. This intense, delicate labor leaves the viewer contemplating the ephemeral nature (and possibilities) of time.

Brant Vest, a San Francisco based artist, combines his personal, iconic symbols of revelation and spirituality with the mundane run of the mill cultural images that are a constant feed to our psyches. The recombination of these disparate influences is meant as a reflection of his mortal experience – the transcendental alongside the mundane. These works set a kind of stage for a reengagement of sometime contradictory images that mark and define his timeline on earth – a geographical site of personal conflict and curiosity.