HEMPHILL surveyed local curators and dealers for recommendations of emerging talents in the Mid-Atlantic region. What resulted was an onslaught of suggestions that reaffirmed the variety of creativity surrounding us. We narrowed the focus to these four artists whose work stands out as uniquely beautiful, technically strong and conceptually relevant. Each artist plays with the balance between such dichotomies as abstraction and representation, flatness and perspective, symmetry and spontaneity, intention and happenstance, and identity and uncertainty. Whether in medium, subject matter, or process, commonalities flow through their work, in a small way binding these independent creators to one another.
Erika Diehl
Diehl paints about painting, about the act of looking, the dialectic of interior and exterior and the experience of time through color. Evocative of landscape and vaguely anthropomorphic, her paintings occupy a space between representation and abstraction.
Alex Ebstein
Ebstein is interested in textures that arise from make-shift fixes, hasty patches, and experiments gone awry. The play between chance and intention dictates the balance in many of her compositions. Surface effects and decorative faux finishes are recreations of heavy handed or accidental material combinations in previous stages of development.
Katherine Sable
Sable’s work embraces a visual language that is both studied and imperfect, and grounded in the process of painting. The paintings engage areas of emotionality, vulnerability, and subjectivity through the visual exploration of decorative embellishment that can be both unexpected and unpredictable, while embracing the confidently feminine.
René Treviño
Treviño attempts to reconstruct, re-imagine, and retell history from a different, very specific and underrepresented perspective. He is charged with a compulsion to make thoughtful and beautiful work that confronts societal assumptions and gives new insight into the human experience. His artwork addresses a personal quest for heroism and bravery and a need to define his place in the world.