VIVEZA ART EXPERIENCE Debuts "Gallery on the Go" for Miami Art Shows
Date: Nov 7 2006 | Contact: Tom Jensen, publicist | Telephone: 206-956-3584, ext. 4 | E-mail: gallery@viveza.com

Francesca Berrini brings 'Terraform' to Viveza
Multimedia artist tears maps, forms imaginary worlds
Date: Oct 16, 2006 | Contact: Tom Jensen, publicist | Telephone: 206-956-3584, ext. 4 | E-mail: gallery@viveza.com

SEATTLE - "Terraform" is Francesca Berrini's new collection of fabricated worlds. Experience it exclusively at Viveza Art Experience from Wednesday, Nov. 8 to Sunday, Dec. 24. Opening reception is from 6 to 10 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 10. Berrini will be at the opening.

"I slowly create a separate world from the scraps of my current fascinations," the Portland artist said. "I am reforming the world that is available to me piece by piece to reflect my imagination."

Before satellite imagery and aerial photographs, the earth was painstaking mapped by superstitious sailors, daring explorers and surveyors. Looking at the antique, European maps from cartography's heyday, between the 16th and 17th centuries, one finds foreboding sea serpents in dangerous waters and fantastic inhabitants of terra incognita among a world emerging from a patchwork of mathematics, mythology and artful presumption.

There is a certain reverence to Berrini's sacrifice of vintage maps to the landscapes of her imagination. Each map is meticulously reconstituted in layers of resin through varying processes of collage, often creating topographic features. The collages that emerge are by no means haphazard and, at a distance, deceive the viewer into wondering what country or continent Berrini has rendered.

"Francesca Berrini is one of Viveza's most sought after artists," said Michael Rivera-Dirks, Director of VIVEZA. "Berrini literally tears up old worlds and forms new ones. This meticulous process of tearing and forming, terraforming, ignites the imaginations of our clients and brings wonder and a sense of exploration into their daily lives."

The new chart contains the very legacy of a people not yet stifled by a factualized planet. It is that legacy, of a world as malleable as clay, which lives in the Berrini's mind and art. With only the debatable borders of a fiercely politicized planet left to consider, she tears the world asunder and begins a splendid reconstruction.

Go to www.viveza.com for Berrini's portfolio and biography. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday.

 

Artist delves deep into biology
VIVEZA hosts Eva Speer and 'Primordial Soup'
Date: Sep 8, 2006 | Contact: Tom Jensen, publicist | Telephone: 206-956-3584, ext. 4 | E-mail: gallery@viveza.com

SEATTLE -- Contemporary artist Eva Speer returns to Viveza Gallery, 2604 Western Ave., for "Primordial Soup," an exclusive showcase of her mixed-media journey through the genesis and inevitable mutation of all forms, natural and artificial, from the macrocosm to the microcosm. The exhibit runs Wednesday, Oct. 4 through Sunday, Nov. 5. The opening reception is from 6 until 10 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 6.

Influenced, in part, by her "morbid fascination" with global warming, Speer creates complex, emergent entities through an alchemy of digitally altered, reduced, and expanded imagery. Speer put down her paintbrush for this new series and began experimenting with various materials and textures in order to attain the "layering and delicacy" required to fulfill her aesthetic vision.

"I wanted to let the material be in control and acquire its own life on the canvas," she noted. "My work revolves around a process of fracture and reassembly wherein my approximations of reality and the physical world can be set in motion and confounded. The images result from discoveries about materials and working processes as well as a search for structures that allow me to address the mutability of form, the inconstancy of time and space and the complexity of visual phenomena."

Through her meticulous process of distortion, using Xeroxes, scanners, inkjet printers and the like, Speer transforms rigid, man-made designs into an organic vision of life deforming as it is forming. The resulting collages of mutated imagery explore the ongoing evolution and entropy of primordial form.

"While the paintings exude a sense of their own mortality, I try to suspend catastrophe and protect the structures by interjecting playful forms and materials that negotiate relief, like figurative steam holes," she said. "Such forms acquire the characteristics of strange aquatic creatures and bulbous body parts."

While Speer looks to animal life, specifically at the deep sea and cellular level, as the inspiration for the formal qualities of her work, the patterned similarities that exist between organic systems, social systems, technological systems, and so on, emerge from the conceptual fusion and confusion of form and function that compose her works.

"Systems in general represent how we organize our lives and how systems do break up and this imagery reflects my sense of the instability of the complex networks that we build to connect to each other," she said. "I see my work as a realm that negotiates the connections and transitions between idealized environments and an absurd messy reality."
 

Viveza 'comes of age'
Gallery to mark milestone with special review featuring all its artists
Date: Aug 31, 2006 | Contact: Tom Jensen, publicist | Telephone: 206-956-3584, ext. 4 | E-mail: gallery@viveza.com

SEATTLE - Sept. 1, 2006 - VIVEZA Gallery, 2604 Western Ave., celebrates three years of welcoming a wide variety of people to not only enjoy contemporary fine art, but also experience it.

The gallery will host "Coming of Age" Wednesday, Sept. 13 through Sunday, Oct. 1. to mark the gallery's milestone and feature all of its emerging artists. A special reception is slated from 6 to 10 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 15. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday.

As a gallery, Viveza takes on artists unafraid of challenging artistic conventions. The gallery's incoming and current artists exemplify that premise. Viveza recently highlighted Casey Curran and his intriguing 3-D creations.

"Curran has created ingenious little devices rendered in wire, rope, and balsa wood that are operated by a hand crank. The result resembles one of DaVinci's wildly visionary sketches come to life," said Sue Peters, of Seattle Weekly.

During the past three years, Viveza has perfected its creative concept. Viveza is not just an art gallery, but also an aesthetic laboratory where complex systems and emotions are investigated and manipulated. The resulting art experience celebrates the unique aspects revealed in the commonplace and the singular hidden in the everyday world

Other bold Viveza artists include:

Francesca Berrini tears and rearranges real maps into a collage of lines, letter fragments and terrain that question the role of maps in the identity of all people.

Rebecca Woodhouse spreads thick layers of vibrant, pigmented resin to her canvases using the gesture of the written word and focuses on the emotional impact of literary form.

Mattie Iverson presents textural memoirs of vast and surreal landscapes through the filter of her mind's eye.

Doug Smithenry culls images of people and landscapes from the Internet as his only source for generating art.

Raymond Morrow draws inspiration from passing conversations and the dreams of young men who obsess about love, lust and sex

Eric Olson presses dabs of paint from a tube onto metal, plastic or wood. The dabs are near perfect repetitions of one another and are pre-assigned to correspond, in color, to a numeric printout of a random number generator.

Lenka Konopasek and her rodeo paintings reflect the changes in the American West, the slowly dying Americana, which is now depicted as a myth.

Julie Haack creates map-like paintings that arise from her imagination in response to a multitude of influences and turn into personal explorations of not-so-impossible continents.

Roderick Rojo and his raw works explore how mark, color, atmosphere, density and saturation allude to the idea of landscape while still maintaining abstract qualities.

Valerie Beller demonstrates a fusion of conscious decisions and intuitive responses, creating a dynamic, paradoxical structure that defies boundaries.
Korey Gulbrandson toys with cultural symbolism, primarily the pitfalls of orientalism and urban cross-cultural identity.

Eva Speer studies the repetitive process, the effects of reproduction and the fusion of texture and form.

Cara Enteles explores the recurrence of geometric patterns in the natural world through vibrant works that depict these patterns engaged in a dance through the ether.

Go to www.viveza.com for complete portfolios and biographies for all Viveza artists. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday.

VIVEZA takes the static out of art
Art Experience Clips breathes life into works
Date: July 18, 2006 | Contact: Tom Jensen, publicist | Telephone: 206-956-3584, ext. 4 | E-mail: gallery@viveza.com

SEATTLE - Jul 18, 2006 - Life isn't static and VIVEZA (Spanish for "vividness") Gallery, 2604 Western Ave., in Seattle, believes art viewing shouldn't be either.

Experience contemporary fine art at a new level with VIVEZA Art Experience Clips, a set of produced videos clips for each work of the gallery's eclectic and flourishing collection.

"VIVEZA's mission is to make the experience of exceptional contemporary art accessible to a wide variety of people," Michael Rivera-Dirks, director and founder of VIVEZA, said. "VIVEZA art is best experienced in person, but if you can't make it into the gallery, Art Experience Clips are the next best thing."

Visitors to www.viveza.com can now immerse themselves in the stimulating works of Casey Curran and Mattie Iverson from literally anywhere. Both emerging artists come to VIVEZA Aug. 2 through Sept. 3.

The technology compliments Curran's interactive 3-D pieces. Through his mechanical manipulation of texts, symbols of great literature are set in motion by the viewer's interaction. Turn a tiny crank and breathe life into the skeletal framework of Melville's great white antagonist, Moby Dick, or send Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet spinning toward their fate.

"Still images don't do justice to the engaging and multifaceted works offered by VIVEZA," Rivera-Dirks said. "We are excited to be one of the first galleries to offer video clips of its works."

Click here to connect directly to the virtual clip of Curran's "A Turn of the Crank: Sink into Script." You can also access other Art Experience Clips, including those associated with Iverson's work, by browsing the gallery's artist portfolios and clicking the "clip" button.

VIVEZA plans to expand the clips to all its new art.