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Ward Schumaker And Tama Hochbaum At George Lawson

By Kimberly Kradel

Recent paintings of San Francisco artist Ward Schumaker include selections from his ongoing series on the composers. Schumaker’s painting combines elements of illustration and design with improvised gesture and a repertory cast of personal icons and poetic text. This is his second solo show here. In his own words:

I frequently ask myself, what is the difference between design and art, between illustration and painting? For this series, I created work inspired by posters in the 2009 Contemporary Jewish Museum show of Russian Jewish Theater, employing the names of classical composers whose work I admire. In the 1970s, Ray Johnson of the NY Correspondence School (see the movie, How to Draw a Bunny) had sent me art work with letterforms that looked a bit Russian, cyrillic-like, and I liked that connection with the posters at the CJM, so I decided to use my variation of it. My first pieces (Stravinsky, Prokofiev) ended up quite poster-like, with large letter forms of the composers’ names cut from paper. Later, in some (Bartok, Stockhausen, Andriessen) the names disappeared under layers of paint. In others, (Janacek, Dodge, Byars, Weill, Gorecki) words appear which derive from descriptions of the composers’ works. And in some pieces (Copland, Satie, Berg) I included recognizable images, drawn simply and hearkening back to graphic design and illustration. Design or art? I felt I had come full circle.

In this recent work of Chapel Hill, North Carolina-based photographer Tama Hochbaum, is reflected an artist who seems to capture the image of continually coming home in her work, the loop of her earliest memories melding with her most recent sensory experiences. In a series of modestly-scaled black and white photographs the quick, peripheral reflection of a passed tree off the car windshield might share the time/space continuum with the image of her father as a little boy holding a piece of chalk, all of a piece. In her own words:

…an unfolding of time, a story told, the figure, the natural world, combined, juxtaposed, all pushed together in a very personal picture plane.

Hochbaum, who studied with Stanley Hayter at the famous Atlier 17 in Paris in the ‘70s, has enjoyed an active exhibition schedule over the past few years. This is her third solo show with the gallery since inaugurating the program in 2008.

Ward Schumaker: selected paintings from the composer series
Tama Hochbaum: moving pictures – recent photographs
Exhibition Dates: February 8 through March 12, 2011
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 10th, 5:30pm – 7:30pm

George Lawson Gallery
49 Geary 2nd Floor
San Francisco, CA 94108

Press release and images provided by the gallery.