#Paolo Arao

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Powerful Contemporary Textile Art Unveiled in Paolo Arao's 'Reverberations'

Paolo Arao: Reverberations at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts reveals powerful contemporary textile art immersed in the fusion of tradition and modernity.

Paolo Arao, Installation view Reverberations, 2023. One of the vibrant contemporary textile art on view at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Photo: Colin Conces. Paolo Arao: Reverberations at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts reveals powerful contemporary textile art immersed in the fusion of tradition and modernity. BY KAZEEM ADELEKE, ARTCENTRON Vibrant Contemporary Textile Art…

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Textile painting by Paolo Arao. Source: twocoatsofpaint.com.

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Paolo Arao

Nice introduction at American Scholar.

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Paolo Arao (A ‘00) Drawdown Morgan Lehman 526 West 26th Street, Suite 410, New York, NY 10001 February 11 - May 08

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Paolo Arao, Sweet Licks, 2019, Sewn cotton and canvas, 33 x 27 in.

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Paolo Arao

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Paolo Arao

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Paolo Arao

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PAOLO ARAO

Chro Ho, 2018 Pieced and sewn cotton on shaped support 25 x 32 inches 

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New Post has been published on Georgetown Art Attack

New Post has been published on http://georgetownartattack.com/wordpress/2017/12/30/celebrate-the-new-year-with-the-georgetown-art-attack/

Celebrate the New Year with the Georgetown Art Attack

Start your New Year off in Georgetown as we usher in 2018 with a dazzling array of contemporary visual and performing arts throughout the historic industrial arts district. Jump aboard the FREE Art Ride to check out our west end locations such as studio e, and Equinox Studios!

Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery  presents “Now”, and exhibition featuring images by a dozen emerging and established artists in the new comix anthology of the same name from Fantagraphics Books. Associate publisher Eric Reynolds will discuss his editorial process at 7:00 PM on January 13.

All City Coffee  Stay Sweet & Ride High! New Work by Devi Ann Pellerin. Woodcut wall hangings, ceramic pots, prints, and custom painted motorcycle helmets. This show is pure fun and inspired by all my favorite things: Lowbrow, cartoons, 70’s illustration, vintage motorcycles and a good time!, vintage motorcycles and a good time!

Rainier Glass Studio  Become part of the glass art experience, browse the gallery of NW artists unique blown glass art and stay for live demonstrations at 7pm during Art Attack.

  Bridge Productions  Bringing in the new year, Bridge Productions is very excited to host this intimate group show, Somewhere Nearby, curated by Sue Danielson; and to welcome New York artists Catherine Haggarty, Julie Torres, Matthew Neil Gehring, Paolo Arao, Minku Kim, and Sarah Trigg to Seattle. This tender bridge connecting the edges of place is an attempt to further the connection between our cities and our coasts through the alignment of art and practice. Opening reception 13 January 6-9PM.

The Alice Gallery  presents BODYWARP, a solo exhibition by Indira Allegra. Warp is the vertical thread held under tension on a loom, making the act of weaving possible. BODYWARP, is an exhibition exploring weaving as performance requiring a unique receptivity to tensions extant in political and emotional spaces. Like the accumulation of memory in cloth, in BODYWARP, looms and other tools of the weaver’s craft become organs of memory, pulling the artist’s body into an intimate choreography between maker, tool and the narrative of a place. Performance and conversation open to the public Friday January 12.

Oxbow  Seattle-based artist, Barbara Robertson has created a site-specific installation, titled “Architectonic,” composed of three projected animations which use the expansive Oxbow space as an integral part of the image. This project is an on-going work in progress, and Ms. Robertson will continue to add new elements to the installation through the end of the exhibition.

Prairie Underground  presents Everyday Possibilities of Feeling Like A Totally Different Person by Dakota Gearhart. A series of new videos incorporating collage, performance, and sound that take inspiration from popular make-up tutorial videos, but turn them into surrealist narratives of face shapeshifting. An ode to femme culture, as well as, a look into identity, gender, and costuming, the videos playful speak to the presentation of self and the many forms we can inhabit simultaneously.

Machine House Brewery is showing understated pop culture references and infectious jokes through illustrations, paintings and mixed media pieces by Nicolas Anderson. Open during Art Attack,simultaneously hosting “Be Loud” a bingo fundraiser for King County Sexual Assault Resource Center. Open to the public with no cover charge.

Illumination Studio# 305  presents Rostad and Ferrell. presenting Rostad, Dari Stolzoff and Ferrell. Rostad, explores the inner beauty of our neurological system through vibrant color and Ferrell explores spatial and color field through abstraction. Also Dari Stolzoff as abstract expression in in bright color and light. Music by “DJ” Luscious Leopard Lips, who brings background music with a Theremin synthesizer and keyboards. With new work up, you’ll be glad you came by.

The Conservatory will be hosting Jewelry and Fashion Artists with pop-ups this January’s Art Attack. FIVE distinct artists showcasing their fashion accessory and jewelry creations!

studio e  rot: Brian A. Beck. Beck’s latest work questions the stability of a single meaning conventionally granted to a familiar object. Departing from what appear to be wooden children’s toys, the art pieces are composed from carefully handcrafted and tenuously related elements, abstracted to their basic shapes and color. Beck’s category-defying display of three-dimensional collages mounted on white walls breaks the boundaries between daily objects, sculpture, painting, and conceptual art. Open Friday & Saturday from 1-6pm and always during GEORGETOWN ART ATTACK

Equinox Studios  is a growing arts community in West Georgetown, home to over 100 artists working in an inspiring array of mediums, including dance, blacksmithing, welding, woodworking, cycle fabrication, sculpture, painting, film, glass and art performances monthly.

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Paolo Arao

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Paolo Arao - Sunset Boulevard, 2019

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I’m loving these new textile-based works by Paolo Arao created at @wassaicproject ! ❤️🌈🔥 @paolo_arao #wassaicproject #wassaic #paoloarao photo by @sklein79 (at The Wassaic Project)

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Paolo Arao, Choral Quarrel, 2018, Sewn cotton and canvas, 45 x 36 in.

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11. Paolo Arao & Alex Paik

Paolo Arao & Alex Paik discuss Paolo’s work and his relationship to abstraction, classical music, and color.

Paolo Arao, Divisoria, 2020, sewn cotton, acrylic, canvas, hand woven fibers, felt, denim, 54 x 45 x 1.5 inches. photo: Cary Whittier

Alex Paik (AP): I’ve admired your work for such a long time, it’s great to be able to talk to you about it! I see your work not so much as expanding the language of the traditions of Euro-American painting but more that it’s coming from the traditions of improvisational quiltmaking like the Gee’s Bend quilts or Korean bojagi. How do you think about your relationship to painting?

Paolo Arao (PA): I’m happy that we’re able to have this dialogue, as I’ve admired your work as well! I appreciate your thoughtful observations about my work, and all that you’ve mentioned is true. When it comes to painting, I’m pretty restless. My relationship to painting is always shifting.

AP: A related question: how do you think about your relationship to abstraction? What traditions of abstraction do you see your work coming from?

PA: Great question! Early on in my practice I was making figurative graphite and charcoal drawings and it eventually felt limiting (partly because of the explicitly queer content/imagery as well as the lack of color.) I wanted to return to making paintings. Abstraction presented an opportunity to create work that was more open to layered interpretations and also to revisit color again. While my current work is rooted in geometric abstraction, I’m still continuing to address the queer content as well as my Filipino heritage through textile-based processes. Working with textiles, I’ve been able to interweave my interests in color, labor, materiality and identity. Aesthetically, my work is in conversation with (and against) Modernism, the Bauhaus, Hard Edge and Color Field Painting, Pattern + Decoration, and Op Art.

AP: I would love to hear your thoughts on how you see your practice as working against those traditions you just mentioned.

PA: I think of my work as mending these histories of Hard Edge, Color Field and Op Art traditions through the use of textiles. My deliberate decision to use fabric in lieu of paint, softens the rigidity inherent in these traditions.

Paolo Arao, Graphic Score, 2020, Sewn cotton, canvas, acrylic, felt, denim, nylon, 33 x 27 x 1.25 inches. Photo: Cary Whittier

AP: How are these works composed? Are they planned out in advance or do the pieces grow somewhat improvisationally as one shape is attached to the next?

PA: I often work in series and I prefer taking varied approaches with each new body of work. I like to think of the studio as a laboratory where I can test various solutions to the questions that I’m posing. I keep a sketchbook for rough ideas and to map out composition or color relationships. Sometimes my paintings are the result of composites from those sketches. At the same time, I like to work in a space of inquisitive experimentation, leaving room for discovery. What the work is “about” and what it “means” comes belatedly – usually after I’ve had some time to reflect on the pieces.

AP: How do you think about color and color relationships in your work?

PA: Before I studied painting in art school, I was a classical pianist. I started playing the piano at a very early age and I was accepted to Virginia Commonwealth University as a music performance and composition major. To this day, music still plays an important role in how I think about and work with color and composition. Sometimes, I’ll begin a new painting by sewing strips of color together to create a chord of color, establishing the “key” of the piece. The way I compose a painting establishes its structure and rhythm. It’s both classical and jazz improvisation.

AP: I also studied classical violin as a kid so I like you I feel like the qualities/attributes of music influenced my eventual visual language. During the past year I’ve been really drawn to solo piano music and have been working through some of the easier Philip Glass Etudes. Do you know those works? There is a clarity about the structure and the color relationships that I can see you being drawn to.

PA: We should start a chamber music ensemble! I always wanted to play the violin, but the piano was my first love. I am a fan of Philip Glass and the Etudes you mentioned are wonderful. I often listen to his music when I’m working in the studio. The rhythmic syncopation and repetition in his work is captivating. These are qualities that have definitely shaped my visual aesthetic.

Color is both material and content and it is vital to my work. My relationship to color is not passive. It is political, it’s personal, it’s emotional, it is felt and it is in my very being.

AP: Can you expand on this? In particular, how do you feel your relationship to color is political?

PA: Politics is synonymous with power.  Color is both expansive and powerful. My color choices aren’t always purely aesthetic. I’m also interested in the social and political implications that can be alluded to through a specific use of color and/or chromatic relationships. The behavior of a certain color and its capacity to transform, enhance, or subdue other colors in a given context continually fascinates me.

Paolo Arao, Natural Rhythm, 2020, sewn cotton, handwoven fibers, canvas, colored pencil, 33 x 27 x 1.5 inches

Paolo Arao (b. Manila, Philippines) is a Brooklyn-based, Filipino-American artist working with textiles. He received his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Arao has shown his work widely and has presented solo exhibitions at David B. Smith Gallery (Denver). Western Exhibitions (Chicago), Jeff Bailey Gallery  and Morgan Lehman Gallery (NYC.)

Residencies include: Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, The Museum of Arts and Design (NYC), the Millay Colony, the Studios at MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Residency, NARS Foundation, Wassaic Project, BRIC Workspace, and the Fire Island Artist Residency. He is a recipient of an Artist Fellowship from The New York Foundation for the Arts. Arao’s work has been published in New American Paintings, Maake Magazine, Artmaze, Dovetail and Esopus. His solo exhibition “In Dialogue with Drawing” is on view at The Columbus Museum (Georgia) through August 8th.

www.paoloarao.com @paolo_arao

Alex Paik is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. His modular, paper-based wall installations explore perception, interdependence, and improvisation within structure while engaging with the complexities of social dynamics. He has exhibited in the U.S. and internationally, with notable solo projects at Praxis New York, Art on Paper 2016, and Gallery Joe. His work has also been featured in group exhibitions at BravinLee Projects, Lesley Heller Workspace, and MONO Practice, among others.

Paik is Founder and Director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, a non-profit network of artist-run spaces and serves on the Advisory Board at Trestle Gallery, where he formerly worked as Gallery Director.

www.alexpaik.com @alexpaik