Seconds

5 - 30 March 2016

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Press Release

Hannah Sloan is pleased to present Seconds: featuring work by Mary Beth Heffernan, Adele Mills, Rebeca Puga and Arden Surdam. On view March 05 through March 30, 2016. A reception for the artists will be held Saturday March 19 from 2-4pm

This exhibition marks the one-year anniversary of the gallery and emphasizes the gallery’s expanding roster and work by artists who will present solo shows during our second calendar year. Since opening in March 2015, Hannah Sloan has showcased the work of both mid- career and emerging multi-disciplinary artists. The budding gallery program focuses almost exclusively on women artists who maintain studios in the Los Angeles area. Continuing in this spirit, SECONDS, brings together four L.A. based women who employ a variety of mediums in their studio practices and whose work combines a joy of experimentation with technical gravitas.

Mary Beth Heffernan is a Los Angeles based artist whose work explores the intersection between representation and physicality. She earned her MFA in the Photography Program at CalArts in 1994 and is currently Associate Professor of Sculpture, Photography and Interdisciplinary Art at Occidental College. The monoprints on view titled, Cutting Board (Clement Family), were made from a cutting board utilized by her family for over 100 years. These minimalist, abstract works record a century of (mostly) feminine labor in the accumulation of cuts produced during everyday meal preparation.

Adele Mills is a Los Angeles based multidisciplinary artist. She earned her MFA from CalArts in 2003 and was a Research Scholar at UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women from 2005 to 2007. Using photography, painting and digital rendering, Mills produces abstract and figurative work with a structural layering, where one image is viewed through the transparency of a second image. The signature gap between the two layers in Eat Cake, for example, creates a displacement of colors, shape and composition and produces doublings, fadings and seeming movement, as aspects of the image are activated through the shifting perspective of the viewer.

Rebeca Puga is a Chilean-born painter who lives and works in Los Angeles. She earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BA in Social Economical and Juridical Sciences from the University of Chile. Much of Puga’s work is inspired by what she observes while driving around Los Angeles, where she has maintained a studio for fifteen years. In her large-scale painting, Territorial Waters, familiar highways and bodies of water collapse into semi-abstraction with loose layers and structural fragments created by repeatedly reworking her canvas.

Arden Surdam is an L.A. based interdisciplinary artist working primarily in photography and digital media. She received her MFA from CalArts in 2015 and was recently named winner of Focus Photo L.A. at Photo Basel. Images from Surdam’s series, How to Tell When It’s Done will be on view. This original body of work consists of lensless food images that blur the boundaries between studio and kitchen, photography and painting. Each work is produced by combining light sensitive photo chemicals and food matter, which cooked over time, alter in form, composition, and scent. The final images are sensual abstractions, rich in color and texture.