Three Contemporary Artists Featured in ‘Dimensions’ Exhibit at Hollis Taggart in Southport

Hollis Taggart art gallery will open its latest exhibit, “Dimensions,” a group exhibition featuring new and recent paintings by three contemporary artists: Paige Beeber, Emilie Duval, and Rachel MacFarlane.

— an announcement from Hollis Taggart

On view from Sept. 15 to Nov. 5, the exhibition features selections of their paintings, which are united in their spatial explorations.

Beeber abstracts architectural elements into flattened patterns, while MacFarlane foregoes empirical representations of landscapes to create fantastical ones filtered through memory. Duval combines both exterior and interior spatial elements to create altogether new worlds that embody the future of human consciousness.

An opening reception will take place from 5 to 8 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 15  at the Hollis Taggart gallery, 330 Pequot Ave., Southport. All three artists will be in attendance.

Created during a residency in Sicily in 2021, Paige Beeber’s works in this exhibit reflect the influence of the Italian architecture she encountered there. Continuing her engagement with shifting layers of painterly marks, this body of work abstracts architectural elements into wovenlike patterns and flattens their space into the two-dimensional.

Noted for her distinctive approach to mark-making that lend her paintings the appearance of needlework, the artist often incorporates a wide range of materials into her large-scale works, including acrylic, spray paint, and oil pastel. Beeber’s works in this exhibit brim with energy and evince a palpable sense of play and wonder.

Influenced by her law and art history studies in Paris, Emilie Duval creates works that explore the duality between the natural and the digital.

Informed by research and observation of a wide range of geopolitical, economic, and financial regulations and their existence through algorithms, Duval’s works translate these forces into metaphoric visions and question how these frameworks infiltrate our everyday lives as well as public spaces.

Her works in this exhibit employ a variety of materials to construct intricate worlds that often combine interior and exterior elements, seemingly refracted through an otherworldly prism. Mediated by Duval, these landscapes present an alternate world where simulation intermixes with reality.

Rachel MacFarlane creates imaginative and uncanny landscapes that are rich in jewel tones and loosely based on memories of specific places. Investigating the psychological nuances of illusionistic space, MacFarlane’s works speak to our complicated relationship to the natural world in our late capitalist milieu and also in light of the proliferation of digital (computermade) landscapes as a form of surrogate landscapes.

Central to MacFarlane’s work is the question of how to “translate a place without claiming ownership of it”; accordingly, her works expand the long-standing genre of landscape painting to account for ecological pressure on natural spaces.

Among others, this exhibit will feature two of her newest paintings from her 2022 residency in Clearwater, Manitoba. Imbued with the majestic and sublime–yet terrifying– charge of nature, these paintings register as a kind of warning against the perils of climate change.

About Hollis Taggart

Founded in 1979, Hollis Taggart presents significant works of American art, showcasing the trajectory of American art movements from the Hudson River School to American Modernism and the Post-War and Contemporary eras. The gallery has sponsored several catalogue raisonné projects, most recently for the American Surrealist artist Kay Sage, and has been instrumental in advancing knowledge of such artists as Alfred Maurer, Arthur B. Carles, and more recently, Theodoros Stamos, Marjorie Strider, and Michael (Corinne) West.

In the summer of 2019, the gallery announced the formal expansion of its primary market business and focus on the presentation of contemporary work. It continues to expand its roster of contemporary artists, focusing on emerging and mid-career talents. The gallery’s flagship location is in Chelsea, and it also operates a space in Southport.