June 24th - August 6th 2022
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC (miniature Mount Airy Contemporary)
25 West Mt Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce Passages, an exhibition of works by Arden Bendler Browning and Janos Korodi. Both artists incorporate technology into their art making practices, exploring motion through geographic and painterly space to map memory and time. The works in this exhibition are dynamic and evocative; they invite the viewer to become a fellow traveller with the artists, an explorer of the moving worlds they have fashioned for us.
In Arden Bendler Browning’s own words:
”I am an explorer, marking my way with paint.
Walking, to get lost.
How can I travel somewhere new through memory?
I paint quickly but intently
while navigating layers of light, color, shadow, density, gesture, and infinite detail.
Time moves more slowly when I am painting fast.
I layer marks over marks over marks. There is no horizon.
The colors are more alive than we notice.
The world is overloaded and so am I
but it makes sense when looking carefully.
I invent new worlds and journeys.
I put on a virtual reality headset, and grow my body size paintings into distant and near walls.
Roaming within the vast space of my small travel drawings, I use virtual reality tools to paint in three-dimensions.
What was once the focus is now the backdrop, the floor, the unreachable island.
If you wear the headset, you too can walk through the paintings.
Moving through these immersive marks, you become part of an unseen world.
I record video while walking through my real but not real marks.
I paint while watching the video. The screen meanders through almost real shapes and brushstrokes : all aspects, all directions, monumental and miniscule.
The longer I look, the more I am noticing the ways the colors talk to each other -
like a still image that is moving.”
Janos Korodi says, ”I started to paint the first versions of the motion picture series by the time we arrived in Philadelphia in early 2015. Browsing through seas of screenshots from journeys I've made in Google Earth, choosing the ones that had the potential to become the desired piece – if turned into a painting. The images and the panning motion, as it is pushed forward, produces a footage that simulates (or mimics) velocity. The stills chosen from these footages made my harvest for a five year long painterly journey.
As a continuation to my ongoing painting and printing cycle of motion pictures, just before the pandemic hit, I started a project in 2020 instantly, by finding a new source material and medium to work with. The plywood sheets with their natural patterns showing up as repetitions of ornaments on the surface are perfect backgrounds for the distorted street views. I used dye sublimation to print a special selection of images for the wooden surfaces, where the panning layers create an intense, painterly atmosphere. It's a conceptual imaging process, with a fresh and playful outcome, that upcycles the industrial trash (raw plywood sheets) and makes a connection between "motion virtually and in reality" with the Google Street View images. At the same time the process places them on a new stage with strong synergy, the metaphysical marriage of substance and content. The whole process connects me with my new society, giving an opportunity of learning and teaching, that is formulating its culture, and with it the spirit of the place.”
Philadelphia based artist Arden Bendler Browning (www.ardenbendlerbrowning.com) creates large paintings, small works on paper, and virtual reality (VR) environments. Her work explores movement, the desire for travel, the effect of digital imagery on perception and memory, and finding wonder and escape through immersive spaces. Her work hovers between landscape and abstraction.
Bendler Browning’s works are included in several public collections such as the West Collection, the Pennsylvania Convention Center, Dream Hotel Nashville, Frost Tower Collection, Toyota, PNC Tower, amongst others, and numerous private and corporate collections. Her work is represented by Bridgette Mayer Gallery in Philadelphia, Galleri Urbane in Dallas, and Tinney Contemporary in Nashville. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, New American Paintings twice (2009 & 2013), The Studio Visit, Nashville Scene, I Like Your Work podcast (with an accompanying catalog), D Magazine, Philadelphia Style Magazine, The Morning News, the artblog, polisblog, Philadelphia Inquirer, Atlanta Journal-Constutition, and Drawing Magazine, among others. She has been featured in exhibitions at the American University Museum at Katzen Arts Center, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Weatherspoon Art Museum, James A. Michener Museum, Swarthmore College, Kutztown University, University of the Arts, West Chester University, Delaware Contemporary, Arlington Arts Center, and more. Public works include "Nonstop" (2017), a commissioned Percent for Art project for the City of Philadelphia at the Philadelphia International Airport, and "Elastic Geography" (2021), a Mural Arts Philadelphia project. She recently completed an artist residency at Interlude Artist Residency in Livingston, NY, and will be a resident artist at Pouch Cove Foundation in Newfoundland, Canada in summer 2022.
Bendler Browning holds a BFA in Art with honors from Carnegie Mellon University (1997), a Master of Studio Art with high distinctions from Sydney College of the Arts (2000), and an MFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art (2003). She has lived and worked in Philadelphia since 2001, with her husband, creative tech programmer Matt Browning, and their three children.
Arden Bendler Browning is represented by Bridgette Mayer Gallery (www.bridgettemayergallery.com) in Philadelphia.
Janos Korodi (korodijanos.com) was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1971. A visual artist, primarily a painter, Korodi also deals with different forms of printmaking, murals and occasional interdisciplinary collaborations. By the time he received his doctoral degree in visual arts from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2013, Janos was already in the process of relocation to the US. In the last 25 years his works have been shown in various venues in multiple countries of Europe and the US. He has spent a six-months art residency at TerraCycle Inc. in Trenton, NJ in 2015, awarded the 2010 Eötvös Scholarship of the Hungarian State – a 3 mo. studio residency in New York City, a 2008 scholarship at the Hungarian Academy in Rome, the 1999–2001 Derkovits Fellowship for emerging artists in Hungary and the 1996 scholarship for emerging painters from the Tóth Menyhért Foundation of Kecskemét, Hungary.
Korodi’s works are in permanent public and private collections internationally. Janos has lived and worked in Philadelphia since 2015.
Through the 2000’s Korodi has dealt with architecture and urbanism, and its visual and theoretical aspects for his Genius Loci – Spirit of the Place program, which concluded in his doctoral thesis. Later he found his new self in motion and started using the phenomenon of transition between places in his work. This shift was coded in and bound together with their own immigration, as well as the human exodus of the past decade worldwide.
miniMAC is a project of MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary). MAC has been curating shows in northwest Philadelphia since 2009.
