480.203.4707 | melanie@tiltgallery.com
Kyrene and Elliot, Tempe, AZ
Photo by Rachel Brace Stille
Untitled, from the series ‘Grand Views Intimate Spaces’
December 2018
Tilt Gallery is showcasing a variety of artwork by our represented artists. Photographic processes ranging from Silver gelatin, bromoil, salt prints, Cyanotype, wet plate collodion, and photogravure. We also feature mixed media, ceramics and installation pieces.
October 12 to November 9, 2018
Making as Provision
Kelley E Foy
Opening Reception: Friday, October 12, 2018, 7 to 9 p.m.
Kelley will be available during the reception for questions and conversation.
Artist Statement
My earliest memory about making centers on a retired neighbor I met when I was six years old, growing up in the former orchards of Arcadia. He spent his days on his carport building wooden pews and rocking horses, which he donated to his church. He used only hand tools. I remember his aged hands with graphic detail. They were swollen and gnarled with arthritis, but he used them so carefully and purposefully with each project. His hands had a sculptural quality from years of use. Looking back, I imagine he often worked in pain, but what was more apparent was the joy his work brought him. Even then, I appreciated that his practice was a solitary one. For whatever reason, he quietly shared it with me, not so much by inviting me into his space as allowing me to wander in, watch and witness for myself the possibilities of handcrafting.
My work cannot be described without acknowledging my lifelong connections with archetypes like him and the stories and identities of past makers and providers. The work in this show focuses on the function of provision and its grace. This show is about functionality with a nod to what that meant in generations past.
About the Artist
Foy began her career as a furniture designer and builder. She worked in the field for over 20 years. This body of work is primarily functional ceramics. Foy earned her BFA in Ceramics at ASU.
August 16 – September 29, 2018
Shot
Kari Wehrs
Opening Reception: Thursday, August 16, 7-9 pm, during Scottsdale’s ArtWalk.
Closing Reception: Thursday, September 27, 7-9 pm, during Scottsdale’s ArtWalk.
Kari will be available for questions and conversation.
Artist Statement:
A couple of years ago, my mother explained that she had begun to carry a handgun for self-protection. Guns had never been a presence in our family, so I wondered why my 61-year-old mom would resort to such an action. No personal prior incident had occurred to cause her to carry. I was shocked, angry, and saddened.
I thought about the closeness and care in our relationship, while simultaneously questioning the distance between our perspectives…or was it simply between us? I wondered what she was so fearful of, and I realized that whatever it was, I had conjoined my fear with hers. Our fears were clearly on opposite ends of a polarized argument in this country, yet they lived in tandem, seemingly inseparable. My mother’s individual desire to carry a gun related to what I had been seeing on a larger scale, as collective, societal reverberations. Weeks later, this realization remained piercing and haunting.
Shot
I set up my darkroom tent and tintype gear at locations in the Arizona desert where recreational target shooting is allowed. These spaces are heavily frequented and officially unmonitored. I create participants’ tintype portraits, then give the subjects the option to use the image as a target.
Tintypes were the primary form of photography during the American Civil War – another time when the country exhibited vast divides. Soldiers often posed for their tintype in military uniform and with weaponry. Looking back on these historical likenesses, I often wonder: is this tintype the last, if not the only, photograph of the soldier? At the moment the photograph was made, did he contemplate his own fate? Did he contemplate that he might battle another member of his family?
Present day ideologies surrounding the gun in America contribute to a cultural civil war. I have engaged in this work to better inform myself and to actively question others who support these various ideologies. Most of these photographic encounters have resulted in open and thoughtful conversation surrounding views of the gun, and nearly all have concluded with a verbal exchange of gratitude.
Throughout the varied experiences with participants for this project, the driving desire has been to push notions of disagreement directly in contact with notions of reconciliation. Just how close can these concepts get, and what, then, is found at their intersection?
To see the exhibit,click here.
May 1 – July 31, 2018
Copious
Betsy Schneider (1997-2017)
Artist Reception: Thursday, May 17, 7-9 pm, during Scottsdale’s ArtWalk.
Betsy will be available for questions and conversation.
Artist Statement:
My work has its genesis in my childhood and family roots. Both of my grandfathers were copious family documentarians. From my maternal grandfather I first learned photography and after he died I inherited an old view camera that I used for several bodies of work. My father was a more direct influence, my original photography instructor, a psychotherapist and grief expert, (with specific focus on transformation in loss) he nurtured in me an obsession with observing and marking transitions and perhaps as well strong dose of drama.
The tools and the output of my work vary significantly within photography: snapshot, appropriation, scanner images, medium and large format film, black and white and color, film and video. Always the work concerns itself with photographic mediation and the way in which the photographic image creates, conveys and alters cultural values and relationships, specifically integration of ideas of family, relationships and broader socio-political implications of how we create meaning and structure through photography.
The work in this show is a selection from work from the past 20 years of my career—specifically work related to my children.
TO SEE THE EXHIBIT, CLICK HERE.
April 5 – May 5, 2018
Walker and Walker: Songs for my Father by Melanie and Todd Walker
Artist Reception: Thursday, April 12, 7-9 pm, during Scottsdale’s ArtWalk.
Melanie will be available for questions and conversation.
Artist Statement:
The exhibition will be one of the first exhibitions of the work of father, Todd Walker (1917-1998) and daughter, Melanie Walker. All of the images generated in this exhibition were generated by Todd Walker. Both father and daughter share a curiosity about the materiality of photographic processes and have spent their lives pushing the boundaries of the medium. After many years of working with her father’s vast archive that spanned a career in photography of 60 years, Melanie Walker began working with some early images that had been ravaged by time in order to freeze them in their states of compromise. The images are treated in a variety of mixed media approaches from platinum/palladium prints to waxed infused Japanese Kozo paper to convey a sense of fragility and the fragmentary nature of time.
TO SEE THE EXHIBIT, CLICK HERE.
March 1 – 31, 2018 Closed on Sunday by Jim Morris
Artist Reception: Thursday, March 22, 8:30-9:30 pm, during Scottsdale’s ArtWalk, Worth a 1000 Words
Jim will be available for book signing and questions.
Thursday, March 22, 2018, at 7 pm, Jim Morris will speak at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA) to give you a behind-the-scenes breakdown of the creative, technical and production process Pixar used to create the film Inside Out. An artist reception at Tilt Gallery will follow the event. To see the event, click here.
Artist Statement
I have long been profoundly struck by the moments of calm and beauty I encounter in the urban landscapes I pass through. And I am intrigued that glimpses of a place I have never seen before can trigger some deep sense of memory and emotion — sometimes wistful, sometimes playful, sometimes haunting. I consider myself lucky when I find those places, and can capture a sense of those feelings and emotions in my compositions.
TO SEE THE EXHIBIT, CLICK HERE.
February 1 – 24, 2018
As We Wait by Andrea Modica
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 1, 7-9pm, during Scottsdale’s ArtWalk.
TO SEE THE EXHIBIT, CLICK HERE.
Essay by Larry Fink about Modica’s work
Andrea Modica works with sensual love as her base but aligned with a darkness which is pervasive, so much so that it can color your dreams. The work is not hopeless but breathless, as if there is an atmospheric gauze placed over the larynx so that breathing has to be softened, done in silence so that walking the tight rope between an exalted life and a sultry death you shan’t emit too loud a sound. The balance is so tentative, so tactile, so absolutely fragile that there is the danger of tipping the scales of mortality in clear sight.
We enter the work through an illusionary visage of two men sitting on the edge of a steaming tub. A rectangular pool, one is naked the other in a sports coat. One is looking haltingly into the future the other waiting ominously within the present. They set the scenario for the dark theater which is to come; a vascular pulse generates throughout the work, which sure-footedly explores the aspects of life which have no surety at all. It is perhaps this soft pulse which separates this work from art. So many of the compositions are artful and exquisitely divined, but art is not the point here. Art, in its tendency for commoditized promiscuity, will not dwell easily on the edge of heat and possible demise. Nothing is disappearing here; it is in your face but without being frontal, it lays back and allows you to be seduced by meanings which are not to be understood.
To receive full essay, please contact info@tiltgallery.com
December 7, 2017 – January 26, 2018
Who’s in the House
Artist Reception & Holiday Party: Thursday, December 14, 7-9pm, during Scottsdale’s Gold Palette ArtWalk, Scottsdazzle!
Some of the artists will be available for conversation.
Tilt Gallery will be showcasing a variety of work by the represented artists as well as works of the First and Second Place winners of Photography Re-imagined VI and Infinite Possibility II.
Winner of Photography Re-imagined: Visual Storytelling
Anna LaBenz and Jeannie Hutchins
Winners of Infinite Possibility II: Imagination & Creation
Betsy Feick and Randi Ganulin
TO SEE THE EXHIBIT, CLICK HERE.
Crossroads: Western Dreams
by Holly Roberts
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 9, 7-9pm, during Scottsdale’s ArtWalk
The artist will be available for conversation.
Closing Reception: Thursday, November 30, 7-9pm, during Scottsdale’s ArtWalk
Artists Statement:
For the past several years I have been experimenting with different ways of making my images, but always with paint and photography as the driving forces. My photographic imagery is widely varied, all the way from specific portraits of people or animals to photos of rocks, leaves, or even dead moths—material I can use to build textures and surfaces. I have also begun to work with transfers, something I have taught for years but never really integrated into my own work. I am seduced by the magic of taking something and making it live as something else. And, most recently, I have gone back to working with oil paints, something I gave up 13 years ago in favor of acrylics.
What has resulted is a wide variety of images, still with my own view of the world at their core. Animals, people, and people as animals are my most constant themes. Portraits of men and women have become a larger part of what I do. Horses, dogs, and birds are the animals I use predominantly since those are the animals I feel most connected to. If I can find any one theme that runs through my work, it would be a subtle kind of loneliness or feeling of separateness, at times mixed with odd humor.
TO SEE THE EXHIBIT, CLICK HERE.