BROOKLYN, NY.- Using gravity as a tool for their image making, these three artists' works move us to consider more seriously the connection between abstraction and self-portrait.
Through invented systems that nudge their materials along until their artwork makes itself, Daniel G. Hill, Norma Márquez Orozco, and Mary Schiliro playfully poke at the larger effects we all must endure as our planet spins. By attempting to harness the Earth and Moon’s magnetic pull, we see in these three a common personality emerge, artist/explorer, author and spectator.
Daniel G. Hill
In recent years, Daniel Hill has been fixated on the work’s method of construction and its physical presence. During the winter of 2014, he began a new line of inquiry, translations of paintings into wire-frame drawings. While he developed mechanical connections to make the drawings unstable, the drawings became flexible, dynamic and three-dimensional. These constructions lead to more improvisational work that investigates the relationship between gravity and structure.
In 2016, he increased the scale of the work and sharpened the focus on issues of tension and compression through a change of material—polyester cord and PVC rod. The work has a direct connection to modernism and draws inspiration from the linear work of Gego (Gertrude Goldschmidt), the planar work of Lygia Clark and the catenary string models of Antoni Gaudí.
These works use humble materials and economic processes, which are intrinsic to the resulting forms. But a common aspect of all of my work is the tendency to give rise to the questions, “What am I looking at, how do I relate to it and how do I understand it?” Such self-reflexive viewing is part of the artist’s role, gently inviting the viewer of their capacity to wonder.
Daniel G. Hill was born in 1956 in Providence, R.I. He lives and works in New York City. He is a multi-disciplinary artist who has worked in sculpture, installation, painting, photography and digital media.
He has exhibited in the U.S. for nearly 40 years and, since 2010, in Europe, Asia, Austalia and Central America.
His work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; MoMA Library Special Collection; New York Public Library; Phillips Collection; Cleveland Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, The Frances Mulhall Achilles Library; Yale University Art Gallery; US Embassy, Beijing Embassy Annex, US Department of State; Arkansas Art Center; and in several corporate and private collections.
He is the recipient of a fellowship in painting from the National Endowment for the Arts.
He is an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at the Parsons School of Design and was the President of American Abstract Artists from 2013 through 2018.
He received an A.B., Magna Cum Laude, from Brown University and an M.F.A. from Hunter College, C.U.N.Y.
Norma Marquez Orozco
Norma Marquez Orozco explores concepts of impermanence, perception, form and balance through physical movement of the work itself in a lucid, game-like context, like puzzles. All the elements are made of paper, molded into threedimensional forms. The repetitive geometric shapes are assembled inside boxes built out of translucent paper. The arrangement is random and unfixed to allow movement and unpredictable composition.
The harmonies and tensions in the work arise from different exchanges between the colors, the patterns, and the geometric and organic shapes, as well as the sense that change is constantly occurring as the elements shift and move.
When one looks at these compositions, you see them for the first time, every time, because what is creating and completing the artwork is always changing; such as light, weather and forms merge and interact. As a result of these dynamic relationships, the work extends beyond her personal hand, sustaining an appearance and composition entirely of its own.
Norma Márquez Orozco was born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico.
Her work can be seen as an investigation into the way relationships emerge and evolve when elements like color, form, shape, lines, angle and pattern are blended, shifted and layered.
She currently lives and works in New York City. Marquez Orozco has curated exhibitions throughout New York and has hosted lectures and artist talks for the public. In 2001 she founded Floor4Art, an alternative space in West Harlem that houses artist’s studios and exhibition space aimed at producing, promoting and connecting artists.
Exhibition venues include: Longwood Art Gallery, Queens Museum, The (S)Files 007/ El Barrio Museum biennale, Art Agora, Instituto Cervantes, Bronx Community College's Hall of Fame Art Gallery, Affordable Art Fair New York and MASQUELIBROS International Artist Book Fair of Madrid.
Mary Schiliro
Mary Schiliro’s work with acrylic paint on Mylar is process based, and expands the boundaries of painting by exploring alternative presentation methods. Using a dipping process where the work becomes a film of translucent, fluid color suspended in space, the paint coats the Mylar enabling medium and support to become one.
Color becomes a physical substance freed from its traditional role of creating illusion on a flat surface enabling it to exist in real space. Hanging her work just off the wall, allows light to pass through and illuminate the color to varying degrees. Color and shadows are transmitted through the Mylar onto the wall. This enhances the interplay between the highly saturated, physical presence of color and the changing nature of light. She is deeply interested in the tangible and real versus the ephemeral and impermanent as metaphors for the human condition.
Schiliro’s work has been exhibited across the United States, in New York, California, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Schiliro has created site-specific installations for PS122 Gallery, The Art Lot and Norte Maar in NYC, as well as for the Islip Art Museum in East Islip, NY, and most recently for the Imogen Holloway Gallery in Saugerties, NY.
In 2018 she participated in Blurring Boundaries: The Women of American Abstract Artists, 1936-Present at Murray State University in Kentucky. Internationally, she has exhibited at ParisCONCRET in Paris, France. In the summer of 2017, Schiliro participated in From Mondriaan to Dutch Design, a centennial celebration of the De Stijl movement in The Netherlands. Upcoming in 2019, Schiliro will exhibit her work at ODETTA, in Brooklyn, NY, as well as Mathilde Hatzenberger Gallery in Belgium, and dr. julius| ap in Germany.
Schiliro’s works are in numerous private collections as well as Swiss Re’s internationally recognized contemporary collection.
Her work has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, The New Criterion and On-Verge.
Schiliro was the recipient of two Project Studio residencies at PS122.
She received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Hunter College of the City University of New York and is a Member of American Abstract Artists.
