Mar�a Victoria was born in Buenos Aires on January 16th, 1985. When she was two years old, she moved to Z�rate where, at the age of 5 she started taking art courses at the Chierico School with Aida Gaite as a professor. She continued working at her workshop up to her 15 years of age, participating in competitions, such as the ones carreer out in the Buenos Aires province area. Many times she reached the provincial stage.

Mar�a Victoria has got a strong vocation and she enters the �Facultad de Bellas Artes� in 2002 where she still continues her carrer with great success.

Website: Garia Alonso
Contact email: vgarciaalonso@gmail.com

Naomi Kashiwagi was born 1982 and lives and works in Manchester. Her Fine Art studies at Manchester Metropolitan University included exchanges to Venice and Tokyo. She has exhibited in UK, Italy, Germany and Finland.

Kashiwagi transforms the utilitarian and conceptual functions of everyday technologies and phenomena. She also challenges the inter-relationships and boundaries between art, music and language. The visual, conceptual and physical parameters of drawing are central to her practice and research.

Her exhibitions include Notions of Drawing at CIP House,London;Nationwide Mercury Art Prize 2005, Air Gallery, London; Duet at the British Art Show Sideshow, Nottingham; Sonic Arts Expo 2006: The Annual San Exhibition, Manchester; ARTRADIO, Cornerhouse, Manchester, Meeting Point, Axel Lapp Project, Berlin and Paperworks:Paper Art in the 21st Century, Bury Art Gallery.

Kashiwagi’s work is also in Drawing Now: Between the Lines of Contemporary Art. This exhibition in a book form showcases the best of contemporary drawing including works by Cornelia Parker, Tracey Emin, Paul Noble and David Shrigley.

Website: more info

“It takes me a long time to create one of my paintings. I focus all of my skills and energy on nothing else but the art that’s in front of me. Everything else disappears. My work is my Zen. Each piece becomes a part of my breathing. And with every breath, I lay down another brush stroke. All of my original paintings are one of a kind. I make each painting the beginning and the end. Like the journey our souls take through the course of our lives. Like our final breath”… David Cochran

Website: David Cochran Fine Artist
Contact email: netartifacts@gmail.com

Manuela Rauber lebt und arbeitet als bildende K�nstlerin in Freisen. Ihre k�nstlerische
Ausbildung hat sie an der FH Trier absolviert.
Ihre Arbeit ist vielseitig und experimentierfreudig. Holz- und Linolschnitte, experimentelle Siebdrucke, Radierungen, Collagrafien im grafischen Bereich - Werke mit Acryl, �l, Gouache, Mischtechniken mit Erden, Pigmenten, Collagen und diversen Malgr�nden auf der malerischen Seite. Der Themenbereich sch�pft aus der Natur und aus dem Menschen selbst.

“Urformen, Silhouetten, menschliche Transparenzen,
Gitter- und Makro-Geometrien, pflanzliche und
tierische Formen sowie informelle Schnitte nehmen
die Form seltsamer und beunruhigender Symbole an,
welche an Totems erinnern und einen ganz besonderen Zauber ausstrahlen.”

Die Farben selbst sind Antriebsfeder f�r die lange
Auseinandersetzung von Geste und Farbe.
“Auf stilistischer und Kompositionsebene erobert die Farbe den h�chsten Moment, auf welchem ihre
Inspiration gr�ndet, unabh�ngig davon, was das
Zeichen darstellt oder hervorruft, da die Farbe die gesamte Struktur des Werkes unterstreicht und st�tzt, indem sie alle Wortfetzen in einer einzigen, ausdrucksvollen Stimme vereint.”

Die K�nstlerin ist seit 1986 freischaffend t�tig, seit 2002 beteiligt sie sich an internationalen Messen, Ausstellungen und Wettbewerben.

Website: atelier MANURA
Contact email: manura@manura.de

A Winter�s Tale
Warren Vance

The works that make up Warren Vance�s �A Winter�s Tale� are an essay in the manner of Rainer Maria Rilke, as if licensed by that poet�s work: visual equivalents that work a similar magic in tribute to the German poet�s characteristic effects and his mental world.

Rilke is one of the great late-Romantic poets, writing in the era of Symbolism and aestheticism. He was born three quarters of the way through the nineteenth century, but most of his best work comes after World War One. He died in 1926. His late poems are an extraordinary summation of the romantic vision and yet come after the War that ushered in the modern world.

The thinking and the method of imaging that visual art employs are different from those of language and Vance�s work, as well, does not stand as mere illustration. But while the charms and mystery of �A Winter�s Tale� are its own, they resemble much in Rilke.

There is much in Rilke�s body of work that is continuous with the whole of Vance�s work back at least to the late1980s: preoccupation with light, with worlds made up of elements of great delicacy, and with intimacy of scale, with the miniature and decorative, with a kind of distilled and un-nameable spirituality - the Ideal as it would have been called by 19th century Symbolists like Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes or Redon - something uplifting, ethereal, chastening at the same time as it is rewarding.

Vance�s work has ranged from sculpture, light-based installation and collage of various kinds, from explicitly abstract and minimal to a kind of photomontage with its feet in the camps of both Bauhaus constructivism and the dream of the Surrealists.

Rilke�s poems attain to a kind of enlightenment - a wordless one - an accession to innocence and understanding that is usually fleeing from worldliness. They orchestrate - or discover - a communion with the natural world - a submission to its orders. The language is often simple and the poem - through pacing, and building and release of tension - typically enacts or mimes a process as it describes it.

From An April

Again the forest is fragrant.
The soaring larks lift up
aloft with them the sky that to our shoulders was heavy;
one still saw the day through the branches, indeed,
that it was empty -
but after long, raining afternoons
come the gold-besunned
newer hours,
before which fleeing on far housefronts
all the wounded
windows fearfully beat with wings.

Then it grows still. Even the rain goes softer
over the quietly darkening glint of the stones.
All sounds duck entirely away
in the glistening buds of the brushwood.

Typically in Rilke the conclusion is a change of mood, a reconciliation or saintly resignation and comes as if with the weather, like positive ions arriving with the fall of evening, coming with a sob, a cry - like a child �coping� with a �big day�. This is usually an assent, to a vantage point above or outside, a removal from stress and involvement, towards selflessness and it is almost always marked by heightened sensitivity and attention to light, sound. Vance�s art achieves a like stillness and calm and a similar suggestion of correspondences between fading or glowing light and a �truth�.

Vance�s collages are replete with the favoured subjects of Rilke�s poetry - with children, most often girls or young women, placed in landscape settings of dusk, fog, stillness, forests, moonlight. The characters symbolise the inward-looking soul, susceptible to spells and effects of Nature - through their youth, innocence and curiosity. Their vulnerability introduces drama to the pictures and casts the landscape surround as active in relation to them, not a passive backdrop but an imminent player, primordial, exerting forces. Out of this stillness and potential is born the synaesthesia, the mixing and heightening, of sound, wind, weather, breath and altered light, patterning and colour, that mark Warren Vance�s �A Winter�s Tale� collages, just as they typify the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke.

Ken Bolton
Ken Bolton is a poet working
at Adelaide�s Experimental
Art Foundation

Markings
Julie Bartholomew

Bartholomew�s work expresses a long-term interest in human bodies as a site for the expression of social and cultural change. A series of porcelain objects, entitled �Markings�, critically engage with the forces of consumerism that create a dynamic and often overwhelming environment for living. These works playfully satirise elite-branding and the fetishist impulse often stimulated by advertising and visual media culture, to enhance one�s identity by adorning the body with expensive products. A desire to wrap the body in elite-branding has been pushed to an extreme so that bodies have lost their distinct and separate identities, morphing instead, into a favoured pair of Prada gloves, Ma nolo Blanhik shoes or a CoCo Chanel handbag.

Ambivalence plays a significant role within this series of work emphasizing the tension and anxiety between consumer branding and autonomous, individual identity. Cast limbs appear to be struggling against the seamless veneer of consumerism �wrapped� like packaging around their body parts. Others celebrate consumerism with waving hands or uplifted gestures. These porcelain sculptures are casts from actual bodies that make visible wrinkles, veins and imperfections. This aspect of the work disrupts the polished and homogenised �white skin� of consumerism, exposing something sinister.

Bartholomew holds a Doctor of Philosophy from the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW and a Master of Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. A lecturer in various schools and universities since 1989, Bartholomew has also held residencies in China, Japan, and New Zealand with the assistance of the Australia Council and the Australia-China Council. She has been president of the Australian Ceramics Association, a board member of Object, the Australian Centre for Craft and Design, and her works are in the collections of Shepparton Art Gallery, Victoria; WOCEK International Collection, Korea; Renwick Alliance, Washington, USA and in many private collections in Australia, New Zealand, America and Japan.

Website: Uber Gallery
Contact email: info@ubergallery.com

For more information, please contact:
mirit@miritart.com
Mirit Ben Nun
Born August 8, 1966

These paintings express a personal need to delineate images and fantasies abundant with
color and emotional explosion. Signs, lines and the materials appear of their own volition
and develop as an external language bridging the eye, the hand and the painted surface.
During the making of a painting the power of the shapes emanate from an unconscious
and concealed inner dimension.
Line by line, painting after painting while repeating shapes and patterns, a creation
evolves into new shapes and patterns. With a determination that reaches obsession, Mirit
Ben-Nun keeps on returning to her art of meticulous decoration. A strong presence of
primitive ornamentation provides the artwork with a�tribal facet on one hand and a
feminine touch on the other, encompassing�embroidery, bead threading and weaving
among others.�Ben- Nun�s beautifying urge carries within it an archetypal strata, mythic
at times, which empowers her authentic expression.

Thanks to:
Dr. Gidion Ofrat and Ami Steinitz

Website: MiritArt
Contact email: mirit@miritart.com

Online press release with images:
http://leejosephpublicity.com/show/griffithparkfire

drkrm. Gallery
2121 San Fernando Road � Suite 3
Los Angeles, CA 90065
323.223.6867
drkrmgallery@gmail.com
http://www.drkrm.com

On May 8, 2007 a major wildfire broke out in Griffith Park and, over the course of that afternoon and evening, spread rapidly. Before it was contained, the fire had consumed over 800 acres of the 4,200-acre park. Just days after the fire, photographer Colin Remas Brown documented its effects. Where he expected to find only scorched trees and hills, what he discovered instead was an apocalyptic nightmare. �I hope my photos will reveal the true victims of the blaze: our native wild life.� During the fire our worries about damage to our neighbor�s homes and the possible destruction of such beloved landmarks as Dante’s View trumped all other concerns. Did anyone wonder if the reptiles went deep enough into the dry, parched ground to survive? How far do you think the rabbits, squirrels and deer got? How many birds flew off in the middle of the night?

Brown�s photographs unveil the incalculable losses suffered from a wildfire and what we stand to lose in the future. These photos fascinate and repel, shock and sadden, for they expose a pitiful and grotesque tragedy, one that would have remained invisible had Brown not ventured into the park that day. But life does go on. �The last day I was there� says Brown, �there were green sprouts pushing through the blackened soil everywhere.�

Drkrm. presents these photographs in an exhibition commemorating the one-year anniversary of this disaster.

Colin Brown graduated from Ithaca College with a degree in photography in 1997. For the past 10 years he has been a member of IATSE Local 600 International Cinematographers Guild.

drkrm. gallery is an exhibition space dedicated to fine art and documentary photography, cutting edge and alternative photographic processes and the display and survey of popular cultural images.

Regular gallery hours are Tuesday � Saturday, 11 am � 5 pm. Sunday 1-4pm

Website: Aftermath: The Griffith Park Fire 05/07
Contact email: leejemail@gmail.com