“ML” ARTISTS EXHIBITION
December 7th, 2018 — Listhus Gallery
Emily Sides (USA) | Geoffrey Gersh (USA) | Jonathan Sims (USA) | Mara Blome (Lativia) | Nils Karlson (Germany)
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Jonathan Sims is a New York City based visual artist who originally hails from Texas. His visual arts practice is characterized by brightly colored geometric abstractions and simple, minimalist symbology that evokes language and universal, ancient design.
Jonathan began his practice with painting, but has since moved into digital animation, sculpture and projection installations, print, long exposure photography and graphic design. His work is intended to elicit a sense of familiarity and artistic intent in viewers, but his compositions remain stubbornly non-objective, and his fictional “glyph” languages refuse transliteration. A consistent premise underlying his work is based on the idea that a modern human’s relationship with the very ancient past is mirrored in their relationship with the distant future.
Jonathan started painting in San Antonio, and first showed in 2012. In 2013 he owned SoPac Studios there, and that same year he moved to New York City. He joined Wayfarers Brooklyn in 2014, and began working in projection installations with the EcoHacker collective that summer. In 2015 Jonathan was awarded a Fellowship with BRIC Media Arts, and he joined the Flux Factory Residency program in 2016. Major shows include Governor’s Island Art Fair in 2015, Luminaria Art Fair in San Antonio in 2016, and a solo exhibition at Flux Factory in 2016. Jonathan spent two months at the Wassaic Project in the summer of 2017, and started 2018 as an artist in resident at the Visible Futures Lab with the School For Visual Arts in Manhattan and with a site-specific projection installation at Lehman College in the Bronx.
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In Ólafsfjörður for Moving Lights programm Māra Blome will make performance “Víðsýni” about retired pilot, his love for flying and love for his wife. Theatre piece is inspired by personal pilot stories about their passion for flying, risk taking and their life. It will be collaborations piece with Geoff Gesh sound compositions, Jotahtan Sims light art and Ingi Johannesson poetry.
Māra Blome is latvian theatre director, what works with multimedial. She has vocational education in Drama, Valmieras State Gymnasium. After she took her BA in New Media arts, Liepajas University. During BA she participated in MPLab (Art Research Laboratory) and RIXC (The Center for New Media Culture) exhibitions with her student works. After graduation she worked as a photographer and photoshop artist and assisted on different film production sets. Māra connected both educations and did her MA as a theater director in Latvian Academy of Culture, Rīga. She have participated in PLETA (Platform European heater Academy) projects in Germany, Belgium, Netherlands and Finland as a performer and director.
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Nils Karlson is photography artist living in Bochum, Germany. He seeks peace and calm in the process of creating the most quiet photographs possible. The longing for silence and solitude is deeply intertwined with a minimalist and abstract visual vocabulary, which overcomes the traditional practice of photography: Instead of translating a three-dimensional world of width, height and depth into a two-dimensional print, his approach allows time to elapse, become one with its flow while it simultaneously stands still.
The early days of Nils’ artistic endeavors may seem antagonistic, originally starting out as a drummer in his early teens, a hard worker in the discipline of building walls of sound. His main focus shifted to the fields of audio engineering, and paved the path towards a career as a foley editor, which he pursued for several years. The daily tasks opened up his senses for the interaction of micro-timing, dramaturgy, and minimalism, leading to the profound understanding how a message doesn’t need to be loud and obstructive to be received, dismantling the myth of “cutting through the noise” to be noticed. Working with film and other chemically based means since 2014, his photographic language is in constant progress.
Nils’ works have been exhibited in Germany, Spain, UK, Hungary, and USA, and is published in print and online. In 2016, he published his first photo book entitled ‘EarthStands Still’. The limited edition of 100 copies sold out within six weeks. His recent catalogue ‘Eyes Like Slumber’ (2017) is still available. In 2017, he joined the artist residency of the Revela*T photography festival in Catalonia/Spain. More recently you will find him scouting the area around Ólafsfjörður/Iceland working on the theme of Moving Lights as a participant of the Listhús artist residency.
Nils Karlson is an avid collector of light and colour. He seeks peace and calm in the process of creating the most quiet photographs possible. The longing for silence and solitude is deeply intertwined with a minimalist and abstract visual vocabulary, which overcomes traditional practice of photography: Instead of translating a three-dimensional world of width, height and depth into a two-dimensional print, his approach is focused on the concept of time passing by.
