News
Battat exhibits John Ancheta and Stephen Talasnik in Milan
Published on March 23, 2010
Fielding the Uncanny brings together the work of established American artist Stephen Talasnik and emerging Canadian artist John Ancheta. Talasnik, who has shown extensively in the USA and Europe, creates intricate and fantastical quasi-architectural / organic structures which fascinate and intrigue, while Ancheta’s hazy abstracted landscapes provide obscure fictive spaces one can become lost within. Each artist builds imaginative worlds for us to explore, but in both cases, although the imagery is slightly familiar, it is also elusive and often delightfully intangible.
The paintings and drawings exhibited by John Ancheta form part of his Aether series. ‘Ether’, whether defined as an anaesthetic – providing escape into another world of sleep – or a reference to the heavens or upper regions of space, when applied to Ancheta’s paintings allows an understanding of foggy otherworldly spaces, ephemeral forms, and escapist reveries. They emit an eerie dream-like sensation.
Stephen Talasnik’s sculptures and drawings also embody aspects of the uncanny – they resemble architectural, scientific and organic structures, but are in fact constructions of fiction. The forms appear as intuitive, imaginative coalescences, emerging almost transiently from the artist’s subjective process of creation. Often asymmetrical, sometimes submerged in resin, Talasnik’s forms appear as if they could orbit away into space or are waiting, frozen in gestation.
Experienced as a whole, the exhibition becomes a subjective imaginary for viewers to question, explore and immerse themselves within.
www.isarte.net
Bio: John Ancheta
Drawing from his background in set/sound design for theatre and film, John Ancheta’s paintings coalesce scientific imaging, landscape, and digital abstraction in large-scale cinematic mise-en-scènes. Ancheta works primarily from found images culled from open source digital archives and film stills, but in the process of painting, he transmutes these images into imagined fragmentary topographies that imbue the cartographic quotidian with a near mythological significance. Often working with variations of a single image, Ancheta orchestrates serial compositions that explore the psychic dimensions of temporal and spatial simultaneity.
Born in Long Beach, California in 1973, John Ancheta spent much of his childhood on a communal farm in rural Northern British Columbia. Ancheta studied sound engineering at the Institute of Communication Arts in Vancouver, BC (1993) and Fine Arts (1997-2000) and Philosophy (2004-2007) at Concordia University. He currently lives and works in Montreal, Canada.
Bio: Stephen Talasnik
“Rooted in the aesthetics of architectural infrastructure, my work in drawing, painting, and sculpture address the essential visual language of constructed anatomy. With references to the history of photography, print information, and engineering, I invent a personal narrative that suggests actual function and design, although it is ultimately visual fiction.
I am primarily interested in the gestural capacity of the straight line and all structures are dependent on intuitive decision making rather than hard math. All sculpture is made without preliminary drawing and is organic in that an individual construct expands from a single point addressing the repetitive sensuality of the variable grid. The paintings allude to the history of documentation and scientific explanation. As fantastical color representations they serve as a compendium or encyclopedia of mind wanderings. My drawings reference the history of the visionary architect; imaginary structures that encapsulate an invented historical codex of construction. All works intersect with a reliance on the ideational capacities of drawing, an art that remains at the core of visual conceptualizing.”
Originally from Philadelphia, Stephen Talasnik attended the Rhode Island School of Design and the Tyler School of Art in Rome, Italy. Although formally trained in design his work in drawing, painting, and sculpture is the result of a self taught process. In addition to his time in Rome, he also lived for 3 years in Tokyo, Japan and did extensive travel throughout the Far East studying indigenous hand built architecture. In addition to the US, he has shown extensively in Germany, Austria, and The Netherlands and his work is included in such public collections as the Albertina (Vienna) British Museum (London), and the Staatliche Museen of Berlin (Germany). He lives and works in New York City.