I’m super-excited to be paired with my esteemed colleague Sharon Brant for this exhibition in a wonderfully intimate apartment gallery space.
If you’d like to know a little more about the history of apartment gallery spaces the New York Times recently printed this story on the lineage of these unique spaces.
Mary Oliver has passed. I will miss her words. Here is her poem, Praying:
"It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak."
I'm honored to be included in this excellent examination of the history of color.
Chromatopia: An Illustrated History of Colour by David Coles
Thames and Hudson, Australia
This comprehensive and sensuous book, written by acclaimed paint-maker David Coles, is based on the exhibition of the same name, curated by Coles and Louise Blyton, which took place at Tacit Gallery in Melbourne, 2017. My painting, An Apple in 13 Colors, was included in the show and is in the book.
One can order by sending an email to INFO@CHROMATOPIA.ORG
My solo exhibition, Painting Time, curated by Mara Williams, opened on Friday June 22nd and will run through September 24.
One the wall, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter : Yellow Trail. Each 20 x 30 inches, acrylic on museum board, 2014. Each band of color is recreated from one in nature and placed on the painting in the order in which they were found on the hiking trail they were collected on.
A video is available here:
More information available here: Brattleboro Museum
Curator's statement:
You might be surprised to learn that this installation— comprising a profusion of colorfully painted and curled strips that pile, unfurl, and tumble across the floor—is a landscape. Yes, a landscape.
Debra Ramsay generates a strict set of rules to guide her creative process for each new body of work. For this installation, she distilled her daily walks in the woods to pure color. What you are seeing is her color record across four seasons.
Painting Time is at once reductionist and exuberant. While Ramsay reduces the complexity of color change in nature to momentary snap- shots over a year of seasons, the swirling heaps of color evoke nature’s abundance.
That the conceptual rigor of her work doesn’t overpower the aesthetic pleasure of the experience is a testament to Ramsay’s artistic power. Painting Time exists in the aesthetic realm—a place where inter-pretation is nuanced and fluid, and where understanding can deepen each time an artwork is experienced, revisited, or discussed.
— Mara Williams, Chief Curator
Sky & Snow, 30 x 13 x .75 inches, acrylic on plexiglass, 2016
I'm pleased to be included in the final exhibition of the season at The Re Institute in Millerton, NY.
The opening will be from 2 - 5pm, followed by a community potluck, please join us!
1395 Boston Corners Road, Millerton, NY 12546
Gallery hours: Saturdays from 1 to 4. Other times please email theReInstitute@gmail.com to make an appointment or call 518 567-5359.
Exhibiting artists include Xiaowei Chen, Yukari Edamitsu, and Mark DeLura.
My contribution to The Re Institute exhibition will touch on two ideas: time and the beauty of ordinary materials. You will see a sampling of artwork from 2011 (Braille and Bubble Wrap with Gold Leaf) to the present to show a continued strain of investigation in my work, specifically an indeterminate color surface and the ephemeral.
Many thanks to curators Joshua Rosenblatt and Chris Ketchie, and gallery director Henry Klimowicz.
My work is included in the art exhibition of monochrome abstract work which showcases pure colours. Each Artwork celebrates an individual colour from the pigments included in Chromatopia.
Details of the art exhibition here.
Details of the full Chromatopia exhibition here.
Opening 6:30pm on the 31st of May and on display from the 1st to the 18th of June 2017
312 Johnston St, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Installation shot, Extended Process 1, Deb Covell, Debra Ramsay, Brigitte Parusel. Photo by Brigitte Parusel
I'm delighted to be a part of this group exhibition, hosted by Saturation Point Projects, focusing on reductive, geometric and systems practices of artists.
See more about the exhibition here: Extended Process Exhibition
Gallery Hours: Saturday & Sunday 4/16, 22, 23, 29, 30 1-4pmor by appointment with the artists.
This body of work is in keeping with my previous conceptually driven explorations of color yet offers a new strain of exploration, transposing words to color. The paintings are crude, on purpose, showing their failure, expressing time and adjustments.
from the press release:
Ridgewood, NY, April 9, 2017
Two women arrive at a party, are introduced to one another by the host who suggests a kinship between their work. Studio visits are arranged, the mutual intersection within the work is realized, an offer to exhibit comes forward.
The meaning of words, mountains, nature, memory, amplifying structures and colors are the crossover points between the work of Shen and Ramsay.
Debra Ramsay’s artwork is conceptually rigorous and process-oriented. The idea comes first; the search for materials, methods and procedures that will best support the idea follows. For “Three Shelf Redder” Ramsay is introducing a body of work created from obscure and off-beat definitions of color, sourced from The Dictionary of Colour, by Ian Paterson. “Redder,” for example, is the title of a painting based on the only palindromic color word in the English language. These monochromatic paintings work with color and light, as their translucent supports and layers of colors react with the ambient light. Ramsay is concerned with many of the principles the Light and Space artists of the 60’s as well as the humor that can be packed in conceptual art such as in the work of contemporary artist Spencer Finch.
Hilda Shen’s new sculptures are small, displayed in a way that emphasizes our physical reaction to scale. One leans in to focus and scrutinize the details, and there is an urge to touch these glazed ceramic pieces. There are two projects which are developed here: “Range of Mountains” reinterprets the tradition of Chinese scholar rocks as objects of contemplation; “Northwest” is inspired by Shen’s studies of Pacific Northwest forests, the transformation of energy from immense decaying nurse logs to young saplings. In “Three Shelf Redder” Shen continues her long-standing interest in landscape and the reciprocal influence of culture and nature.
Cloud, with moon.
Brooklyn's biggest art weekend is now in October.
Sarah Cascone, September 30, 2016
Hue[s]pace at ODETTA gallery, running through Oct 9th.
Hue[s]pace continues Ramsay’s investigation of color, location, and time. The installation, Hue, Place, Pace, One Year of Color, cascades 14 feet from the ceiling and undulates 23 feet across the floor, specifically designed for the gallery. It translates a year of color change in a specific location in nature into an abstract three-dimensional object.
The 14 artworks in the exhibition demonstrate Debra’s thinking on color. It being something to be borrowed/captured/found photographically then interpreted into a paint formula with the aid of a computer program, not harming or physically altering anything from its original condition. There is no intuitive color selection at play. This is painting in the digital realm. Her rigorous color system exploits an idea Josef Albers spoke of, the “…profound harmony in the immeasurable spectrum of color”.
The sources of these colors come from the natural environment, either a color that is surrounding, such as the sky, or a color from something miniscule, as a flower petal, that could easily be overlooked. Ramsay 's viewpoint is, "There’s no human design to nature, it’s true on its own terms, no egonot harming or physically altering anything from its original condition. I want to make work that feels bluntly true. Simple. The most simple it can get."
Time is evident in a variety of ways. The installation is segmented into colors from each of the four seasons. Several wall works (acrylic on ¾ inch thick slabs of clear plexiglass) have titles such as Lichen Memory…where something has been painted over, then removed…allowing the viewer to see what is no longer there. Time captured in an elusive way. The handling of the paint itself contributes a sense of time. Thin veils of color laid over a translucent support, light pushing through the backs of the panels, and light changing within the environment all contribute to the shifting qualities within each painting and suggesting time itself.
Photo credit: Reiko Yanagi and Steven Speliotis
October 1, 2016, 6:00 pm-6:15 pm
Gleich Dances
Title: a white room
Choreographer: Julia K. Gleich
Dancers: Kara Chan, Ahmaud Culver, Tiffany Mangulabnan, Izabela Szylińska
Duration: 7 Minutes
Created during a Norte Maar / Dance at Socrates Residency 2016 at Socrates Sculpture Park.
“a white room” was made in parallel with Debra Ramsay’s investigations of “changes of color and repetitive serial systems”. The dance suggests the nature of a blank canvas upon which a series of evolving lines and color are drawn and structured. Working from the dancers’ own movement affinities and personalities, Gleich draws upon space, color, and character to create a textured and progressive dance.
Lichen and Snow, acrylic on polyester resin, 20 x 16 inches, 2016
With a faithful allegiance to geometry and its capacity to reveal profound truths, Debra Ramsay works with mathematical logic to generate or guide form in precise ways. In Hue(s)pace Ramsay become the conduit for the arrangement of shape and the placement of color, thus making time visible in her paintings.
Ramsay gathers her quantitative visual information about changes in color through repetitive and serial systems. Once she develops the system for a specific project, what remains is a form of meditation. What we gain is a time-lapse record of color’s shifts as seasons and life cycles change.
Lichen Memory 1, acrylic on plexiglass, 8.25 x 5.25. x.75 inches, 2016
Debra Ramsay Hue(s)pace is the gallery’s nineteenth exhibition. There will be an opening reception for the artists on Friday September 9, from 6 – 8:00 pm. Gallery hours are Friday thru Sunday 1-6 pm, and by appointment.
There will be an Artists Talk on Sunday October 2 at 3:00 pm. The gallery welcomes Norte Maar and Gleich Dances in series of dance performances during Bushwick Open Studios on Saturday October 1, at 6 and 6:45 pm. Check for these events and more on the website calendar and social media.
To get there: Cook Street is bordered between Bogart Street to the north, and Evergreen Street to the south. The Morgan Ave stop on the L train is 3.5 blocks from Cook Street. ODETTA
My solo show at 57W57thArts is up and open for viewing on Wednesday - Saturday, noon- 5p through June 9th. (Please note: the gallery will be closed for a private event on June 4th)
Spring, Yellow Trail and Summer, Yellow Trail
72 colors found during one year on the Yellow Trail, acrylic on polyester resin film, dimensions variable, 2016
Fall, Yellow Trail and Winter, Yellow Trail
detail...
and more details...
The artwork in this gallery is about time. The landscape was used as a time-keeping device. I captured time passing by documenting the change in color within the landscape at the same location (New Berlin, NY) over the course of a year. I think of each painting as a landscape; a pure landscape, reduced to the actual found colors.
Making the work required capturing colors from nature, over one year, and transforming them to paint. I returned to the same trail in the forest. I visited this trail in the spring, summer, fall, and winter. Each time I walked the trail, I took a photo every 100 steps. 18 photos were taken on each walk. One color was selected from each photo to be mixed into a paint color. Once back in the studio, I mixed colors with the aide of a program that interprets the color I select from a photo into a paint formula. There are 72 distinct colors marking this one year of time.
Each season is represented as an individual painting and the entire year as the installation on the floor. Spring and Summer are on the left, Fall and Winter on the right, as you face the floor installation “72 colors found during one year on the Yellow Trail”
As I worked on this project I was reminded of Josef Albers' statement: "There is a profound harmony in the immeasurable spectrum of color."
Debra Ramsay
2016
I hope you can join me at the opening of my solo show at 57 W 57th Arts...
A walk in a woods; one year, 2016, acrylic on silk, brass rings, pins, graphite, 8 x 9 feet
Please join us for a conversation about Land Air Place
with the artists Natasha Maidoff, Debra Ramsay, Elizabeth Riley and Holly Sears
Saturday, April 30, 2016
Project: ARTspace | 156 Fifth Avenue, #308 | New York, NY
2:30 pm
The gallery will be open on the 30th from 2pm - 6 pm
Regular visiting hours: Monday - Friday 12-6pm
I will be at the gallery on Wednesdays from 12- 3p.
A walk in a woods; one year, 2014, acrylic on Juan silk, 8 x 9 feet
PRESS RELEASE
April 8 - May 8, 2016
Project: ARTspace 156 Fifth Avenue, Suite 308, New York, NY 10010
Opening Reception: Tuesday April 12, 2016 6:30-8:30pm
Artists Talk: Saturday, April 30 at 2:30 pm ______________________________________________________________________________
Project ARTspace is pleased to present Land, Air, Place curated by Leslie Kerby and featuring work by Natasha Maidoff, Debra Ramsay, Elizabeth Riley and Holly Sears. In a present day “mash-up” of color, swagger, humor, skill, and solitary moments, this exhibition through these artists’ works, posits a conversation between Remington, Bonheur, Muybridge, Pendergast, Seurat, Delauney, Chamberlain, Cole and Bierstadt.
Natasha Maidoff uses the natural world as a backdrop where she incorporates physical theater, layering it with digital media to create visual textures of projection and performance in excerpts from her “Live Cinema!” triptychs, The Cowgirl and The Sleepwalker. In the The Cowgirl, the performer lies on her back in the dark on a horse, as mountains are projected onto her body; text appears telling a story of loss and a dramatic shift in life. In The Sleepwalker, she journeys through dreams into the land of the known and unknown, but finds herself trapped, hammering on the walls of invisible boxes, searching for a way out.
Debra Ramsay’s absorbing dance with the landscape started in 2014 and proceeds as she continues to mine the trails of New Berlin, New York and Bethany, Connecticut selecting individual colors from her seasonal trips to create abstract sculptural pieces for this exhibition.The colors, presented both in a systematic grid and lyrically playful way, allow us to “gauge the color of the seasons changing and thereby glimpse time passing and time paused, feel the coupling of art and nature—and quietly savor the abundantly satisfying pleasures of both.”
Elizabeth Riley starts her sculptural process with standalone videos that are mining new experiences and environments, based on a consciousness of place and influenced by living in New York City for many years. Riley combines 2-D video media—printouts of sequential video stills sometimes on extended lengths of inkjet paper often with 3-D physical materials such as raw plywood, furniture and found materials.The sculptures are architectural, angular and alive—living cities that explore both human connection and disconnection in these environments.
Luminous depth and mirror like surfaces created by painting with thin oil glazes makes you think that Holly Sears hung out with the Hudson River painters.This slow and sometimes tedious technique allows Sears to construct and collage the elements of her paintings—“giving veracity to what might otherwise be conceived as unbelievable content.” Like the other artists in the exhibition Sears is awed and inspired by the landscape and the mystery and amorality of nature.And so, with a blend of surrealism, naturalism, ritual and digital phenomena these artists hold forth with new conversations about land, air and place.
Gallery hours: Monday-Friday 12-6 pm Other times by appointment: contact Aaron Zulpo 630.244.7160
