Black & White at Slate Art 2017

ANASTASIA FAIELLA- Excerpt from show catalogue”

“San Francisco artist Anastasia Faiella also plays with white on black vs. black on white, but she is less

interested in figures and illusionism. Her imagery is created mainly through the written word, which

becomes a visual language of its own. Her paintings focus on memories told through stream-of

conscious writing. Like memories, these stories are never completely linear and eventually become

obscured by both time and by their own continual replaying (or re-writing). In some works, the content

is completely obscured to the point where the writing is reduced to abstract lines; while in others,

fragments of recognizable words and phrases can be found buried in the rubble.”

“Like Thomas and Kolo, Faiella is also interested in taking a small gesture and extending it through

repetition to create something large in scale. In many cases, it is not an entire story but a single word or

a phrase that is repeated again and again to form the field of figuration. Narrative comes into play in

her work, not only in the suggestion that a story is being told through the writing, but also in the very

clear history of the path that the artists’ hand and body has taken moving across the canvas. (With a

background as a dancer, Faiella has long been interested in the body as a tool for mark-making, and

has created performance art pieces that use full-body movements to create large paintings). While

some of the paintings in this show are made of writing alone, others are layered with washes of dripping

paint. These veils may be a metaphor for the way time tends to occlude memory. But they also have a

formal function of integrating writing and painting in new ways, suggesting both an equivalence and a

distinction, reminding the viewer of the range of options for mark-making, and the choices that an

artist is constantly making.”

From show catalogue

BLACK & WHITE

“SLATE contemporary gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition, Black & White, for the fall 2017 season in Oakland, featuring three

artists who explore the classic tensions of black and white through objects, forms, motion, and text.

This show follows a few lines of inquiry that curator Danielle Fox has been exploring since 2010 in several exhibitions including Concept

+ Craft at Pro Arts Gallery in 2010; Barely There at SLATE in 2011, and Minimal at SLATE in 2016. All these exhibitions have looked at

minimalism, simplicity, and an achromatic palette as a way to strip down a work of art and focus it, while still maintaining an interest

in process and hand-work. With Barely There and Minimal, both of which showed work that was extremely subtle and mainly white or

grey on white, we asked, how much can an artist take away or not do, and still have a work of art that draws a viewer in and keeps

them engaged? Can you take away color, gesture, contrast, or recognizable subject matter and still have something evocative,

beautiful, even sublime?

Black & White takes the same inquiry in a new direction. Here the focus is on black and white, on contrast, and on the power, tension,

and drama, that can be created when the two come together. Another theme that runs through this show (and which also harkens

back to Concept + Craft) is repetition and accumulation. In other words, what magic happens when a small manual gesture

(looping string around an object, laying down a dot of paint, writing a word) is repeated again and again until it reaches what

Thomas calls a “critical mass” and something much larger begins to exist in the world? How can an accumulation of small gestures

create something much more powerful than the sum of its parts? And how does a work of art hold a history of the body, of the

movements of its maker, and of time?”