Start Deep: Opening Reception

Friday December 15th, 2023

7PM-11PM

Artists:  bARBER & Tish Noel

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

In February 2020 Tish Noel decided to switch gears and choose a new substrate for painting. She stood in the studio and weighed the options. Continue with work on polypropylene or move to canvas, what size? A voice said “Hey! You know you just want to paint on catalog pages.” “Yes!” She began this series and hasn’t stopped and will continue until the voice tells her otherwise.

Start Deep is a multi-generational two person show that features work by Tish Noel and bARBER. Both artists work in recycled everyday materials to create landscapes and paintings that have an embedded context for climate change, racial capitalism, and social dystopia. They use artist intuition to guide them through material and process. Through Tish Noel’s consumer catalog painting’s and bARBER’s three- dimensional artwork the artists build beauty through color and texture. The show navigates the ongoing toxic environment that starts deep by digging into human creativity and imagination to layer colorful raw emotion and incite a utopian future in an irrational world.

bARBER (b. 1982, US) uses his art practice to articulate various testimonies within and surrounding Black culture. He repurposes everyday materials, such as junk mail, found objects, etc., for his collages and three-dimensional constructions. Barber received his MFA from the University of Iowa and BFA from SCAD and is a current resident of Chicago Artists Coalition's HATCH program. Personal recognitions, aside from collaborations with Propelled Animals, a site adaptive art collective, include Graduate Cum Laude at the University of Iowa, 2020 Biennial Artist Research fellowship at Sam Fox Island Press, and New American Painting entry issue #150.

Tish Noel, education and immersion occurred at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is moved to work through the influence of other artists' interpretations of the world. Among those influences are: William Turner (atmosphere and light), Max Beckmann (intense examination of reality), Morris Graves (the ethereal), Elsworth Kelly (details), Joseph Beuys (shamanistic insight), Agnes Martin (devotion), and locally, Frank Paitek (community). Tish Noel has shown at Woman Made Gallery, 65GRAND, Backroom, Bite Club, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Oxbow Exhibition and Auction, and her work is part of the Buford Collection.