DIALOGUE WITH AMY GREEN AND LAUREN HARTMAN

Installation View. Left to right: It Will Probably be Alright, Amy Green; Healing of the Rich Man, Lauren Hartman; Apocalyptic Plastic, Amy Green.	Installation View. Left to right: It Will Probably be Alright, Amy Green; Healing of the Rich Man, Lauren Hartman.
Installation View. Left to right: American Nerves Leave Something to Be Desired, Lauren Hartman; No Worries, Amy Green.	Installation View. Left to right: That's Fine, Amy Green; American Nerves Leave Something to Be Desired, Lauren Hartman; People Kind of Get It , Amy Green.
No Worries, Amy Green. detail of I Give My Attention to Only the Top People, Lauren Hartman.

Post-minimalist conceptual painter Amy Green and figurative painter Lauren Hartman explore the territory between painting genres, shortening the bridge between what appear to be two opposing aesthetics camps in order to broaden the dialogue about the rationale behind current painting practices.

Both Green and Hartman are dedicated to an idiosyncratic painting language and to risk. Both are engaged in seeking an understanding of the current period through exploration of American and European painting and cultural history. Both are concerned with the "before and after" in linear time, and both use the body as a passive index of political and social climates. The products of their research are different, but their collaboration creates a juncture for movement. So why can't they be together?

WHAT YOU WILL SEE

Green's minimal, light plastic remnants lean and float carrying the residue of painting's late modernist history: a dot, a zip, a pour, a stripe. As part of her process, Green allows the objects to accept accidental tracings of their environment; they become smeared or scratched or end up with an unanticipated mark. They are then set in the gallery like props. Upright, tilted, lurking, suspended, they absorb and unify elements of the space around them, playing off of one another. Their tentative arrangements and transparency lend them a quality of animation despite their extreme static nature.

Hartman's dense, colorful works use the lexicon of expressionisms to delve into American psychosis.   Imagery from Jewish and Christian iconography, eugenics, European folk mythologies, transsexual biography, and abstract signifiers of madness are dragged through scenarios in which utterance and language, the oral and the textual, struggle through a muck of color and energetic brushwork.

In their pared down installation, Hartman and Green allow their works to function in relationship, in opposition, in curious juxtaposition and in response to the gallery as a performance field, activating a series of difficult arrangements in which the objects are "decamped" allowing dialogue about oppositions and the "why" of painting to be opened once again.

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Amy Green, a Los Angeles artist, received her BFA from University of Tennessee and earned her MFA at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1997. Green's paintings and installations have been shown internationally. She has exhibited her paintings at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Susanne Vielmetter of LA Projects, Rolf Ricke Galerie in Cologne,Germany, Schmidtmaczollek Galerie in Cologne, Germany. Additional images can be found at www.schmidtmaczollek.com , www.amygreen-art.com and www.myparkprojects.org.

Lauren Hartman is a painter, performance installation artist, and filmmaker. Hartman received a BA from UCLA and an MFA from CalArts in 2003 and has exhibited extensively in the Los Angeles as well as internationally including at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Recontres International, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Track 16, LACE, Highways Performance Space, Side Street Projects, and New Image Art. Hartman served as co-director of Crazy Space in Santa Monica and teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

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