OPENING RECEPTION: SUNDAY, MAY 9, 2010 3-5PM

LA Artcore is pleased to present an exhibition with artists Ann Gooding and Joseph Piasentin.

Formally trained as a wood sculptor and painter (Otis College of Art, M.F.A. 1987), Ann Gooding’s previous experience with tactile, dimensional materials informs her approach to painting. Gooding prepares her surface using a multi-paneled stratum of poplar, fir, and clear birch. The surface’s topography is tiered and built of multiple planes. After coating the surface with numerous layers acrylic paint, Gooding carves into the surface, revealing both a layered spectrum of color and the stratum of wood beneath. The resulting contrasting visual reality is left for the viewer to decipher. Aside from optical color experiences, Gooding exposes layers of surfaces that create colored patterns and textures. Working with both sculptor’s tools and painter’s brushes, she experiments with the language of color. For her, color is an element with magical force to inspire and affect one’s state of mind. “I was inspired by the paintings of Hans Hoffman, Robert Motherwell, and Helen Frankenthaler,” she says. Seldom mixing colors, she uses pure, saturated color for maximum psychological impact.

For over four decades, Southern California painter, Joseph Piasentin’s compositions have negotiated fragments of memory and history through articulating geometric forms and color. As evidenced by physically built-up surfaces, Piasentin reveals layers of construction and deconstruction that assert the vigorous cycles of color-mixing, sanding and scraping that each painting undergoes. Piasentin continues in his most recent body of work his complex use of imagery that mixes latticework, arabesques, tendrils, silhouettes, streaks and clouds of color. Piasentin received his MFA from Stanford University and is a professor of art at Pepperdine University.