Curators Office "a curator's office in a micro gallery setting..." Dedicated to contemporary art and culture, Curator's Office merges the idea of workspace and exhibition space. Both curatorial activities and the display of contemporary art work takes place within a micro gallery environment. Curator's Office offers a wide range of curatorial and art consulting services and is run by Director and Founder, Andrea Pollan.
Andrea Pollan has worked for over twenty years in the visual fine arts. Trained as an art historian at Yale University, she has organized over ninety exhibitions of contemporary art for museums and galleries regionally and nationally. She has written numerous catalogs and exhibition brochures. Pollan has juried scores of art exhibitions and art fairs in the region including an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
She served as Exhibitions Director of the McLean Project for the Arts in Virginia and was curator at the Arlington Arts Center prior to that. She has worked for the Trust for Museum Exhibitions, the Yale University Art Gallery, and two regional commercial galleries.
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Curators Office Potential Energy: Works on Paper Kate McGraw & Ann Tarantino September 13 - October 25 McGraw is based in Washington, DC, and Tarantino is based in State College, PA. The Potential Energy series arises from a years-long, extended conversation between the two artists. Each artist's work is essentially rooted in acts of performance and a reflection upon the simultaneous vulnerability and power of the physical self
In the summer of 2007, their mutual interest in an overlap of processes and thematic concerns led to a collaborative residency at a small artists' community in Pennsylvania. There, together, they made nearly seventy drawings over three weeks' time. The residency yielded not only a new body of work, but also lent clarity to their individual processes and revealed a model for thinking, making, and working, in an environment of mutual respect. During that time, their separate processes - indeed, their identities - were fused into something new that has become a meditation on the act of exchange, process and conversation. As their collaboration continues, the ongoing progress of the series serves to indicate new directions for their individual and collaborative bodies of work.
Using techniques both planned and impromptu, and taking turns approaching the surface, each artist makes both marks that are familiar from her individual practice, and new ones that reference the other's. Containing all manner of marks and materials (varied hues of ink, washes of gouache, repeated gestures made with sharp pencil points, more delicate ones made with conté crayon), the works retain individual identities while also functioning as part of a larger whole. When viewed together, the "Potential Energy" series unfolds much like a book or a conversation-a narrative of exchange and negotiation, full of discussions, arguments, moments of pushing and pulling, and, finally, resting.
The project raises the question of potential - what kind of energy is possible? How does that energy change when it is transferred from one hand to another? Where (if at all) does the energy stop? And if it does not stop, where does it lead? As the drawings unfold, as if flowing out of their individual and collective consciousness, it becomes clear that humans can communicate volumes through physical acts. This project harnesses that potential for communication and evidences true exchange, focusing on the physical and social significance of the act of making - and making together.
The collaboration on view includes small, medium, and large-scale works on paper. Works by the individual artists are available to view in the flat files for comparison and contemplation. McGraw works her drawings heavily and physically, gouging graphite into the paper surface in acts of excavation and catharsis. Tarantino uses her breath as a tool for mark-making, blowing water-based paints and inks through a straw to tease marks into existence.
McGraw and Tarantino will be collaborating on a large-scale wall drawing project at Flashpoint in Spring 2009. Kate McGraw earned her B.F.A. in Painting and Drawing at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. She has exhibited her work at the Katzen Art Center, Washington, DC; Patterson Gallery, University Park, PA; Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery, Weber State University, Ogden, UT; and Scope New York Art Fair (Curator's Office), New York, NY among other venues. She recently won the Young Artist Program Grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and an Artist's Grant in Residence at the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT. Her work was recently featured in Studio Visit: A Juried Selection of International Artists published by The Open Studios Press, Boston, MA.
Ann Tarantino earned her MFA in Painting at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA and her BA in Visual Arts from Brown University, Providence, RI. She has exhibited her work in the US and abroad, including the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI; Scope New York Art Fair (Curator's Office); Mixed Greens, New York, NY; Lloyd Dobler Gallery, Chicago, IL; and neutron and Kisara-do in Kyoto, Japan. A recipient of numerous residencies and awards, her work was selected in April 2007 and December 2005 for New American Paintings Nos. 69 and 56, published by The Open Studios Press, Boston, MA. Most recently, her work was commissioned for Jen Bekman Gallery's noted 20x200 Project, New York, NY.
