June 17th - July 29th 2023
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC (miniature Mount Airy Contemporary)
25 West Mt Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce Visionscapes, an exhibition of works by Ace Harlo and Bethann Parker. These artists work within the context of landscape painting as a meditative practice that tap into hidden energies - life and loss, being present and seeing beyond the veil.
Since 1990, Ace Harlo (qy/qym/qyr) has made art in the mediums of sculpture, performance, poetry, painting, video, sound, photography, and social practice, often combining the mediums into live works of performance art. During the pandemic, Harlo leaned hard into painting. Qy wrapped up in a down blanket and painted for hours at the coast. Harlo solo road tripped the entire length of California painting along the way. All told, Ace made over 100 paintings and filled several sketchbooks. Harlo titled this body of work Avant-Rainbow because it is a colorful, prismatic expression of life energy amid the great loss of the pandemic.
In the rural Mountains of North East Appalachia, Bethann Parker runs a homestead that is rooted in traditional living and tends a studio which, through interdisciplinary research and material experimentation, expands the ways that she depicts her country narratives. Inspired by tactility, Parker explores the interlacing of time and emotion in visionary painting. Offered as a type of prayer, this series is influenced by an incessant devotion of restless searching. Repetitive brush strokes become clogged in meditation, outlining condensed pleas to break open ground and peel back the veils that blur pastoral views. Using thick impasto oil paint to build up conscious and unconscious memories, Parker submits to intuition and curiosity while leaving a residue of the domestic and spiritual landscapes that frame her life.
Shape-shifting and genre-bending, Ace Harlo ( https://www.aceofviolets.com/ ) is a transdisciplinary artist who works in a wide range of art media often combining them into live performance art. Since 1990, Ace has presented artwork at 85 venues in 42 cities in the United States, Canada and Scotland. Venues include Center for Contemporary Art in Glasgow, Scotland; Banff Centre of the Arts in Canada; MOMA, PS1 and PS122 in New York; and LACE and Highways in Los Angeles.
Bethann Parker ( https://www.bethannparker.com ) (b. 1984 Montgomeryville, Pa; lives and works in Saylorsburg, PA) received a BFA and Certificate of Fine Art from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and a Certificate from the Barnes Foundation. She was the recipient of The Kittredge Fund, The Fred and Naomi Hazel Art Scholarship, The Richard Von. Hess Travel Scholarship and twice awarded Venture Fund Grant for large project proposals. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and the Voice of America.
miniMAC is a project of MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary). MAC has been curating shows in northwest Philadelphia since 2009.
