Phillip Estlund makes architectural sculptures and assemblages using detritus from his immediate surroundings. These works are reflective of the present day, tenuous natural environmental and financial climate at large. Estlundʼs work is made from ordinary materials collected from demolition sites- all in advanced stages of decrepitude, further hastened by the volatile South Florida climate. Ever yielding to the inevitability and finality of decay, through these sculptures the artist embraces attrition and the resulting degeneration as a force of both inevitable annihilation and potential growth. He has also created heavily tactile landscape paintings, as well as transforming mid century pieces of furniture through addition of botanical and field guide images and real but inverted cypress knees. Inspired by the sequential devastating hurricanes that preceded the housing crash nearly a decade ago, and through the use of a menagerie of man-made, natural, and synthetic-chemical materials, Estlund is addressing the visual/physical stew that is our contemporary landscape and examining the complexities of living in such a place.

Phillip Estlund was born in Athens, Greece and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. He received his BFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art and studied in the Netherlands. He has been included in exhibitions at Cheim and Reid, Gagosian, Eleven Rivington, MOCA North Miami, Art and Culture Center / Hollywood, FAU, The Norton Museum (The Triumph of Love / The Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection), and the Bunker Artspace Inaugural Exhibition of the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, where he was also a co-curator. Estlund is represented by Gavlak Gallery in Palm Beach, and will have work in “Sea and Sky” there this fall. One of his installations can currently be seen at the Culture Lab (formerly Macy’s) in West Palm Beach.

phillipestlundstudio.com


This season’s other artists and dates are:

October 30: Aurora Molina (Miami) - “Cultural Portraits in Fiber and Thread”
November 27: Dana Donaty (Miami and Delray Beach) - “Profoundly Playful”
January 8 Sibel Kocabasi (Lake Worth) “We Look Like Each Other”
February 5: lou anne colodny (North Miami) - “Confessions of a Retired Museum Director: (or how I transformed into an artist)”
March 5: Jeanne Jaffe (Delray Beach) - "Unraveling the Knot- reexamining myths, history and narratives "
April 2: TBA
May 7: TBA

Artist Statements / Biographies:

October 30: Aurora Molina (Miami) - “Cultural Portraits in Fiber and Thread”

Aurora Molina is a figurative fiber artist, using embroidery as a drawing instrument, and fabric as a material for building large sculptural installations, tapestries, marionettes, and small wall drawings that capture people of all ages and backgrounds, and the environments in which they live. Each has its own spirit; some playful, some grotesque, others belligerent, some with a more serious side, some with satirical, even subversive political commentaries. Each one tells a story that appeals to our social consciousness and narrates stories, whether about childhood or aging, family, climate change or immigration, life in one of the many cultures in which she has lived and worked or anthropoid-like creatures with animal instincts. She says “The use of fabric and embroidery defines my work and honors that centuries-old legacy of women weavers and artisans.”

Photography, video, robotics and more have been utilized in the telling of her many stories. “Whereas society has slowly created ‘fictions’ and ‘virtual realities’ to replace the real, I instead direct the spectator’s attention to the everyday real happenings of ordinary lives.” Some works use stockings to make her creatures appear crude, more visceral, “as if the skin had been removed to reveal what’s beneath, to expose the rawness of tissue and blood”. She says “it is the grotesque nature of these pieces that is meant to invite deeper explorations into the true nature of the character, in order to seduce the spectator to reexamine his or her own psychological vulnerabilities”.

Aurora Molina was born in La Havana, Cuba, in 1984, and emigrated to the United States at the age of sixteen. She received her BA in Fine Arts from Florida International University, specializing in Mixed Media, and her MFA in Contemporary Art at the Universidad Europea de Madrid, completed in 2009. She currently lives in Miami, where she is a resident artist at the Bakehouse Art Complex, and is represented by Bernice Steinbaum Gallery. She also works as an art educator, teaching art to kids who are often from disadvantaged backgrounds or with developmental disabilities, in Miami, Oaxaca, Mexico, Yogjakarta, Indonesia, and Kota, India, often related to the aesthetics of their own cultural traditions.

November 27: Dana Donaty (Miami and Delray Beach) - “Profoundly Playful”

Dana Donaty is a painter / sculptor /public artist who’s work blends reality and fantasy with narrative, satire, burlesque, psychology and “a super charged palette that is like a party about to get thoroughly out of control”. She grew up in New Jersey, in a family with mixed Colombian, Peruvian, Italian, Irish and American backgrounds. She has a BA in Drawing from Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia, PA. After living in London for twelve years, she relocated to Florida in 2006, where she now lives and works in Miami and Delray Beach. Since 2014, she has been an Artist-in-Residence at Bakehouse Art Complex, Miami.

Dana’s work comes from an interest in satirical playfulness, fragments of timeless memory where nothing is sacred. Every part is a series of actions and reactions. She places virgin canvas underneath the “in-process” painting on her easel, and ‘collects’ the excess paint that is flung, splattered, scraped, spilled and off loaded. The floor work is then raised to eye level. From the aggregation of Rorschach-like blots of primordial color, a fresh composition and a new group of figurative characters emerge. Their shape serves as stimulus for free association, giving life to a cast of characters, each exhibiting the vitality of their individual freedom, until they create a visual display of memories sourced from the subconscious. She often assimilates ideas or phrases from things people say or from books on audio that she listens to while working. She says: “My process mirrors the way in which we learn, we cannot ultimately control how information finds us or how we process it. Therefore, I regard chance as the organizing principle employed in constructing each painting... My work is my poetic theater of uncertainty, popular culture, universal truths, personal experiences and the modern condition.”

Dana Donaty’s work was recently on view in a solo retrospective at Coral Springs Museum of Art. Other selected solo shows include Fordistas Gallery, Miami; Paul Fisher Gallery, Palm Beach and The Ora Sorensen Gallery in Delray. It has also been exhibited at The Cornell Museum of Art, Art Palm Beach, Art Boca Raton, American International Fine Art Fair, Scope.

January 8 Sibel Kocabasi (Lake Worth) “We Look Like Each Other”

Sibel Kocabasi is a multidisciplinary visual artist, working mainly in paint, staged photography, and installations, who’s work addresses many contemporary social issues, from the environment to the suppression of female identity, violence against women and the later awakening of feminine power and confidence, to the effects of war and migration, across cultures and in the Middle East. She was born and raised in Turkey, and now lives in Lake Worth, FL.

She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Turkish Traditional Arts (rug-kilim design, natural dyes, conservation and restoration of textiles, and illumination of manuscripts) from the Marmara University of Fine Arts in Istanbul, Turkey. She received her Master’s Degree at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton Florida in painting in 2005. Kocabasi is the recipient of the 2010 South Florida Cultural Consortium’s Fellowship for Palm Beach County, and the 2006 Hector Ubertalli Visual Arts Award. Her work is in numerous private collections, as well as The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum in Miami, Florida.

February 5: lou anne colodny (North Miami) - “Confessions of a Retired Museum Director: (or how I transformed into an artist)”

lou anne colodny investigates contemporary issues concerning man/woman as he/she is ruffled by nature and society. Borrowing imagery from the internet, newspapers and magazines, she collages, manipulates materials, and uses her imagination to create her videos and drawings. In many of her works, she assumes faux personalities and thereby explores differing professions, values and actions that individuals pursue in their life journeys. She is fascinated by the psychology of life and how people react to it.

lou anne colodny’s experiences in dance, theater and museum administration have greatly informed her videos, drawings and photographic work. She was a recipient of the 2008 South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship and Best in Show for her videos in the 2005 Boca Museum of Art’s 54th Annual All Florida Exhibition. colodny was the founding director of MoCA, Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Florida and director of its precursor, COCA for 15 years. Her studio is at Under the Bridge Art Space / Bridge Red Studios, North Miami, where she curates exhibitions of Miami Artists who are not represented by galleries in the front two spaces.

colodny has had solo exhibitions at Art at Work (Mosquera Gallery) Miami, Hollywood Art and Culture Center, Jazzar Gallery at the Design Center, Miami, and in group shows at galleries in New York, Atlanta, Georgia, and in the Snitzer, Dorsch, Castillo and Jazzar Galleries in Miami. Her works are in the Permanent Collections at MAM (Miami Museum of Art) now PAMM, Miami, the Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach, MoCA, Museum of Contemporary Art Optic Nerve archive, North Miami, Miami-Dade Community College, Miami-Dade Public Library Collection, and the Okaloosa-Walton College, Niceville, Florida.

March 5: Jeanne Jaffe (Delray Beach) - "Unraveling the Knot- reexamining myths, history and narratives"

Jeanne Jaffe is a sculptor and installation artist who recently moved to South Florida from Philadelphia. She says, “Inspired by an interest in anthropology, mythology, and psychology, my work explores how identity is forged from early, pre-verbal bodily experience through the later influences of language and culture. This is undertaken by investigating the use of metaphor and reexamining our cultural myths and stories.

In installations such as “Little Red Riding Hood as a Crime Scene”, “Eulogy for Nikola Tesla” and “T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets”, well known folktales, history, and poetry are re-imagined through a contemporary lens and made into multi-sensory environments. In these installations, sculpture, videos, interactive elements, stop motion animation and sound coexist in a multi-leveled composition. The different signifying systems of image, motion, language, and sound intertwine and highlight different aspects of our internal and external experiences. How we navigate multi layered experience, where signification and understanding is being endlessly reshaped, and how we create meaning and self-determination from the cacophony of sensation, memory, myth, and cultural history is the subject of all my work. “

Jaffe was a Professor of Art in the Fine Arts Department at the University of the Arts for many years, and is now Professor Emeritus. She is now the Coordinator of International Projects at the Jaffe Center for Book Arts at FAU in Boca Raton. She is also a visiting artist at Xian Academy of Fine Arts and at Tianjin Academy of Art, both in China, during the fall semester.

Works by Ms. Jaffe have been exhibited both nationally and internationally at such places as Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art Museum, Delaware Art Museum, Hillwood Art Museum, Akari Museum in Japan, Michener Art Museum, The Royal Scottish Academy of Edinburgh, Museum Rijswijk in Holland, London Craft Council Gallery, and the Seokdang Museum of Art in Korea. Her work has been reviewed extensively, including in Art in America, The New York Times, and Sculpture Magazine. Ms. Jaffe’s works are included in many private and public collections, in such places as Pennsylvania Academy of Art Museum, Akari Museum of Art in Japan, Seokdang Museum of Art in Korea, Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, N.J, Abington Sculpture Garden, Abington, Pa., Rutgers Center for Innovative Printmaking, New Brunswick, N.J, and Museum of Ceramics at Alfred University, Alfred, N.Y. Jeanne Jaffe holds a B.F.A. from Tyler School of Art and an M.F.A. from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University.


Speakers for April and May are being arranged and will be announced soon. See armoryart.org/Salons or elleschorrphotography.com/salon-schedule.php for updated information and changes.