MUNICIPAL BONDS PRESENTS: OPENNESS
Austin Thomas, Bara Jichova Tyson, Danielle Dimston, and Yvette Taminiau
September 3 - October 5, 2019
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 7, 5 - 8pm
Municipal Bonds at Minnesota Street Project
1275 Minnesota St, Gallery 200, San Francisco, CA
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 12 - 6pm
EXHIBITION STATEMENT
Municipal Bonds is delighted to announce our inaugural exhibition Openness, on view at Minnesota Street Project in Gallery 200, September 3 - October 5, 2019, presenting four important female artists: Austin Thomas, Bara Jichova Tyson, Danielle Dimston, and Yvette Taminiau.
Openness features complementary bodies of work, wherein each artist investigates a singular direction, inspired by materials and their consequences: Austin Thomas with ghost-marking monotypes; Bara Jichova Tyson with analog collages; Danielle Dimston with chiaroscuro watercolors; and Yvette Taminiau with associative newsprint paintings.
Each distinct inquiry develops as a passageway through the work—an openness—driven by a point of view from the artist’s relationship with her chosen medium. The material language conveys a shared exploration and interplay between exterior and interior, sensibility and surprise, experience and perception. Herein, openness is about freedom, imagination, transparency. It is also referential to the premiere exhibition of Municipal Bonds: yes, we are open!
Austin Thomas has developed a form of monotyping that employs ghost-marking, in which she prints several times on the same piece of found paper: book covers and pages, ledger sheets, and loose-leaf notebooks. Her monotypes feature shapes, sometimes overlapping and sometimes in translucent colors, made by using craft foam and templates she borrows from a metalwork shop. The resulting images have an improvisational buoyancy, combining spontaneity and precision, and referring to a range of modernist styles, including Russian Constructivism, Minimalism, and Color Field painting.
Bara Jichova Tyson’s The Hatch House Series, a group of analog collages, is inspired by the experimental Hatch House cottage on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and is a complement to her award-winning short film. Designed by Jack Hall in 1960 for Robert Hatch, an editor of The Nation, and his wife Ruth, a painter, the Hatch House was a sanctuary for artists and intellectuals in the 1960s, like Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, László Moholy-Nagy, and the Boston Brahmins. Hand-cut and collaged photographs of the cottage reference a place in time: a fragile, amateur structure living at the cultural crossroads between DIY "work of the brain" and the rising tide of American bourgeois, consumerist values.
Danielle Dimston’s watercolor series, Chiaro/Scuro, is inspired by the Italian term for light-dark. Each work in the series is created with a minimalist palette, undulating lines, and an equal respect for both painted and negative space. She captures a luminescent gradation anew in every piece, with a long or short interval of shape, like a subway train passing through a tunnel, experiencing intermittent light and dark. At the same time, there is a levity with drips and drops of paint, as if to show the acceptance of imperfections alongside the precision of brushstrokes.
Yvette Taminiau’s newsprint paintings comprise a dialogue between the artist and the page. She transforms newspaper pages in an associative manner, responding to the images, headlines, articles, and the layout of the page. Her approach is intuitive and suggestive—while her academic background, with its strong reliance on analytical frameworks, is reflected in her selection of topics and articles from the newspapers. Dutch, French, and English news act as her referential canvas, from economic issues to political coverage to cultural icons.
GALLERY STATEMENT
Municipal Bonds—our name as well as our purpose—is a symbolic play on words. Municipalities form and encourage a concentration of people and ideas, where bonds are the connections and strengths between us. To that effect, we have launched Municipal Bonds, a contemporary art gallery with a nomadic exhibition program devoted to emerging and established artists, international in scope and cross-cultural in intention. Founded in Oakland, California by Emily Miller, Municipal Bonds seeks to enhance artists’ support, development, and exposure; and to increase the diversity of art showcased for the betterment of community, collectors, and creativity.
For press and sales enquiries, please contact: info@municipalbonds.art
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Austin Thomas
Austin Thomas is both an artist and a curator based in New York. She fills sketchbook diaries with drawings, paintings, and collages that explore her everyday experiences, and often act as a springboard for her improvisational and painterly monotypes. She also creates hybrid sculptural and architectural objects that facilitate thought and discussion.
In her daily journals, which she creates during conversations, Thomas crafts detailed representations of energy and sound. Thomas refers to her sketchbook as a "pocket utopia" (which was also the name of the influential artist-run gallery she founded and directed in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and on the Lower East Side, Manhattan, from 2007 to 2015). Drawing, painting, observational compilation—her pocket utopias have formed the basis for her more significant works on paper, including collages and abstract assemblages.
Thomas has developed a form of monoprinting that employs ghost marking, in which she prints several times on the same piece of found paper: book covers and pages, ledger sheets, and loose-leaf notebooks. Her monoprints feature shapes, sometimes overlapping and sometimes in translucent colors, made by using craft foam and templates she borrows from a metalwork shop. The resulting images have an improvisational buoyancy, combining spontaneity and precision, and referring to a range of modernist styles, including Russian Constructivism, Minimalism, and Color Field painting.
Thomas has exhibited, both nationally and internationally, and specifically in New York at: The Drawing Center, SculptureCenter, Art in General, White Columns, and Morgan Lehman. She has also exhibited at the Robert Lehman Art Center at Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts; at Seed Space in Nashville, Tennessee; as well as in Singapore, Australia, Hungary, and at the Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna, Austria.
Thomas is a graduate of NYU, and has received numerous residencies and fellowships, including: Wave Hill, Guttenberg Arts, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Smack Mellon, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and at Bascom Lodge, Mount Greylock Summer Residency.
Thomas is featured in the book titled Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists and its sequel The Artist as Culture Producer: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life, both edited by Sharon Louden. Thomas has been written about in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, The Paris Review, and Hyperallergic. Her work is in the permanent collection of the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC, and New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City.
Bara Jichova Tyson
Bara Jichova Tyson is a New York-based artist and filmmaker, originally from Czechoslovakia, now Czechia. Her short documentary film, The Hatch House, won best short experimental documentary at the 2016 Fine Arts Film Festival (FAFF) in Venice, California, and was an official selection of the 2019 Film Architektura in Prague, 2016 Architecture and Design Film Festival in New York City and Los Angeles, and the 2016 American Documentary Film Festival (AmDocs) in Palm Springs. Inspired by the Hatch House cottage in Cape Cod, Jichova Tyson created a body of collage work, The Hatch House Series, using hand-cut photography of its architecture, design, and period imagery.
Her first feature hybrid documentary film, Talking About Adultery, premiered as an official selection at the 2019 Sheffield Doc/Fest, and was nominated for the New Talent Award. As a complement to the film, Jichova Tyson created an exhibition of analog collage works sharing the same theme as her film: What does it mean to be in a committed relationship?
Jichova Tyson's feature film, Organ Player, which she co-wrote and edited (directed by Narcissister), was selected for the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Prior, she edited the feature documentary film, Instructions on Parting (directed by Amy Jenkins), which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 2018 Doc Fortnight.
Jichova Tyson has exhibited her 2D work and photography in solo and group shows, including: at the Greene Naftali Gallery, Salon Ciel, BBLA, and Pocket Utopia—all in New York. In 2013 she co-produced and edited Built on Narrow Land, a feature documentary directed by Malachi Connolly, about Bauhaus architecture on Cape Cod. She was art director of Now, Forager, a feature film by Jason Cortlund and Julia Halperin, which was part of the 2012 New Directors/New Films Festival organized jointly by MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. The film was a nominee for the Gotham Independent Film Awards, and had a worldwide release.
Jichova Tyson studied fine art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, and received her BFA at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. She is a 2016 recipient of The MacDowell Colony Fellowship.
Danielle Dimston
New York-based painter Danielle Dimston has received numerous grants and awards, including from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Stephen and Palmina Pace Foundation, and The Peter S. Reed Foundation. Funding from Artist Space saw the launch of The Ladder Project, and with a commission from The Millay Colony for the Arts, that project was used for their Open House Fundraiser. A grant for a site-specific installation helped inaugurate Smack Mellon in Dumbo, and a commission from Tiffany & Co. welcomed their new Soho location. Her artist residencies have included: Yaddo, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Mino Art Paper Village in Japan.
After studying drawing and painting at The New York Studio School, Dimston earned an MFA from Boston University. She has taught as a visiting professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and as a visiting artist at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Dimston has shown widely in the United States and abroad. Her work is in many private and public collections, including the Cleveland Museum of Art, which acquired a suite of Dimston's prints produced by C.R. Ettinger Editions in Philadelphia.
Yvette Taminiau
Yvette Taminiau is a Dutch artist, as well as an assistant professor and senior lecturer at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In her work, she balances and mixes her grounding in both worlds.
Taminiau obtained her PhD in Business Administration at the Rotterdam School of Management. She has been a visiting scholar at the Alberta School of Business, Edmonton, and the London School of Economics, London; and has held a British Council Fellowship at PREST, Centre for Science and Technology, Policy and Management Research, at Manchester Business School.
As a university student, to generate extra income and overcome a certain level of shyness, she worked cafés and terraces in the center of Amsterdam as a "papergirl," hawking copies of NRC Handelsblad to patrons. Since 2004, she has been painting on newspapers—first on the French Le Monde, later mainly on the Dutch NRC Handelsblad, with an occasional International Herald Tribune and The New York Times.
Her academic background, with its strong reliance on analytical frameworks, is reflected in her selection of topics and articles from the newspapers she works with, for example: Follow the Money, Working Hard, and The Double Life of a Barrel. Before applying her brushes, pens, and sometimes scissors, she carefully reads each newspaper. However, in contrast to her academic work, her approach to her artwork is more free, suggestive, and spontaneous. She transforms newspaper pages in an associative manner, responding to the images, headlines, articles, and the layout of the page.
Going full circle, Taminiau's first publication of her painted newspapers appeared in 2005 on the cover of the culture section of NRC Handelsblad itself. Since then, she has presented her work at the Athenaeum Nieuwscentrum, part of Athenaeum Booksellers, in Amsterdam, and she created a new series for an exhibition at the Center for Visual Arts in Emmen, the Netherlands. Her works have been commissioned by Birgit Donker, former editor-in-chief of NRC Handelsblad, former director of the Mondriaan Fund, and current director of the Netherlands Photo Museum in Rotterdam. Altogether, her work is held in more than 30 private collections.
