Hot Chroma: Jordan Clark, Kayla Plosz, Matt Reimers, and Jeremy Szopinski

Hot Chroma features the paintings of Jordan Clark, Kayla Plosz, Matt Reimers and Jeremy Szopinski. This exhibition explores the physicality of committing predominantly oil paint to surfaces. Each of these artists emphasizes the nature of experimentation with the materiality of paint as their central conceptual anchor. The layers and thickness of application allow color and depth to create structural landscapes, all revealing a subtle commentary of the mysterious gestures that preface our existence.

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Jordan Clark’s works explore the visual language of time, space, light and natural phenomena. Through using imagery pulled from observational drawings Clark pulls inspiration from a wide bank of marks, shapes and processes that are then formally translated and re-contextualized in his pieces. The work is fostered through the process of painting, arranging, collaging and manipulating materials. This intuitive engagement is many times interrupted by a gesture of reason that strains to hold together a framework in concert with the more expressive mark-making. Each painting has its own set of guidelines and challenges that are worked through, and left on the surface as evidence of the painting’s history. The colors and marks are inspired by Portland’s unique cityscape—along with the action, timing and theatre of sports and physicality. The result of the blending of these moments and actions work similarly to that of a photograph with multiple exposures. These layered actions and markers of color, time, speed and light are encapsulated into one frozen, isolated viewing experience.

Jordan Clark has exhibited throughout Wisconsin and Oregon. He received a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Stout and is currently a MFA candidate at Portland State University. This will be Clark’s first exhibition in Minnesota. He currently lives and works in Portland.

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Kayla Plosz’s current work arises from an acute obsession with the “stuffness” of paint; her process involves a psychosomatic dialectic that accounts for the paint’s substance, sensuality, color, and mutability. Her paintings begin with a particular image, texture, feeling, or shape. As the painting advances, it vacillates between intuitive bodily sensuality and more logically driven formal decisions so that the initial thing gets buried, altered, or deconstructed. Each work, then, redefines its content through the free-play of the paint’s color and form. This process evolves over time and is meticulous and slow. In contradistinction to the fast pace of technology, my paintings embody intentional physical repetitions and seek to engender comfort therein.

Kayla Plosz has exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions throughout the Midwest and east coast, including Burnet Gallery, Hillyer Art Space, and the Torpedo Factory. She has an upcoming solo exhibition at Common Ground Gallery in March of 2017. Plosz graduated from Taylor University with a BA in Studio Arts and received her MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She currently lives and works in Fairfax, Virginia.

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Matt Reimers’s paintings are torn between representational sceneries and nullifying abstractions. Recognizable instances are buried and exposed by abstract economies of mark making. Oil paint is the only material he uses; because “it is fleshly, slow and difficult.” His mixtures and consistencies vary radically. Reimers wants paint that pulls apart, flows into itself, laps over like waves and slides away from its point of contact. He longs for apocryphal spaces in a slow-burn pandemonium. He creates dismembered clarity, the slippery feeling of coming apart in a moment of trance and the placid violence of a rarefied place.

Matt Reimers has exhibited throughout Minnesota including Ridgewater College Galleries and Northern Spark, along with being an artist in residence at Kimball Arts Center, New York Studio Residency Program and White Page Gallery. He received his BFA in painting from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He currently lives and works in Minneapolis.

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Jeremy Szopinski’s work explores the idea of unresolved and unhinged spatial tensions. In the space of his paintings, areas of opaque impasto contrast areas of thin transparency and create intermittent motion, sometimes erratic, sometimes rhythmic. Simultaneously, irregular geometries suggest shifting figures and knotted, tangled forms. To achieve these effects, Szopinski often uses squeegees and as well as homemade brushes, wide enough to make marks that stretch across the whole canvas. The paintings revolve around abstract imagery of an apocalyptic landscape. The mood is guided by the seemingly ubiquitous and devastating doomsday anxieties that face us today: climate change, contagion, terrorism, political unrest and other threats, both literal and metaphorical. Various compositional elements create disparity between the negative, overwhelming imagery of waves, drowning and tumbling, sludge and pollution, and the optimistic, hopeful visualizations of water, rebirth and an environment teeming with life.

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Jeremy Szopinski has exhibited at many venues in the midwest and nationally including Woodward Gallery (N.Y.C.), Holly Hunt (N.Y.C. and Chicago), Speedboat Gallery and the Duluth Art Institute. He has created public artworks, notable examples of those murals can be found at the U.S. Bank Stadium and The Urban Flower Field. He was an adjunct faculty member at the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul and a senior letterpress printer at Studio On Fire in Minneapolis. Szopinski received his BFA from the College of Visual Arts, in St. Paul, and completed his MFA in painting at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 2010. He currently lives and works in Minneapolis.