FORMA NIGHTS: BRINGING CREATIVES TOGETHER
Celebrate FORMA’s launch with the DC area’s best artists
Alexandra Arata explores the impact of colors on our lives. Barbara Januszkiewicz utilizes color and curves to display a rhythmic vision. Gail Shaw-Clemon printmaker, mixed-media, artist-activist, and teacher. Jordann Wine produces vibrant and meditative art. Stephanie Mercedes transforms weapons into musical installations and works of art. MasPaz muralist that explores the topics of earth preservation and indigenous people.
ALEXANDRA ARATA
Alexandra holds a Masters in Interior Architecture and Design from Salamanca University, Spain. Born in Argentina, she moved to Washington, DC in 2002 and now she works from her studios in Washington, Miami and Easton, MD. She drew and painted her entire life, and when in DC, she continued her art education at Glen Echo and the Corcoran School of Art. She participated in many art exhibitions locally and abroad, and her works art part of private collections in US, Spain, Argentina, Andorra, Germany, Uruguay, Britain and Peru. One of her paintings hangs in a White House office and at the International Monetary Fund.
Alexandra explores the impact that colors produce in our lives, how they can change our mood, affect our psychology, and even produced physical reactions. Her architectural and design backgrounds show through her series of wall sculptures, where she expresses a desire to build, arrange objects, and play with different materials, mediums, shapes and colors. Assembling these pieces require a very intimate process that starts with applying color on each individual wood to build installations full of color, texture and dynamism.
A notion of spatial relationship with the object and her surroundings is shown in her installations. She builds with a very planned, meticulous process, where repetition and certain symmetry take her to a meditative space. Her paintings are more experimental, a cathartic form of expressing passion and moods. Tied more to a feeling of the moment, rather than an attachment to a particular outcome, painting is a freeing process, as she pours the painting and feelings onto the canvas.
Her abstractions have a common thread: a reflection of life itself, full of light and shadows, rhythm and layers, and the duality of every experience. She finds inspiration in architecture, nature and the richness of different cultures she finds in her trips. Alexandra’s goal is to give an optimistic view of the future with attitude, audacity and strength. She wants to add color to our days in a symbolic and metaphorical sense; she reaches out to the viewer to connect trough color and passion.
barbara januszkiewicz
Januszkiewicz pure abstract forms call to mind the stained canvases of Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, but her work embodies a unique elegance that differentiates it from that of her color fields with wonderful abstract shapes that are rendered loosely with a great feeling of fluidity and motion. “My brushwork is applied in waves of curving, color shapes, submerged in translucent washes. My goal is to achieve the highest degree of richness, with a light source that comes not from applied paint, but rather from the luminosity of the brilliant white paper or canvas.”
VISION
My art explores the relationship between light and color, and constantly challenges the interaction between hue, value, and intensity. The viewer of my work is able to see the “veils of pigment that fold over one another creating illusory creases and hollows. The overall effect is one of slow, powerful visual rhythms. I push for semi-translucent colors to float across the surfaces, soaking into the unprimed canvas and paper to create tactile fusions of paint and support that envelope the viewer in diaphanous veils of paint. My goal is to seamlessly apply watercolor-like acrylics across large formats with zen-like brush strokes.
PHILOSOPHY
Creative Vision is the starting point for making everything possible. The visual arts are the tools to better human existence. Here we can imagine more. Push boundaries, encourage new ways to think and enlightened human condition. In our daily life one of the best creative activities we can do to promote brain plasticity and creative thinking is look at abstract art.
gail shaw-clemons
Born in Washington, DC. Gail Shaw-Clemons is a printmaker, mixed-media and artist-activist, and teacher with residencies in Africa, Sweden, Ireland, Pennsylvania, and New Mexico. She spent summers away making art. She has exhibited extensively with collections all over the world including China, Ireland, Brazil, and Sweden.
Locally her work can be seen in collections at the Library of Congress, the DC Commission on the arts and humanities, and the National Women’s Museum.
jordann wine
Jordann Wine (b. Bethesda, MD) is a Washington, D.C. based artist whose meditative abstractions in paint and glitter hope to provide the viewer with a visual respite from the chaos of daily living. Her art practice has been pivotal to her own healing and an important tool in bringing a sense of calm and purpose to her life. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from New York University; where she studied Sustainable Entrepreneurship in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and minored in Studio Art. She continued her education at the Aegean Center for Fine Arts in Paros, Greece. She has had solo exhibitions at Honfleur Gallery, George Mason University, and Strathmore Arts Center, as well as national and international group exhibitions.
She has murals and public art throughout DC, Maryland, New York, and Jamaica, working with among others: Facebook, the DC Commission of Arts and Humanities, DC Walls, Conrad Hotel, and lululemon. Her work has been purchased for public and private collections, including select acquisitions for the permanent collections of the Kennedy Center, Capital One, Palms Casino Resort, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Fairmont Hotel, Montefiore Hospital, and Booz Allen Hamilton. She has been the recipient of multiple DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowship grants.
STATEMENT
Inspired by sacred geometry, Jordann Wine draws on classical forms and patterns in her work to reference mathematical concepts that reflect the wonders of the universe. Working with the golden ratio, fractals, and gradients these geometric abstract paintings, drawings and murals connect to notions of deep space in time, as well as deep space found in meditation. Floating, falling, fading and unfolding patterns of triangles and circles mesmerize the viewer, evoking contemplation of the infinite. Seeking order out of chaos, and interrupting rigidity of order with slight imperfections in the repetition is central to the meditative nature of her practice and to the solace it intends to bring out in the hand-drawn imagery. Along with her work in drawings, paintings and murals, Jordann has evolved her practice by introducing glitter. Glitter, commonly dismissed as an ordinary craft material, is elevated to a painterly standard as she foregrounds the material’s inherent qualities of holding and releasing light. Making use of the medium’s full range of iridescent, opaque, and translucent color qualities, she transforms the childish or garish reputation of glitter into a reflective cosmic field. Reflective surfaces instinctually remind people of water, the element most critical to survival. Glitter’s shimmering surfaces, reminiscent of light hitting water, attracts the viewer into the work, evoking the appeal of both the movement of water as flow and the introspective quality of water as stillness.
stephanie mercedes
Mercedes is a uncategorized Queer Latinx artist who choreographs large scale performances and installations based in sound. Mercedes transforms weapons into musical installations and works of art. She also excavates missing violent histories. Mercedes has exhibited and performed at the Bronx Museum, the Queens Museum, the Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center and the National Gallery of Art. She has been funded by George Soro’s Open Society Foundation, Light Works, NALAC, The Foundation for Contemporary Art, WPA, The DC Commission for the Arts, the GLB Memorial Foundation, the Warhol Foundation and the Clarvit Fellowship.
Mercedes has been a artist in residence at: VisArts, Halcyon Art Labs, the Bronx Museum, Montgomery College, Christopher Newport University, SOMA, Lugar a Dudas, Largo das Artes and La Ira de Dios. Mercedes is producing an Opera with CulturalDC in 2022-23.
Mercedes can be reached at: [email protected]
MASPAZ
MasPaz is a Colombian born multidisciplinary artist, based in Washington DC. He is known for his distinctive street murals that explore topics of earth preservation and indigenous peoples. His work has been exhibited in galleries throughout the US and Latin America and his larger murals can be found in streets and spaces internationally.
Mas Paz means ‘more peace’ in Spanish, a message he strives to embrace through art and philanthropy. He has been featured on ABC News, Telemundo and The Washington Post, among others. He has collaborated with brands such as Nike, National Geographic, Roots, Sierra Club and Brooks Running, as well as institutions such as the Smithsonian Institution, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery of Art, the New Museum, the Corcoran, the Freer and Sackler Gallery.
He has also worked with numerous schools and education centers throughout the world. During the pandemic, MasPaz initiated a series of free online art classes, encouraging art as an avenue for mental health, as well as designing a limited edition print and textile, raising money for local charities and community centers. He can usually be found, brush in hand, painting, teaching, or spreading his message of “more peace” abroad.
