Anne Appleby and James Chronister at The Gund Gallery
James Chronister
In Between Days (1/20), 2020
oil on canvas
48 x 36 inches
The Art of Trees at the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College features the work of Anne Appleby and James Chronister. This exhibition runs from January 22 through April 11, 2021 and was curated by a committee of Gund Associates, Kenyon faculty, and Gund Gallery staff.
“The Art of Trees reveals the many resonances, forms, and relationships of trees. Exploring themes of restoration and destruction, community and isolation, location and identity, and fragile temporalities, the artists featured in the exhibition experiment with a range of mediums, and even use trees as creative collaborators to express our essential and inseparable bond with these guardians of the earth. The Art of Trees invites an interdisciplinary dialogue about personal, local, and global relationships to the environment, while simultaneously drawing attention to interactions between trees themselves, the communities they form, and their resilience despite human interference.”
Artists include Anne Appleby, Matthew Brandt, Edward Burtynsky, James Balog, James Chronister, Oliver Dorfer, John Gerrard, María Elena González, Laura McPhee, Laura Plageman, Yan Wang Preston, Jennifer Steinkamp, Joel Sternfeld, and Hiroshi Sugimoto.
About Anne Appleby
Anne Appleby was born in 1954 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and moved to Montana at age 17. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1977 from the University of Montana and embarked on a 15-year apprenticeship with an Ojibwe elder, learning to patiently and deeply observe nature. Appleby would watch and then translate into color the cycles of leaves, stems, buds, fruit, and seeds, transforming nature’s fluid evolution into two-dimensional portraits.
Appleby received her Master of Fine Arts in 1989 from the San Francisco Art Institute and has since exhibited her paintings internationally to high acclaim. She has had solo exhibitions at the Tacoma Art Museum, 2018, the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University, Kansas, 2011, the Museum Ritter, Waldenbuch, Germany, 2010, and the Boise Art Museum, 2000. In 2007 the artist was featured at the Villa e Collezione Panza, Varese, Italy, which commissioned a permanent major painting installation. Her paintings are in the permanent collections of the Albright-Knox Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Denver Museum of Art, the Museo d’ARTE Moderna e Contemporea, and numerous other public and private institutions.
Anne Appleby has received grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Western Arts Federation, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation; in addition, she is the recipient of the SECA Award from the San Francisco Museum of Art, the David S. McMillan Award from the San Francisco Art Institute, and the Northwest Biennial from the Portland Art Museum.
Anne Appleby
Magnolia, 2008
oil and wax on panel
68 x 44 inches
ABOUT James Chronister
James Chronister
Hygge (sf_m_1/20), 2020
oil on canvas
48 x 36 inches
In his paintings, James Chronister has produced a visual language that oscillates between personal and universal ideas of landscape and place. Based on his own photographs of his native state of Montana, Chronister renders images using thinned black oil paint on a white or neutral-colored ground, conveying space and depth utilizing mark-making akin to an intaglio print. In these recent works, the white ground becomes highlights, the opaque passages become shadows and cross-hatching becomes mid-tones. Unassuming but vastly complex in their subtlety, these scenes of nature depict an unseen environment that is both rich and rewarding of investigation.
Though reminiscent of such postmodern masters as Gerhard Richter and Luc Tuymans, Chronister has devised a painterly language much his own. Working with a tiny brush and one dark, neutral color on carefully hued, off-white canvases, Chronister achieves a startling range of tonality and depth. Viewed up-close, the paintings are constructed by a series of small, discrete marks: a binary system of data--like type on a page--that results in a surreal density of information. Step back, and the pictures cohere. The eye and mind struggle to reconcile the illusionism of these paintings with the narrow, restrained means of their technique.
-Jake Longstreth
Chronister earned his BFA (High Honors) as a University Scholar (Davidson Honors College) from the University of Montana, Missoula in 2001 and his MFA (with Distinction) from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco in 2004. Chronister was awarded the Fox and Miles Scholarships while at the University of Montana and the Richard K. Price Scholarship while at the California College of the Arts. In 2013, Chronister was awarded the Artist-In-Residence at the Lux Art Institute in Encinitas, California, which was accompanied by a survey of his work from the years 2009-2013. Chronister was nominated for the SECA Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2010 and 2018. In 2020 Chronister was a recipient of the Bay Area Visual Artist Production Relief Grant from Evergold Projects, San Francisco. Chronister has been a visiting artist at the California College of the Arts, the Lux Art Institute, and the San Francisco Art Institute.
Public collections of Chronister’s work include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Stanford Hospital, San Francisco International Airport, Berkeley Art Museum, and Pacific Film Archive, San Francisco General Hospital, Nion McEvoy Family Collection, Paul Wattis III Family Collection, and the Howard Tullman Family Collection.
The artist lives and works in Missoula, Montana.
