June 19 - July 24, 2010

opening reception for the artists:
Saturday, June 19, 2010  5:30 - 8:30pm

Susan Barnett
Games & Icons

Games and Icons will be Dallas artist Susan Barnett’s second solo exhibition at Conduit Gallery. The large scale paintings, works on paper and single-channel video explore the recently popular number and logic puzzle, Sudoku. Barnett has created several series of paintings that illustrate single Sudoku games in various stages of completion using not numbers but colored squares. The effect is one of order and logic as the viewer moves from art work to art work, divining an absolute; as with the game of Sudoku, there can only be one right answer.

left: Susan Barnett, Sudoku 19 , 2010, oil on canvas, 36x36"
center: Susan Barnett, Sudoku 20 , 2010, oil on canvas, 36x36"
right: Susan Barnett, Sudoku 21 , 2010, oil on canvas, 36x36"

Ellen Berman
Every Day

Often noted as a sensual painter, Ellen Berman’s realist oil on panel paintings explore popular standards of perfection with a visual clarity so striking to the viewer that one wonders if such objects can exist outside of an idealized imagination. A variety of fruits and vegetables and the glass jars that contain them become both vehicles of the artist’s masterful hand and forever escape their innate temporal nature. Plums, cantaloupes, eggplants and melons cavort atop vibrant color fields and in raking light that help elevate the every day into crystalline beautiful still-life.

left: Ellen Berman, Three Red Plums, 2010, oil on canvas, 12x12"
right: Ellen Berman, Scissors, 2010, oil on canvas, 12x12"

PROJECT ROOM

Kia Neill

Through sculpture and drawing, Kia Neill creates simulations that blur nature into the fantastic. Extraordinary, almost extraterrestrial landscapes, such as caves, mollusks and coral reefs serve as the reference point for Neill’s graphite drawings and steel and mixed media sculptures. The works provoke the viewer’s imagination to mentally wander through a space they cannot occupy. 

Chicago, Illinois native Kia Neill received her BFA from The Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, OH and her MFA from The University of California, San Diego. Currently, she resides in Houston, TX. Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at Lawndale Art Center in Houston, and a solo exhibition at Women & Their Work in Austin Texas. Neill is a 2009 Houston Art Alliance Individual Artist Grant recipient. Neill is full-time faculty at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston Glassell School of Art and an instructor at the Houston Center for Photography.