Susan Jamison & Susana Raab

Irvine Contemporary announces two concurrent solo exhibitions:

Opening reception with the artists: Saturday, March 27, 6:00-8:00PM

Susan Jamison
Swallowtail: New Paintings

Irvine Contemporary is pleased to present Swallowtail, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Susan Jamison. This is the artist's third solo exhibition with Irvine Contemporary. Opening reception with the artist: Saturday, March 27, 6:00-8:00PM.

Working with egg tempera on panel, Susan Jamison reflects on many traditions of imagery to create dream-like portraits and figures that question gender conventions. Like dream images and memories, the paintings traverse the realms of desires, fantasies, and myths, while maintaining a playful innocence. Reflecting back on sources like fairy tales, Renaissance portraiture, botanical illustration, Persian miniatures, and Kama Sutra manuscript paintings, Jamison composes startlingly original female figures adorned with vibrant pink embroidery patterns and heads exposed with early medical illustrations. Her imagined characters, male and female, are often surrounded by symbolic and sympathetic birds, animals, butterflies, insects, and domestic objects that reference culturally familiar stories and images. The animals, plants, and objects are chosen for their symbolic meanings, and provide a new feminist context for the iconic female figures.

About the Artist
Susan Jamison has an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has exhibited widely in Washington, New York, Richmond, VA, and international art fairs, and her works are in many prestigious private collections. Susan Jamison lives and works in Roanoke, VA.

Susana Raab
American Vernacular: Photographs

Irvine Contemporary is delighted to present Susana Raab's first solo exhibition in Washington, DC, American Vernacular. The exhibition will feature a selection of the artist's photographs that represent her distinctive approach to capturing the often overlooked places, people, and events in daily American life. This selection of images are from the artist’s two long-term projects: Consumed: Fast Food in the US, and Off-Season: America at Leisure. The Smithsonian Museum of American History has recently acquired ten photographs from these two photo series by Susana Raab for the museum's permanent collection. Opening reception with the artist: Saturday, March 27, 6:00.

About the artist
Susana Raab is a documentary and fine art photographer based in Washington, DC. She began her career as a photojournalist in Washington, DC, and worked for the New York Times Washington bureau for four years, where she was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of a shooting on Capitol Hill. She then continued her graduate studies and received her MA from the Ohio University School of Visual Communications. Her photographs have received national recognition, including awards from the White House News Photographers Association, The Ernst Haas/Golden Light Awards, the Lucie Awards, and the Center (formerly Santa Fe Center for Photography). Her work has been published in American Photo, Photo District News, The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, and Photo Espana. Her work has been widely exhibited, both nationally and internationally, including the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in Madrid, and the Noorderlicht Photofestival in the Netherlands. In 2009 she exhibited her work with a workshop in Shanghai, China, and received an Artist Fellowship from the Washington, DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities.