Personal Vistas: New Work by Kim Flora

Reception: Friday, February 5, 2010
Exhibition continues through February 27, 2010

PAC Gallery is pleased to announce Personal Vistas: New Work by Kim Flora. Flora is an emerging Cincinnati artist and a 2008 recipient of the City of Cincinnati Arts Grant. The latest paintings embody two distinct aesthetics: the minimal and tranquil, and the large and turbulent. Wax or encaustic painting is an ancient medium Flora utilizes to examine contextual elements of contemporary painting. Attracted to the smell, texture, transparency and malleability of sun-bleached beeswax, Flora finds it accommodates the immediacy of her working style by lending itself to a process that is both additive and subtractive in nature, and can be approached, not only as painting, but also in a sculptural manner.

Along with heating wax and applying paint, her process involves generating and collecting imagery both original and found, and manipulating it digitally. Flora's process-oriented paintings, fragments are scanned, copied transferred collaged, de-collaged, drawn, painted and laboriously scraped, resulting in works that record the history of their own making.

The dualities that exist in painting are what challenge and fascinate Flora, who uses painting as a means to better understand, interpret, and express the world, while inviting others to bring their own insight and experiences to her fragmented narratives, luminous fields, and personal vistas. Working intuitively, the artist approaches each piece as a new opportunity, as well as an unconscious manifestation of all of the other works that came before it. By working in this manner, made popular by Twentieth Century Surrealist and Abstract Expressionists, Flora strives to reach an emotional or aesthetic realization that might not exist if otherwise planned.