To launch the summer season, Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to present three discrete yet complementary exhibitions titled, Sea Creatures by Joni Sternbach, Dana Montlack & Liz Lantz. The separate exhibitions will feature selections from each artist’s work that examine life above, below and around the sea. They include one-of-a-kind tintype portraits of surfers (Sternbach), images of life beneath the deep (Montlack), and the lifestyles of women surfers around southern California (Lantz).
Sternbach’s 19th century wet-plate collodion method transforms surfers from around the U.S. and Australia into timeless portraits of modern seafarers alongside the primal landscapes they inhabit. Montlack dives below the sea to capture the life there, and then re-interprets them into painterly photo collages. Lantz poetically renders the details of women surfers’ lives: the trek to the sea, the back of a van, prized tattoos and amulets. The photographs in Sea Creatures by Joni Sternbach, Dana Montlack & Liz Lantz are of one conversation. Although using different photographic styles (which complements the experience of each), they blend the specifics of people and their environments with life around and below the ocean. They depict diversity in a place of exhilaration and solace. Taken together, these three distinct artists, who use the beach as a flash point for their subject matter, generate a more complete, lyrical picture of life by the seashore — a perfect group exhibition to inaugurate summer in San Diego. The photographs will be on view from June 11 – August 13, 2011. An Opening Reception with the artists will be held on June 11 (5 – 8 pm).
Dana Montlack’s work is highly organic. It starts with the actual physical world, but is transformed into sensual abstractions that never quite lose their original referent. Some are single images, others are made into diptychs or triptychs. Montlack loves to look through the surface of the natural world in order to see and understand its deeper mechanizations. She then aims her lens at it, using micro or macro lenses, shooting through a microscope, or through the use of a scanner, thereby magnifying, extending, or juxtaposing what she finds into imaginatively exquisite forms. Some of her photographs involve the layering of one transparent image over another; other images incorporate figures and architecture. “Through my work, I attempt to cut away the imagined borders between the inner world and outer world, the insignificant and significant,” writes the artist. “In doing so, the inextinguishable energy of life becomes visible, one which reveals and underscores the connectedness of all things.” Sea Creatures features her Water Series, which reconstructs the shells, sharks, flora and fauna of the ocean into colorful montages.
Montlack received her MFA at Otis Parsons College of Art and Design. She has exhibited in several museum and gallery exhibitions around the U.S. She has worked with designers on commissioned pieces, and is in several national public and private collections. Most recently her work was acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art/La Jolla. This summer, Montlack begins an artist residency at MCA, ending in a solo exhibition. She will generate works based on interpretations of the archives at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.