TAG Gallery is proud to present My Stamp Collection, a series of intimately detailed sculptural paintings by Gary Polonsky. The collection includes works spanning all stages of Polonsky’s career, with pieces based on existing stamps from his original collection as well as more recent work inspired and birthed from Polonsky’s personal library of photographs.
Polonsky began his stamp collection after a visit to China in 1979 with his parents. “Nixon was President, and a gallon of gas was 86 cents. We traveled to Guangzhou (Canton) for the International Trade Fair. While there, wandering through the Tung Fa Hotel, I came upon two large displays of Chinese stamps. Each small image, and there were many, depicted the vast panorama of life in China. I bought the complete set and brought them home.“
In My Stamp Collection, Polonsky takes the opportunity to marry his roots in abstract expressionism with his more recent love for detail and “traditional” painting styles, resulting in works that carry a sense of playful experimentation with shape, size, material, and composition.
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TAG Gallery is proud to present Human / Nature, a series of long exposure, painted-light photographic works from artist Tom Wheeler. Wheeler juxtaposes imagery of vast, starry western landscapes with playful custom-built lighting tools such as acrylic rods, Lucite sheets, hula-hoops, and homemade plastic cubes, allowing for a sense of experimentation with different textures, shapes, and colors patterns.
Wheeler does not consider himself a landscape photographer working as a 3rd party observer, but rather as a photographer working “within” nature as a part of the scene, deliberately intruding into it. The work utilizes long-exposure experimentation to present human interaction with the natural world, tweaking both time and space. In this regard Wheeler’s images intend to showcase mankind’s fleeting but relevant existence within robust natural elements such as boulders, cliffs, deserts, and mountains. For example, regarding the prevalence of massive boulders in many images, the viewer is drawn into the solitary grandeur of them, almost personal, making the point that perhaps what seems important in life is merely relative. What we normally consider “just a rock” may be much more than that.
Wheeler does not intend to make a direct case for or against mankind’s intrusion or nature’s power over us, but rather a co-existence that acknowledges the intrinsic value in seeing the potential that both humanity and nature share in having the ability to create beauty or wreak havoc on the other. Humans manipulate nature to our own desire, and how we choose to do that reveals our connection to our natural environment.
