First Friday’s ARTScrawl led me to The Art Salon at Inspire in Downtown Albuquerque. The idea for this urban salon is unique. Designed for an intimate and comfortable experience by offering visitors avant-garde hair design, the Inspire Salon also provides an appreciation and understanding of art and its role in society through direct engagement with original artwork.
Tara Massarsky, the featured artist for June and July, opened last Friday with her exhibition Conveyance. Massarsky consciously develops her own visual language by using a restricted palette or through extravagant abstraction. She finds that these ideas are best developed through a series of paintings, allowing the viewer to witness the X and Y of creativity. This concept can be seen in her series, Solve et Coagula, which allows the viewer to “tap into places of stillness and uncomfortableness, places one naturally resists tampering with.”
Massarsky has been influenced by great artists such as Dorothea Tanning, Arshile Gorky, Egon Schiele, Ad Reinhardt, Max Ernst, Willem De Kooning, and Adolph Gottlieb for their mastery of disinclination, passion and knowledge of art making. She also admires the minds and earnestness of the American Abstract Artists for their geometric adherence to a picture’s internal structure. Massarsky was academically trained at The Art Student's League in New York City and The Corcoran School of Art in Washington D.C. She has been exhibiting her artwork since 1988 and has numerous works in private collections in New York, California, and New Mexico. In May 2012, Massarsky was awarded Best of Show at the New Mexico Showcase Juried Exhibit at 516 Arts.
Conveyance will hang through July 31 inside The Art Salon at Inspire, 423 Fourth Street, SW, Albuquerque, NM, 505.242.4549, inspireartsalon.com. Get acquainted with the evolving visual language of Tara Massarsky at the Artist Talk and Closing, July 28 from 7:00 - 9:00 PM, taramassarsky.com.
