Exploring The Intersection Of Art And Technology At New York Gallery, Elisa Contemporary Art

Online, May 19, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Elisa Contemporary Art is pleased to present our new Riverdale gallery show, Art + Technology opening on May 20th and running through August 20st.

This exhibit explores the intersection of the Internet, Social Media and Digital Technologies in today's contemporary Art. Please join us for an opening reception on Sunday May 22nd from 3-6pm.

The exhibit includes a series of paintings by emerging Turkish artist, Yasemin Kackar-Demirel which bring in text and conversations directly from her Facebook pages. These are combined with vibrant, mixed media and fragmented landscapes.

According to Yasemin:
"In this body of paintings, I am inspired by the written communication on Facebook, a virtual social networking website, also known as one of the symbols of popular culture today. I chose to focus on the text to examine the ways to make this ephemeral, fleeting written data lasting and perhaps permanent by means of re-channeling and re-presenting them in a visual format. I was also interested in exploring how these realities typed in virtual space would survive by means of my handwriting when adapted to the pictorial space, and where this process would lead me.

I aim for my viewers to seek clues that are related to both the natural and the constructed world. Such encountered tendencies will evoke a lyrical, vibrant, fragile and ambiguous place that rests somewhere in between representation and abstraction."

The exhibit will also feature work by:
* Los Angeles "Flow" Artist, Kimber Berry
* Canadian Digital Artist, Franco DeFrancesca
* Visual Innovator, Rosalind Schneider

What: Art + Technology
When: May 20 - August 20, 2011
Opening Reception: Sunday, May 22, 3-6pm
Closing Party: Tuesday, August 16, 6-8pm
Where: Elisa Contemporary Art Gallery, 5622 Mosholu Avenue, Riverdale NY
Gallery Hours: Friday/Saturday 10 am - 6pm, and by Appointment (Days/Evenings/Sunday).

A portion of all gallery sales is donated to charities helping underserved children heal through art.

Meet our artists:
Kimber Berry
Kimber is an emerging artist based in Los Angeles, who is part of the "Flow Movement." Her artwork is vibrant and dynamic mixed media combining acrylics, resins and digitally altered photographs of her paint-strokes. As a native of LA, Kimber loves to blur the line between what is real and what is illusion.

She has received a lot of positive attention from art critics and curators on the West Coast and has been featured in solo and group shows with the Lowe Gallery in LA and Atlanta. Her work was recently highlighted by curator Peter Frank in Art LTD magazine, and in late 2009 was featured in the Edenistic Divergence exhibit at the Riverside Museum in California.

Yasemin Kackar Demirel
Yasemin is one of our new emerging artists. She was born in Istanbul, received her MFA in DeKalb (IL), and
currently lives in New York. Her work is a fragmented and reconstructed journey through the places she has
lived and traveled, both real and imagined.

Her most recent works incorporate text from her Facebook page. According to Yasemin: ""I'm influenced by my
physical and emotional encounters of places, and in my works I depict my reactions to the several phenomena housed in these places. In my current series of works, I am inspired by Facebook. I gather texts from my homepage on Facebook and write them over and over with a gestural manner in fast pace so that they start to form a motif ."

Yasemin has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in the US and Turkey. Her work is also in the Ipek-
Ahmet Merey Foundation in Istanbul, Turkey.

Franco DeFrancesca
Franco DeFrancesca is a native of Toronto. He has been a multidisciplinary artist since 2004, exhibiting his art and art projects ranging from sculpture/installation, photography, digital art, and sound art. His work explores notions of media, technology, art history, and pop culture.

With his recent "Plasma Gel", series of digital/mixed media "picture objects", Franco investigates the links between art and memory, history and technology. The Plasma Gels series use digital imaging as a means to navigate the territory between photography and painting, mixing references to photography, painting and display technology.

Visualizing ephemeral and elusive environments that allude to a non-delineated, but deep pictorial space, these works recall the colour-field and the elemental geometry of mid to late twentieth century post painterly abstraction, minimalism and op-art.

Franco's work has exhibited in Canada and the United States and is included in various private and corporate collections throughout North America.

Rosalind Schneider
Rosalind Schneider has been at the forefront of innovative landscapes since the 1970's. She was the first artist to
show "Film as Art" at the Hirshhorn museum at the Smithsonian in 1974. According to Rosalind "I have been
interested in the translation, abstraction and restructuring of natural phenomena since the beginning of my artistic voyage as a painter".

Her expansive and prolific body of work spans over 40 years as an artist exploring the nature of energy and our natural environment. Her singular vision has taken her on a creative journey that has pushed the boundaries of visual media from painting to sculpture to film, video and digital media. Her quest has led to the mastery and fusion of these various media to create an original and unique visual language for the forces of nature.

Rosalind's work has been shown worldwide -- throughout the US, Europe and Israel. Her video work has been
part of exhibits at the Whitney Museum, Chelsea Art Museum and is now part of the collection at the Museum of Modern Art (NY).

For more information, visit the website at www.ElisaContemporaryArt.com or contact: Lisa@ElisaArt.com or 212.729.4974.

The Riverdale Gallery is located at 5622 Mosholu Avenue, Riverdale NY 10471. Gallery Hours: Friday/Saturday 10am - 6pm and by Appointment (Days, Evenings, Sunday).