December 7, 2019 – January 19, 2020
Curated by Elena Mencarelli“Space is not a static, inert thing. Space is alive; space is dynamic; space is imbued with movement expressed by forces and counterforce; space vibrates and resounds with color, light, and form in the rhythm of life.” — Hans HoffmannMovement can manifest in many forms—slow, active, regular, wild, linear, syncopated. Even when we see no movement outside, there is still a fire dancing inside of us. Since it ensues transformation (it’s the arrow that propels man into the future), movement is life.
Ella Noe’s art is the fascinating encounter between two different forms of movement, apparently distant: the movement within the space and the movement on a canvas. As co-creator of a synesthetic experience, alongside dancers and musicians, Noe engages in a romantic conversation with dynamic energies. She is open to an improvisational dialogue with the participants. None of the participants know how the piece will develop nor how it will conclude. Their trust in the atavistic force of movement will guide them through a path built on unexpected gestures.
Colors and lines impress the dialectic forms of movement onto the canvas, in an attempt to record the impermanent art of dance. While portraying the dancers’ movement, Noe pours the emptiness and the fullness of space into the bi-dimensional experience of live painting.
The cross-pollination of the arts manifesting within Noe’s works suggests that a collective dialogue is more healing than a monologue, that feeling is more effective than listening, and that the experiences we live include many main characters, beside us. Finally, the sense of connection is the sound that keeps our own life moving on a shared stage.
OPENING RECEPTION:
Saturday, December 7 @ 5:00pm
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Ella Noe was born to Romanian parents in Israel and raised in four different countries in South America. As an adult, she lived in Spain, England, and Romania, finally landing in San Francisco 16 years ago. Her connection to the Bay Area has been critical to her art. Her working experience includes youth from a wide diversity of backgrounds—from Bedouin children in Israel to adolescent orphans in Romania. In the Bay Area, Noe has worked as a photography and art teacher for organizations such as MOCHA, MCCLA, and Red Poppy Art House. She was part of the San Francisco Studio School of Painting, Drawing, Photography and Mixed Media for over 10 years.
Noe believes our experiences in life shape who we are as artists. The search for movement in her work and the need to piece together elements from different areas to create a new reality comes from a constant moving from place to place and the disquiet of not having roots anywhere. This led Noe to have a very rich life in experience, and also constant questioning of belonging, of a search for depth, of connection of creating something that is greater than the sum of all the parts and all the experiences.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My passion in life is creating movement, which is quite a paradox for an artist that works on the static medium of paint and canvas. I also love dancing myself, and my time dancing has inspired my work as a painter. I have been fascinated by dancers and wanted to experiment with capturing the energy and movement of dance onto the canvas. I had no rigid vision for an outcome, I just wanted to co-create an experiment in movement and expression, and invited a dancer into my studio to play with the idea of generating a conversation that would bounce off the dance floor onto my canvas and back.
We listened to each other’s sounds: music, yes, but also words, gestures, brushstrokes, and fed from one another’s expression and energy to learn about where movement generates, why we long to express it, and the dialectic between the paint and the pose, the pigment, and prancing.
Elena Mencarelli is an artist and freelance curator. After having graduated with a master’s in visual arts from the University of Bologna (Italy) in 2016, she moved to San Francisco and has since collaborated with Red Poppy Art House Exhibitions. She had previously worked for gallery60six in SF, artist Anne Nowak, Spazio Testoni, and Spazio Nour. From 2013 to 2014, Mencarelli was the artistic director of Make Your Mark Art Gallery in Melbourne, AU. Her work was published in Make Your Mark Art Magazine (2013) and in the catalogue of the dual exhibition of M. R. Ballestra and Alan Sonfist—A Better Landscape (2016). Mencarelli is also the author of the essay Maria Rebecca Ballestra, A Phenomenology of Posthumanism (Mimesis Editore, 2019). Learn more here.
