Open Mind Art Space is pleased to announce an exclusive online exhibition, Found Moments, featuring works by North Carolina-based artist, Jann Pollard. The exhibition launches today, May 12th, on Artsy.net, and will remain open until June 1st.
View exhibition here: https://www.artsy.net/show/open-mind-art-space-found-moments
Found Moments is a collection of contemporary paintings in oil, acrylic and watercolor by Jann Pollard. Pollard’s subject matter revisits architectural and landscape views culled from her extensive travels, especially throughout Europe — but her deeper subject is the atmospheric sensation of the places, and even more so, the memories that accrue both to those enchanting historical places, and to the mind and soul of the artist. Pollard’s deepest wish is to impart these qualities to her audience.
"My love of art and travel, combined with a study of old world architecture is a never-ending inspiration for me. I see light, color, shapes and a moment in time that evoke a feeling that I want to capture in my paintings and share with my viewer." - Jann Pollard, artist
In her upcoming online exhibition, Found Moments, Jann Pollard’s scenes are often depopulated, yet one feels the residual presence of centuries of humanity; fields and stones, bricks and rivers, bridges and dwellings, all of it saturated with stories, millions of them, and then her own, and through her, ours. Pollard’s works in oil, acrylic, and watercolor demonstrate mastery of technique and the clear ability for faithful renderings, but what she does is the opposite of sight-seeing. Instead, Pollard offers the rich textures of daily life, elevating through the energy of her attentions, the unremarked-upon moments that make a place real.
In her piece titled Secret Canal, Pollard paints a scene of a lone gondola gliding by peacefully through a canal in Venice, Italy. In another piece titled Entering the Louvre, Paris, Pollard recreates the moment she entered the Louvre Museum in Paris, France by painting the silhouettes of other museum-goers against the sunlit reflection of the Louvre Pyramid in the background. The exhibition offers an exclusive view of the unique places and found moments Pollard has discovered during her journeys as a wayfaring artist.
Increasingly, Pollard is pushing the boundaries of her mediums, utilizing traditional paints to pursue a more modern, post-photographic aesthetic. Pollard’s newest work uses proximity, economies of scale, cropping, forced perspective, and other choices that highlight the abstract character of the intersecting surfaces and light sources she captures. For her, painting is a way of paying closer attention to the world, and the memories thus cemented are more durable than any photograph. As the late John Berger said, “The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.” Jann Pollard is happy to take that burden up again.
Jann Pollard received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and has studied under numerous, well-known artists. She was a popular teacher of plein-air painting workshops in Europe, Mexico and the United States, and has recently retired from teaching to allow more time for painting. Pollard is a Signature Member of the National Watercolor Society, Southern Watercolor Society and California Watercolor Society. She was featured in International Artist magazine in 1999 and Watercolor magazine in 2012, and won the Winsor Newton Merchandise Award in 2016. She also served as the cover artist for the lauded Karen Brown travel books series for several years. Her extensive works are in private and corporate collections, internationally. Jann and her husband, Gene, reside in Charlotte, North Carolina.