Population: Defaced

Joanne Artman Gallery, NYC

Identity…Identify…with a change of one letter, what we are becomes what we believe we are…transformed in a metamorphic moment at the hands of artist Ray Turner…if we learn to let go of this thing we call self, image becomes more real as features and colors collide into transient impermanence…Come and see if you can be changed by what you see, what you believe…become mutable…with artist Ray Turner at the JoAnne Artman Gallery: Chelsea, NYC.

“The current group of head paintings span ideas that started many years ago, and have manifested into these most recent paintings called Population Defaced. The nobility and the depravity that are part of our humanity and inhumanity, has continued to be a point of view. The face holds all the contradictions of our existence as a race, the good and the bad. You can tell who a person is in the first glance. There is a knowing that may take time to reveal itself fully, but it’s there in the face, in a moment’s notice. When we look at a painting of a person we participate in that knowing experience, the observer and the observed are revealed,” Ray Turner.

RAY TURNER (b. 1958, Stockton, California) lives in Pasadena, California, where he earned his BFA from Art Center College of Design, then worked for thirteen years as a professor of painting and drawing at Art Center. His work has been showcased in exhibits throughout the country as well as in museums and galleries in San Francisco, New York, Miami, Chicago, Boston, and Berlin.

Ray Turner’s work will inspire, provoke, engage and mesmerize. With visual perceptions always changing, peek behind the stories told and you’re sure to find the right artistic expression!