Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Rebecca Shore: Part and Parcel.

In the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, Shore continues to explore her interests in visual form and composition. In a departure from her previous focus on silhouettes and abstracted patterns, Part and Parcel reflects an exploration of three-dimensionality and painterly illusion.

Shore’s gouache-on-paper and acrylic-on-panel paintings reflect an abiding interest in collecting and arranging images and shapes. An earlier body of work focused on reducing images of specific objects to flat shapes—with either telling or cryptic contours. The present exhibition builds on the same impulse by turning simple shapes into volumetric objects. Each painting is an arrangement of geometric blocks, architectural ornament, block letters as well as the occasional tank top or piece of toast.

These abstracted shapes are given body and substance with the application of traditional foreshortening. Mathematical, rather than ocular, perspective creates an illusory vision and has the effect of representing ideas of forms, rather than recognizable, realistic ones. Markers of space and depth are absent within Shore’s coolly monochromatic backgrounds. Nonsensical shapes float weightlessly and play with pictorial depth as they recede and protrude in and out of the artist’s flattened gouache surfaces.

Shore said in a statement, “A student, drawing a spiral shell for the first time, once asked me, quite puzzled, ‘But how do I make it go back?’ Her question stuck in my mind. Implicit was the assumption that making it ‘go back’ is what we do as artists. Why do we want to make images that trick us into believing that we are seeing something in three dimensions?”

Detached from the reality of gravity and space, these collections of shapes playfully tinker with the conventional approach to viewing painted illusions. By adding dimensionality and real object-ness to the absurd, the works in Part and Parcel challenge viewers’ visual relationships with non-real objects, ideas and patterns that so often take shape in paint.

“There is something magical about making an image that convinces us of a third dimension. It catches our eyes and captures our imaginations… In my paintings I use this trick to make my invented objects appear more ‘real.’ Pretending that they are convinces me, too,” Shore said.

Shore, a Chicago resident, received her BFA in 1981 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has worked as an adjunct professor since 1996. She is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships. Her work has been exhibited widely over the past three decades, including solo exhibitions at the Elmhurst Art Museum, the Chicago Cultural Center and the Herron Gallery at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis.

Eight Modern is open Monday through Saturday from 9:30 am. to 5:30 pm. For further information and image requests, contact Jaquelin Loyd at (505) 995-0231 or info@eightmodern.net.

Image: Rebecca Shore, 07, 2012, acrylic on panel, 18 x 16 inches