WHITNEY BEDFORD: Paintings
May 7 to June 18, 2005
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 7, 6-8 pm


D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present the first New York solo show of Los Angeles artist Whitney Bedford, who recently graduated with a degree in painting from the UCLA Master of Fine Arts program. Bedford will present a series of oil paintings of seascapes and shipwrecks derived from academic imagery of battle scenes.

Bedford uses her own mark making to bring the original source material of her paintings into the realm of the imaginary. Layered with both ink and oil paint, romantic scenes of destruction, calm at sea, and migrating birds are manipulated to the point of abstraction, showing only vestiges of her starting point.

Bedford aligns herself with the historical school of naval painting, “trying to update it, or even capsize it, in a way that only a hybrid of educations and living on the edge of the California coast can do.” For Bedford this is a way of claiming rigid, academic imagery and making it her own. She states: “Sometimes it is the paint itself that sinks the images. Other times, I push the paintings to reduce their images to abstract forms or landscapes that connote a different space, one aged by time and impossible to revisit.”

Whitney Bedford has had solo shows at Art:Concept, Paris, France and BEB Gallery, Providence, RI. She has participated in group exhibitions at Black Dragon Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Track 16 Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; and at the Rimbaud, Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels, Belgium. She will have a solo show at cherrydelosreyes gallery in Los Angeles, CA, in the fall of 2005.