Opening Reception: May 6, 6 - 8 pm

Octavia Art Gallery is pleased to present At the Threshold: Works on Paper by Regina Scully and Iva Gueorguieva. While utilizing different approaches, both artists create imagined or illusionistic spaces, exploring both landscape and the figure.

Regina Scully approaches her works on paper in the same way that she begins a canvas. With intuitive mark-making, she uses paint to both spontaneously and meticulously layer brushstroke and color to create imagined environments. Space is divided up and considered from different perspectives, and there are suggestions of figures and objects as well as references to water, land, city and other-worldly places. Different types of spaces are linked together with line, pattern, staccato-like dots, thick bold strokes, and poured paint. The result is a painted mindscape that invites the viewer in to meander and explore in his or her mind, while attention is also brought back to an appreciation of paint, color, and brushstroke in and of itself. This exhibition features a selection of paper pieces from Scully’s Translation and Passage series, as well as works from a new series inspired by her recent exploration of Japanese landscapes and by the paintings created for her current exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art (April 6-October 10).

Iva Gueorguieva’s works range from intricate ink and watercolor compositions to heavily collaged surfaces where the image is constructed from fragments of paper and muslin. The former reveal her attention and interest in narrative and the figure. There are legible characters and clear references to landscapes. In the case of the latter, she abandons the confines of the traditional rectangle and the figure becomes the space. The glowing light of the papers is undone and sacrificed in order to explore the sculptural possibilities of paper. The Man series, which began with Crooked Man, was inspired by H.C. Westermann’s Coffin for a Crooked Man, which left a profound impact on Gueorguieva’s imagination. The constructing of a flat man out of scraps of paper and muslin compelled her to explore the possibility of the shape being expressive of the bodily gesture. It is the tension between physical space and illusionistic space that Gueorguieva explores in her drawings which in many ways defines the negotiations and explorations underway in both her paintings and sculptures.

Regina Scully lives and works in New Orleans and maintains a daily practice in her Bywater studio. She was born in Norfolk, Virginia and received her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the University of New Orleans. She has exhibited at C24 Gallery, NY; Octavia Art Gallery, LA and TX; Opera Gallery, Geneva; Prospect1.5, LA; Prospect.2, LA. Scully’s work is included in the Microsoft Art Collection, New Orleans Museum of Art, Capital One Art Collection, and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation Collection.

Iva Gueorguieva was born in Bulgaria and currently resides in Los Angeles. She received an MFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 2000. Recent solo shows include Ameringer/McEnery/Yohe; ACME, CA; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, CA; Frederic Snitzer, FL; Galerie Stefan Roepke, Cologne, Germany; Luther W. Brady Art Gallery, DC; Bravin Lee Programs, NY; Samson Projects, MA; Stichting Outline, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and Pomona Museum of Art, CA. Her work is included in many public and private collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; The Museum of Contemporary Art, CA; University Art Museum California State University Long Beach, CA; Art, Design and Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA; and the Pomona College Musuem of Art, Claremont, CA.