May 1 – 31, 2013 digital billboards throughout the city will continue to display this rotating public art project along with advertising. The Highway Gallery – a city wide public art campaign – will feature imagery by local artist CHRISTIE THOMPSON HOLECHEK, momentarily transforming space typically used for commerce.

Artist Statement

Maps are visual indicators of time and reflective of the changing landscape. To render a map depicting today’s fluid landscape, one must enlist a tool, pigment and surface; and require complete focus and observation of surrounding stimuli in space. The body, intrinsically connected through a haptic drawing process, can automatically respond as a conduit transferring felt sensations into dynamic mark making systems of visual form. As the material is left behind on a drawing’s surface by the artist’s hand, a new map is produced, and the documentation of today’s multi-dimensional landscape is recorded.

CHRISTIE THOMPSON HOLECHEK is a third generation Jacksonville, Florida native. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting and Drawing from the University of North Florida and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Interdisciplinary Studio and Theory from Maine College of Art, Portland, Maine. For the past 15 years, Christie’s ongoing efforts have been dedicated to arts administration, education and advocacy while maintaining an active studio practice within her community.

Since May of 2010, Christie has held the position of Art in Public Places Program Manager for the City of Jacksonville under the Cultural Council. Christie champions her position as liaison to the City by facilitating local public art initiatives between Jacksonville’s professional artists and public and private agencies in an effort to provide the City with sustainable and permanent creative solutions to activate downtown revitalization efforts rapidly at the street level.

Clear Channel Outdoor Jacksonville

digital billboard locations

Florida Mining Gallery, a division of Harbinger, presents contemporary, forward thinking works of art to an engaged audience.

Harbinger offers sign program solutions to customers nationwide with core capabilities including volume signage fabrication, installation, conversion, and maintenance. Since 2010 Harbinger has offered clients an unparalled LED Retrofit Conversion Program for exterior signs including double face pylons and monuments using their patented LED Retrofit Kit. Founded in 1962, Harbinger has served some of the world’s most recognizable brands including 7-Eleven, Gate Petroleum, CircleK, Baptist Health Systems, the Jacksonville Jaguars, Baker Industries, and Edwin Watts Golf.

Highway Gallery CHRISTIE THOMPSON HOLECHEK Press Release May 2013

THE HIGHWAY GALLERY

2nd Annual Call to Artists: a juried exhibition featuring 12 artists

Opening Reception: August 2,2013

On view until September 31,2013 on Clear Channel Outdoor digital billboards throughout Jacksonville

On view at Harbinger’s Florida Mining Gallery

Florida Mining, Harbinger and Clearly Jacksonville announce
The 2nd Annual exhibition and Call to Artists for THE HIGHWAY GALLERY

CALL TO ARTISTS:

Fine artists are requested to submit works to show on the Clear Channel Outdoor Jacksonville Digital Billboards. Up to twelve (12) artists will be selected; one (1) work of art per artist will be shown on the digital billboards. At least one (1) work of original art and up to four (4) works will be shown and listed for sale in Florida Mining Gallery.

Works must be submitted in the proper, proportional format (as indicated) for best end results and for judging purposes. Imagery deemed to be inappropriate will not be selected. Each artwork selected will also be shown on the digital billboards throughout the year.

Submission requirements:

1. jpeg file

2. RGB color

3. Your image should be no smaller than 350 pixels tall x 1400 pixels wide OR 3.5” tall x 14” wide @ 100 dpi. The original artwork can be any size, however, the end product will be displayed on a digital billboard. Make sure the image you send will fit proportionally within the dimensions given. If your image doesn’t meet the required image size your submission will disqualified.

4. Each artist must submit between three and six images

5. Each image titled: artistlastname.artworktitle.jpeg

• Example: Picasso.guernica.jpeg

6. Unformatted word document including the following, one page preferred:

• Artist contact information

• Image list to include: artist name, title, actual dimensions of piece, medium

• Artist statement about the work submitted

• Artist bio

7. E-mail submissions, any questions to: mallory@floridamininggallery.com

8. Deadline for submissions: Wednesday, June 19, 5pm

THE HIGHWAY GALLERY – a city wide public art campaign – momentarily transforms space typically used for commerce. Beginning Friday, July 19 and continuing for one month until August 19 Clear Channel Outdoor digital billboards throughout the city will display works from 12 artists selected through a juried process. Following August 19, works from the selected artists will rotate throughout the year depending on billboard availability.

THE HIGHWAY GALLERY is seen millions of times throughout the year by visitors and residents alike, reaching people of all backgrounds. The public art project showcases the city of Jacksonville as a forward thinking location and allows regional artists the opportunity to participate in a public art project offering generous exposure.

Jurors for THE HIGHWAY GALLERY 2013 include:

Adelaide Corey-Disch, Gallery Manager, J. Johnson Gallery

Anthony Edwards, Real Estate Representative/ Digital Media Coordinator, Clear Channel Outdoor Jacksonville

Wesley Grissom, Assistant Director, J. Johnson Gallery

Christie Holechek, Public Art Program Manager, City of Jacksonville

Highway Gallery ANNUAL CALL TO ARTISTS 2013

Harbinger and Florida Mining Gallery are pleased to announce POST, an exhibition featuring street artist Swoon and the art collaborative MILAGROS. Swoon is highly regarded and internationally known for her collaborative and community activist based works. “Alden,” over six feet tall, is one of the works featured in the exhibition and is of Swoon’s grandfather, who is expected to be in attendance at the April 4th  opening. MILAGROS was recently awarded their first public art project in downtown Jacksonville, Florida as a part of a larger urban renewal initiative. Works presented by MILAGROS in this exhibition will primarily be sitespecific installation pieces, mostly made from materials mined and repurposed from the Harbinger recycling bins.

Swoon is a street artist born in New London, Connecticut, and raised in Daytona Beach, Florida. She moved to New York City at age nineteen, and specializes in life-size wheatpaste prints and paper cutouts of figures. Swoon, real name Caledonia Dance Curry, studied painting at the Pratt institute in Brooklyn and started doing street art around 1999.

Swoon regularly pastes works depicting people, often her friends and family, on the streets in various places around the world. Usually, pieces are pasted on uninhabited locations such as abandoned buildings, bridges, fire escapes, water towers and street signs. Her work is inspired by both art historical and folk sources, ranging from German Expressionist wood block prints to Indonesian shadow puppets.

MILAGROS was founded in 2008 by Felici Asteinza and Joey Fillastre, and is a Florida based collective comprised of a varied and ambitious cast of artists and musicians. The objective of MILAGROS is to reinforce individual strength through collaboration. Mutual respect and trust allow for a free environment for evolving creation. Elements of play and spontaneity culminate in surprise and elation.

Both Asteinza and Fillastre are native Floridians hailing from Walton County and Lakeland, respectively. They met at Florida State University where they both received their Bachelors Degrees in Studio Art. In Tallahassee they began painting together and working with their collaborators: Courtney Asztalos, Alex Fogt, Jourdan Joly, Pat Lane, Colleen Matthes and too many more to name. In 2010 they moved to Gainesville and co-founded the Church of Holy Colors with Evan Galbicka. Currently they are road dogs, traveling wherever miracles are needed.

MILAGROS has exhibited at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans and the Freedom Tower in Miami, to name a few. They also have permanent murals in Brooklyn and St. Petersburg and were featured artists at SXSW and Art Basel 2012. They are currently working on their first public art commission in downtown Jacksonville where they will have a permanent mural at the entrance of the Spark District.

Synchronicities and serendipity birth a new mysticism, based in the celebration of growth.

Images shown left to right: Swoon, “Thalassa,” Screenprint on Mylar with coffee stain and hand painting; MILAGROS, “5,” mixed media

Florida Mining Gallery, a division of Harbinger, presents contemporary, forward-thinking works of art to an engaged audience.

Harbinger offers turnkey sign program solutions to multi-location customers nationwide with core capabilities including volume signage fabrication, installation, conversion, and maintenance. Since 2010 Harbinger has offered clients an unparalled LED Retrofit Conversion Program for exterior signs including double face pylons and monuments using their patented LED Retrofit Kit. Founded in 1962, Harbinger has served some of the world’s most recognizable brands including 7-Eleven, Gate Petroleum, CircleK, Baptist Health Systems, the Jacksonville Jaguars, Baker Industries, and Edwin Watts Golf.

POST Swoon and Milagros Press Release April 4, 2013

April 1 through 30, 2013 digital billboards throughout the city will continue to display this rotating public art project along with advertising. The Highway Gallery – a city wide public art campaign – will feature imagery by local artist JASON FORT, momentarily transforming space typically used for commerce.

Jason Fort: Rorschach 10 will be seen millions of times throughout the month of April by visitors and residents alike, reaching people of all backgrounds, ages, and races.

JASON FORT started his artistic career over 20 years ago in Jacksonville, FL. He is a self taught artist/ designer/ architect/ inventor. Through his career his art and contemporary furnishings have been shown in galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Jacksonville, Florida. In the 1990s he served as the exhibition and lighting designer for the Jacksonville Art Museum. Jason was also an early pioneer, opening a “cutting edge” art gallery in Springfield in 1992. This gallery featured local artists and internationally known artists such as Andy Warhol, Jerry Uelsmann, Maggie Taylor, and Enzo Torcoletti to name a few.

Fort’s drawings are inspired by science, nature, technology and psychology. His recent works have been generated from the deconstruction of vector drawings of inventions he has developed. Despite being rooted in mathematical formulations, the drawings are quite abstract. Some pieces contain millions of individual polygons giving them immense detail and a three dimensional quality. His limited edition prints range in size from 8 x 8 inches to as large as 20 x 20 feet.

Project Description:

These billboard images are part of a series entitled Rorschach 10.

They are an interpretive update to Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach’s famous 10 inkblots which he developed in 1921 as a basis of psychological evaluation.

The Rorschach 10 series builds on the inkblot concept. The mirrored image drawings contain a level of complexity far beyond the original 10 inkblots. This level of complex abstraction allows a much greater range of individual interpretation of each image. The work is representative of the visual overload we have become accustomed to and even crave in today’s digital world.

Jason Fort’s Website

Clear Channel Outdoor Jacksonville

Digital billboard locations

Florida Mining Gallery, a division of Harbinger, presents contemporary, forwardthinking works of art to an engaged audience.

Harbinger offers turnkey sign program solutions to multi-location customers nationwide with core capabilities including volume signage fabrication, installation, conversion, and maintenance. Since 2010 Harbinger has offered clients an unparalled LED Retrofit Conversion Program for exterior signs including double face pylons and monuments using their patented LED Retrofit Kit. Founded in 1962, Harbinger has served some of the world’s most recognizable brands including 7-Eleven, Gate Petroleum, CircleK, Baptist Health Systems, the Jacksonville Jaguars, Baker Industries, and Edwin Watts Golf.

Highway Gallery JASON FORT Press Release April 2013

Florida Mining Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of three large format triptych works by GEOFF MITCHELL (b. 1971 Gulfport, MS; lives and works in Los Angeles) from his recent exhibition at the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art which closed in November 2012. Mitchell received a BFA in Painting from Western Michigan University and an MFA in Visual Studies from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. After living in Chicago for several years, he moved to California in 2005 where he founded White Apple Studios in Los Angeles.

Artists Statement:

As a guide map for how one could approach my work, I often like to tell a story from my childhood to create an analogy. When I was a young boy of five or six years old, my family was living in a trailer park in the deep south. Behind the last trailer of the front row, there was a narrow dirt trail that ran alongside the property fence. One day while playing on that trail, I discovered a faint and peculiar grey handprint on the back of the metal trailer. The handprint appeared to depict elongated fingers and a small palm that melted away at the wrist. The nails were abnormally long, grotesque and eerie.

There was a palpable connection in my mind as to where this handprint had come from. At my grandmothers house, there was a childrens bible that I would look at when visiting her. On page one hundred and one there was an illustration of Lucifer being cast from heaven. He was a brown creature with a partially human form and a long thin tail. His legs mutated into hooves instead of feet. He had webbed wings of a bat that resembled semi-transparent membranes. Much of his body was covered in fur and his ears came to a tipped point. He had dark arched eyebrows with well-defined cheekbones and lips. He was almost handsome in the face. Then, there were his hands. He had long unkempt nails in the image. His nails matched exactly to those of the handprint behind the trailer. In my childs mind, this strange impression on the back of the trailer was the handprint of the devil.

This pivotal event of my childhood is a classic example of the illusions and misperceptions that characterize the sensation of pareidolia. This experience is defined as a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus, often an image or sound, being perceived as significant.

Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds or hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse. Our man in the moon or the moon rabbit of Asian cultures can also be considered a product of this phenomenon. It is an idea that has driven my endeavors as a visual artist and it is an excellent place to begin when talking about my work. The paintings I make do not appear abstract, and in reality they cannot be. I use representational imagery within each work to a varying degree. What may be considered peculiar is how I use representational imagery in a free associative and purely intuitive manner. I mix and layer images together in a way that is reminiscent of an abstract painter layering color. And I always find it fascinating to see what will happen in the amalgamation.

I choose imagery based on a number of considerations including the mood I am striving to create, compositional concerns and the texture of the work. Most importantly however, it is an affinity for what I find beautiful and a sheer curiosity about the eccentric associations these disparate elements attach to one another that drives me.

Over time, I have become increasingly aware that as an artist I make it simultaneously easy and complicated for my audience. My paintings are often perplexing in that they present questions with no explanations. Yet they are simple when one discovers that the questions have no right answers. I see myself as the designer of an expanse of clouds. Each member of my audience will find their own images and stories within these clouds; and discover their own handprint.