SHANNON RAE FINCKE: THE LONG CONVERSATION OF THE UNSAID

SOLO SHOW
MARCH 1-10, 2024

GRAND OPENING EVENT—INTRODUCING OUR NEW SPACE AND GALLERY DIRECTOR

OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY, MARCH 1, 6-9PM|POETRY READING AT 7PM|DJ 7:30-9PM

IN SPECIAL CONVERSATION WITH THE ARTIST’S FATHER, GARY FINCKE, POET & AUTHOR OF FICTION/NONFICTION

The Middle Room is pleased to present The Long Conversation of the Unsaid, a solo exhibition of recent paintings by LA-based artist Shannon Rae Fincke. This special, short-run solo exhibition, is of our Founder/Director’s work in honor of our gallery’s Grand Opening of our expansion and relocation to a brand new space in Atwater Village, and will be on view from March 1- March 10, 2024.

The Long Conversation of the Unsaid, is a culmination of new work by Fincke that focuses on the dialogue between herself and the materials—as well as in conversation with her father, Gary Fincke’s poetry, fiction and nonfiction—to create a bond between the image, color and spatial relationships, media, surface, and scale—be it intimate or encompassing. She has long found it meaningful to focus on the materiality of paint and surfaces in her exploration of emotional and psychological intensity. Fincke creates organic shifts between subject and environment—dissolving figurative elements into near abstraction to emphasize the ephemerality of memory, time, and conceptions of who we are, what has happened, and what might happen next within the fluctuating surfaces. She works on a piece until the imagery contrasts and connects with evolving, uncertain environments and surface qualities—until the composition feels alive in its tension, unity and meaning.

Shannon Rae Fincke is the Founder/Director of The Middle Room and Institute for Visual Arts, and is a Los Angeles-based artist who creates paintings on wood, clay, canvas and yupo paper. Her work explores ephemerality, interconnectivity, memories, emotions and psychology, and is influenced by motherhood and interpersonal and ancestral trauma. Fincke focuses on the alchemy of mixed water-based media and how it interacts with various substrates. She concentrates on control and intentionality versus the organic nature of the media. Her intimate and colorful figurative and landscape paintings range widely in scale and push the limits of materiality, surface, and abstraction. Fincke’s work is in private and public collections throughout the U.S., has been exhibited in solo and group shows at museums and galleries internationally, and has been featured in print, film, and television. Fincke attended the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts in high school, completed her undergraduate degree in Studio Art at Washington & Jefferson College and Susquehanna University, both in Pennsylvania, and The Marchutz School of Fine Arts in France, and earned her master’s in painting and art education with high honors at New York University, where she was the recipient of a Gallatin Dean’s Graduate Scholarship and studied intensively with Arnold Mesches.