Natasha Sweeten and David McDonald
May 16 – June 15, 2024
Satchel Projects is pleased to present a 2-person exhibition of new works by Natasha Sweeten and David McDonald, on view from May 16 through June 15, 2024. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, May 16 from 6–8 PM.
Coming together from opposite coasts, the works in this exhibition share an improvisational spirit and a direct, responsive engagement with material and process. Rather than following a predetermined plan or sketch, the artists participate in a considered yet spontaneous dialogue with their chosen medium, as each action generates the next action, until the work evolves a resonant sense of presence and its own individual, distinctive identity. Intimate in scale, these works invite perceptual encounters, speaking eloquently in a material language that is both enigmatic and compelling.
Natasha Sweeten’s paintings reflect a dialectical approach to process, an extension of inner conversations and thought patterns playing out as paint is moved around the surface. Sweeten has said “there’s a wonderful parallel between fiction and abstract painting” -- indeed the paintings are their own narratives of the artist’s making, taken from what she’s reading/experiencing/listening to in a given moment. Largely eschewing paintbrushes, Sweeten’s tools are rags, razor blades and palette knives, allowing the interplay of soft and hard edges, scumbling and glazing in an improvisational, instinctual call-and-response. Evoking rather than spelling-out, the resulting paintings create a space for the viewer to step in and linger, an enigmatic place to “wonder into.” In Sweeten’s practice, a painting has to “live a life” over the course of its making, to accumulate a depth of experience before it is fully realized.
David McDonald’s Big Country series continues his practice of sand-cast sculptures. The pieces evolved via an intuitive process of building form-on-form, one leading to the next. Like phonemes, the forms combine in a parts-to-the-whole relationship, resulting in a new, complete entity. McDonald is interested in making work that has an “intrinsic quality,” the way a tree is only “itself” and doesn’t represent something outside of itself. A practitioner of Zen, McDonald seeks to “tap into areas that are before the rationally thinking mind.” Getting there involves a combination of deliberate action and chance, and an embrace of the unknown. In the casting process, everything happens in reverse, creating surprises and accident. Likewise, color shifts as the piece dries and solidifies in sometimes unpredictable ways. This combination of process, attentiveness and experimentation gives rise to sculptures that are by turns meaty, geological, raw, refined, dynamic, grounded -- and always painterly.
Artist Bios
Natasha Sweeten was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1969. The daughter of an immigrant, Sweeten has always considered her youth a navigation between belonging and being an outsider. She grew up in college-town suburbia and attended high school in rural southern Indiana, where she swept parking lots and led grade school apple orchard tours. She studied painting and sculpture at the Cleveland Institute of Art (BFA 1993) and painting at the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College (MFA 1996). Sweeten’s work has been included in various solo and group exhibitions and reviewed in The New York Times and Art in America, among other publications. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting and a PS 122 Space Fellowship, as well as artist residencies including MacDowell, Yaddo and the Vermont Studio Center. Collaborations with fellow artists include painting, sculpture, film and installation, among other media, and recently she has begun to curate exhibitions. You can find her writing on current art shows at TwoCoatsofPaint.com. Today she lives and works in Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley.
David McDonald currently lives and works in Culver City, CA. Born in Liverpool, England, McDonald spent a nomadic childhood moving from England to Venezuela, back to England, then to Canada, Brazil, and Venezuela again before coming to the United States to attend Boston University. Following graduation three significant events occurred. The first was discovering art and enrolling in the Museum School in Boston. The second was two thirty-day solo camping trips throughout the American West, and third was a short but pivotal relationship with the renowned guru Ram Dass. David moved to Los Angeles to attend and receive his MFA from Cal Arts in 1990, then lived for 16 years in Topanga Canyon. During this time David exhibited multiple times in Los Angeles, as well as New York, Boston, Santa Fe, and San Francisco. It was also during this time that David became involved with and pursued a practice of Zen Buddhism. In 2006 and 2023 David received Pollock Krasner Grants, in 2012 he received a grant from the City of Santa Monica, and in 2013 he received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. He used his fellowship to travel in Japan and to spend a month in a traditional silent retreat at a monastery in South Korea. David has continued his Zen practice and is currently a Senior Dharma Teacher in the KwanUm School of Zen and serves as Abbot at the Dharma Zen Center in Los Angeles. David’s work has been reviewed in the LA Times, Wall Street Journal, LA Weekly, Boston Globe, The New Yorker, and Art Ltd as well as other publications. He has taught at University of Southern California, California State University Long Beach, New Roads School, and the Veterans Administration where he currently works with previously homeless veterans with substance abuse issues.