TAMA TALKS with Galen Cheney

TAMA TALKS are brought to you by the Torrance Art Museum Advocates. Today we will be discussing work which is currently on view in the Main Gallery at the Torrance Art Museum in a show called Risky Business - A Painter’s Forum curated by Marie Thibeault and Max Presneill.
The focus of the show seeks to address how the concerns and expectations of AI begin to dominate the narrative in our increasingly technologically dependent society, some artists reply with the personal mark, risk taking, chance, the unknown endpoint, the illogical, the mystery…to produce a reflection of a living, very human, experience.
The exhibition is on view through May 4, 2024. The museum is located at 3320 Civic Center Drive in Torrance, CA and is open Tuesday - Saturday from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Admission is free and donations are gratefully accepted.
This discussion is being recorded and will be posted to our UA-cam channel with all of our previous TAMA Talks. You can access it from our website www.tamadvocates.com
We are joined today by artist Galen Cheney. Galen is a painter’s painter. Her education as a painter began at Mount Holyoke College and continued at the Maryland Institute, College of Art where she received her MFA and was mentored by Grace Hartigan, Hermine Ford and Salvatore Scarpitta, among others. She was born in Los Angeles and has traveled widely though has spent most of her life in New England where she feels a deep connection to her roots, the land, and centuries-old architecture.
Cheney’s work has been exhibited and collected in the U.S., Canada, China, the U.K. and Europe. She has had many past residencies and fellowships and will be attending the Pouch Cove residency in Newfoundland in 2024. Her work has been published in literary journals and magazines including New American Paintings, Tupelo Quarterly, Berkshire Magazine and Art New England, and she was nominated for a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant in painting.
She lives and works in North Adams, Massachusetts.
The creative process and the exploration and manipulation of materials are the chief drivers of her work. They are the engine and the fuel. Experimentation, risk taking and pushing her own boundaries are ongoing concerns, always with an eye toward gritty beauty and a palpable energy. This energy alternately recalls natural forces or more urban frequencies.
The work she is currently making is a furthering, a deepening of work that started during a residency in China in 2015. She uses fragments of past paintings, old receipts, used airline tickets, remnants of past experiences and works them into the texture of the new painting. Using a process that is additive and reductive, these fragments become one with the surface, imbuing the painting with memory, history, a sense of time, and an accidental quality, similar to graffiti, to which she is drawn. Paintings made this way-built, really-have a distinct, object-like quality, for which she strives.