Zarkana - Tara McPherson

Tara McPherson is an American contemporary artist exploring concepts surrounding the human condition. With a focus on powerful female archetypes, her otherworldly characters hold a compelling tension in their gaze. Inspired by astrophysics, nature, mythology, comics, music, love, loss, and good old life experience. Her portraits delve into the realms of our psychological states, giving us a peek into the complexities of the human psyche. She has exhibited her paintings and serigraphs internationally in galleries and museums. Named the crown princess of poster art by ELLE Magazine, she has created numerous music posters for bands such as Beck, The Pixies, and Metallica. She has worked with Sony Pictures Animation doing character designs & creative development for an animated feature production. Her array of art also includes a variety of designer toys with KidRobot, painted comic covers for DC Vertigo, advertising illustrations for Wyden+Kennedy, Barton F Graf, Publicis, and Bernstein Andrulli. She taught in the Illustration department at Parsons in NYC, and has done many painting workshops in museums and universities worldwide. In 2011 Tara co-founded The Cotton Candy Machine gallery and art boutique with her partner Sean Leonard. The gallery ran from 2011 to 2016 in a former fire department in the Giclée (pronounced "zhee-clay") is a neologism for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word "giclée" is derived from the French language word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt, or spray". It was coined in 1991 by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints. Our Name The term “safe walls” refers to legal spots in the urban landscape for local graffiti artists to do their work without the fear of sanctions. The Poster As A Vital Art Form From the public notices of Antiquity and the first leaflets and placards handed out by traveling performers—which hark back to the end of the 15th century—to the advertisements of contemporary circuses, the poster has had a long and colorful history. With the advent of printing, circuses all over the world were able to produce posters in large quantities for display in public places to attract the attention of passers-by. Generally created by local artists, these visually striking works were the ambassadors of traveling big-top circuses and spread the word of their imminent passage in a city. Like the circus itself, the circus poster of lore exerts a fascination all its own; it strikes the spectator head-on. Poster artists and illustrators have had the uncanny ability to distill enormous amounts of information into iconographic images that penetrate and endure. Posters are designed to mystify, arouse curiosity and the urge to see, but more than mere advertising tools, they have long been recognized as a vital art form—one that shares common roots