March 16-18, 2012

HISTORY LESSONS 

229 Leonard Street, Willamsburg

Marcy Brafman, William Crump, Susan Hamburger, Karen Marston, Victoria Neel

Friday 3/16 from 6 to 9 pm

Saturday 3/17 from 3 to 6 pm

Sunday 3/18 from 3 to 6 pm

The subject of history is a reflection of cultural ideas, the ones that survive epochal conflict, and the ones that continue to challenge our need for context. The artists in this exhibition each concern themselves with a given cultural idea, and create a generative context that is timeless.

MARCY BRAFMAN

WILLIAM CRUMP

SUSAN HAMBURGER

KAREN MARSTON

VICTORIA NEEL

January 19-21, 2012

HEADSTRONG 

133 West 28th Street, New York

Jenny Carpenter, Ray DiCecco, Emily Noelle Lambert, Jeremy Olson, Molly Stevens

1/19 Thu 6-9 p.m.

1/20 Fri   6-9 p.m. 7:30 PM: Poetry by Cynthia Cruz

1/21 Sat   3-6 p.m. 8:00 PM: Fiction by Helen Phillips

The artists in “Headstrong” all deal with a subject matter that is equally indicative of the quality of presence. In the past, a portrait was painted in order to placate the will of some wealthy patron or public official, or to stand as an example of fact in history. There were no photographs, so that a skillfully completed portrait was both a tribute to whoever was being depicted and a manifestation of historical significance.  Today the artist decides upon both the subject and the manner of its depiction, with results that are surprising.
 

JENNY CARPENTER

RAYMOND DICECCO

JEREMY OLSON

EMILY NOELLE LAMBERT

MOLLY STEVENS

November 11-13, 2011

WITH EASTERN EYES 

315 Berry Street - Williamsburg 

Elisabeth Condon, Laura Fayer, Liz Insogna

Dan Rosenbaum, Susanna Harwood Rubin

11/11 Fri 6-9 pm - 11/12 Sat 6-9 pm - 11/13 Sun 2-7 pm

Friday @ 7:30 pm: Reading with John Reed and James Sherry

These artists are heavily influenced by an Eastern aesthetic. They avoid local influences and seek out foreign ones. Though who is to say what is foreign? Many artists have traveled to find the ideas that would excite them, and draw their native intelligence into everyday life. Many people have had to leave home, enter new social circles, or immerse themselves in a new environment to find inspiration, while others may commence a transmission of ideas through books and other cultural sources, building an interior aesthetic. Alienation from one influence does not naturally nor immediately turn us toward another. There is a mute period in between. Yet the influence of an esthetic so powerful as this cannot help but be keenly felt. It projects well in a variety of mediums.

ELISABETH CONDON










 

 LAURA FAYER

LIZ INSOGNA

 

DAN ROSENBAUM

SUSANNA HARWOOD RUBIN

October 13-15, 2011

SPLITTING INFINITY 

76 Bayard Street - Williamsburg

Andrea Champlin, Elissa Levy, Joel Morrison, Mary Murphy

10/13 Thu 7-10 pm - 10/14 Fri 7-10 pm - 10/15 Sat 6-10 pm 

The history of collage begins with Cubism, a movement that is as forgotten as it was celebrated. When we see a ‘cubist’ painting we know what it is about. But the concept behind Cubism originated from a desire to launch the creative practice away from painting—or rather to paint in new ways, with fragments of objects and printed imagery suggestive of the essence of objects. In “Splitting Infinity” I am attempting to address one of the formative ideas behind Cubist collage: that a split between reality and its depiction makes for a necessary evolution in artistic thinking, and will likewise result in how we each view the world.   

JOEL MORRISON

ELISSA LEVY

ANDREA CHAMPLIN

MARY MURPHY

September 14-17, 2011

FICTION IS FACT

526 West 26th Street - New York

Jonathan Feldschuh, Elizabeth Riley, Mark G. Taber 

We use facts to tell a story, yet all the facts together neither make a story nor do they make a story more true—only more concrete in the telling. In art as in literature, one can use as one’s medium not only pigment or wood or stone or digital media, but the concept that something is either a well fashioned fabrication or a document of evidence. Ideas (and the preconceptions that accompany them) are part and parcel of any artistic creation’ public reception. The directed employment of a certain impressions, based in ideological truth, help form the basis for one’s esthetic pleasure. For each of the artists in this salon, the same can be said to be true, though they come to it via different routes.

Jonathan Feldschuh

Somewhere in Europe there is a high-profile government installation housing a piece of extremely specific scientific equipment, the Large Hadron Collider. It is being used to discern the elemental properties of cosmic matter, to answer all the big questions that have ordinarily been left to philosophers: where do we come from, and where are we going? Materially, that is. In terms of the very fabric of reality the LHC is being used to understand how the basic elements of energy and matter existed at the beginning of recorded time, what process is affecting them as time passes, and what will happen to affect the relationship between matter and energy in the distant future. An intimate knowledge of these contexts will allow mankind to make further discoveries which could advance us as a race, and to think beyond the causes and effects of historical discoveries important in their time (like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and the discovery of atomic energy) which now are classic but approaching obsolescence. Feldschuh’s paintings achieve also a synthesis between pictorial impressions and painterly gestures. On one side of a large piece of mylar he paints the interior spaces, vast and grandiose though they are practical in their utility, with thrown paint on the other side; he affixes them to plastic boxes so as to allow for ambient light to illuminate both sides equally, combining their effects.

Elizabeth Riley

Also works abstractly, taking her cue from sensory experiences filmed on a digital camera and then fragmented, serialized, and sampled to then be displayed as film on a screen, as individual scenes printed wallpaper-style and hung or combined with objects. Riley is interested in taking short films of engaging sensory events, from as large as a waterfall, and as small as a piece of paper being waved back and forth in the hand. Her works create a bridge between a more familiar two-dimensional vehicle for images and the dematerialized moving image video, bridging the gap between mind and body. Riley uses moving image video and still frames to create a multidimensional experience. In her work we find a synthesis between the real of realism, and the real of the super-real--the material and the immaterial—and this is where we begin to explore the roots of both narrative and truth. The story Riley tells us is about an essential experience and how, in serialized fashion, it expands to become a sensory narrative with things to say about beauty, inspiration, reason, the senses, and the innate truths expressed by each.   

Mark G Taber

The most naturalistic artists here in terms of his subject matter, Taber is engaged not only with the origins of his theme, but also with their cultural and personal contexts. He describes the type of esthetic event in his work as “embodied vision” and there does exist, in each image, a bodily experience that is alienated from its site of origin by being first expressed as a scene in a popular film, TV show, or novel, transposed via digital media to the format Taber prefers: cartoonish figures re-enacting dramatic scenes that are otherwise overwhelmed by the sheer accrual of likewise imagery in our popular culture, printed on plastic and displayed on light boxes, and matched with texts that bring a degree of the artist’s own interior monologue to their effect.

 

X MARKS THE SPOT

Studio of John Mullen with guest artists Peggy Bates, Mateo Caligari, Colin Kilian, and Elizabeth Sullivan

Thursday, March 25, from 6 to 9 p.m. -- 50 Eldridge Street, 7th Floor

COLIN KILIAN

ELIZABETH SULLIVAN




MATEO CALIGARI AND JOHN MULLEN




COLIN KILLIAN




MATEO CALIGARI




JOHN MULLEN AND PEGGY BATES




MATEO CALIGARI AND JOHN MULLEN



Colin Killian sitting with works by PEGGY BATES

THEY'RE NOT WHO YOU THINK THEY ARE

Studio of Asya Geisberg with guest artists Gregory de la Haba, Elizabeth Hendler, Lindsay Mound, and Kaeko Shabana

Friday, February 26, from 6 to 9 p.m. -- 526 West 26th Street, 10th Floor

GREGORY DE LA HABA

LINDSAY MOUND

ASYA GEISBERG