Another Place

July 7th - September 3rd, 2017

Artists:

Hawkins Bolden, Kyle Breitenbach, Austin English, Inka Essenhigh, Kristy Luck, Alice Mackler, Kevin McNamee-Tweed, Nick Payne, Sandra Osip, Charlie Roberts, Joe Roberts and Bryan McGovern Wilson

“Between ourselves and our own consciousness a veil is interposed: a veil that is dense and opaque for the common herd,—thin, almost transparent, for the artist and the poet. What fairy wove that veil? Was it done in malice or in friendliness?”

–Henri Bergson, Laughter, ”What is the Object of Art?”

Another Place - For some it’s a simple riff on a private moment in time, for others it involves the creation of entirely new worlds full of imagined beings and hyperreal landscapes. These otherworldly escapes offer us repose from the daily grind, glimpses into darker territory that is best viewed through the lens of fantasy and can shed light on infinite unknowable energy in the universe.

This exhibition celebrates artists who bend and reshape reality into new forms. Their work pushes deep into subconscious psychological terrain and explores a surreal, visionary twist on the world around them. Figures are discernible yet have an abstract, mystical air; unconscious dreams and thoughts are unleashed to create narratives that are highly personal but somehow still universal in scope; and through their minds’ eyes we are offered a glimpse into previously unknown realms dedicated to both the light and dark aspects of humanity. 

Hawkins Bolden (1914-2005) was a self-taught artist from Memphis, TN who was blinded at the age of seven following a serious baseball accident. Later in life, he began obsessively constructing tall totem and mask-like scarecrows out of discarded materials, litter, and other debris found in the alleyways and field surrounding his home to protect his small backyard garden.

Brooklyn-based artist, Kyle Breitenbach, transforms simple scenes and portraits into sublime, highly personalized statements about the human condition. His canvases and drawings reference another time and place, both in subject matter and use of materials, but still manage to feel current and of the moment.

Austin English, who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY creates quirky narrative scenes and abstract art cartoons which reinvent conventional notions of comic-style storytelling through their use of coarse painterly outlines, an extremely raw approach to color and form, and nonsensical interactions between his strange characters.

Dreamlike figures, lush backdrops, invented plant forms and abstract shapes mimicking everyday items seamlessly intermingle in Inka Essenhigh's paintings creating surreal, visceral images that draw us in but also impart a sense of potential chaos.

LA artist, Kristy Luck, employs hyper-bright oil pigments tempered with wax to construct soft, friendly shapes in her paintings, inferring blurred landscapes and disembodied body parts. Her ethereal work imparts a sense of calm while still alluding to a wide range of moods and emotions.

The playful and often bizarre earthenware sculptures created by Alice Mackler, an artist who has been active since the 1950s, portray the female figure in somewhat classical poses; however, these ceramic forms have been massively simplified and reduced to the point of referencing a child’s conception of the human form.

Kevin McNamee-Tweed creates raw, almost painterly monoprints of subjects sourced from his travels, life in Texas and personal histories that have been minced with colloquial and art-historical imagery. McNamee-Tweed’s printed scenes exude a comedic universality, where cliche and grandiosity are revered and mined for genuine, visceral beauty.

Brooklyn artist, Sandra Osip, creates mixed media sculptures reminiscent of modern-day dystopian wastelands such as old-school Detroit and the catastrophic destruction in Aleppo. Her three-dimensional assemblages act as a political call to arms and also express the beauty and poignant nostalgia of decay.

An undeniably charming combination of humor, strangeness, and unease exists in the world of Nick Payne. His anamorphic, and somewhat haunted, pastel drawings blur the line between dream and nightmare by focusing on depictions of relatable but utterly disconcerting figures and creatures.

Charlie Roberts's fluid pop style incorporates hip hop, cell phone worship, sports and just about everything else into paintings that breathe with life and energy, and which skirt feeling like cartoons through deft brushwork. His figures appear to slither and contain no bones as they puff on cigarettes, lounge in bed and twist themselves together.

Joe Roberts goes by the moniker @lsdworldpeace on Instagram, and this tagline perfectly summarizes his psychedelic paintings of utopian landscapes featuring cats basking in alien sunsets, forests humming with rows of tweaked-out happy faces and Scream masks, and picnics in the park with sandwiches full of magic mushrooms.

Primarily know for his glass and sculptural work, Bryan McGovern Wilson also creates dreamy pen and ink drawings using pointillism to convey otherworldly faces, shadowy figures, and washed-out landscapes. The dot matrix patterning of these works further heightens the atmospheric and hazy effect of McGovern’s imagery.