Joshua Meyer’s work suggests buried histories and ancient secrets. Using a palette knife to work and rework overlapping layers of oil paint, Meyer’s compositions are colorful, dense patchworks of concise strokes. Challenging abstraction’s opposition to representation, solitary human figures are concisely articulated within the luscious impasto. Such dematerialization of form and kaleidoscopic arrangement of color furthermore play with our understanding of space, making it appear as if the figures were sinking back both into the canvas and into time.… read more

These chicken portraits were created to mirror a union of unlikely opposites. The common image of a banal barnyard animal is juxtaposed with exotic varieties. Automated uniformity contrasts unique individualism, views of how this bird was viewed from ancient times to present, draws on both myth and mass production.… read more

Flesh Was The Reason, the show’s title, is a nod to Willem de Kooning, who famously declared that oil paints were invented so that the artist might capture the voluptuousness of flesh, a venture heretofore unattained by less sensual media. As a potent symbol of life and its many contingencies (including love, sex and death), flesh is also the reason Franssen paints. For if painting is primarily concerned with evoking a visceral response within the viewer, as it is for Franssen, then flesh’s carnal qualities help elicit that physical engagement.… read more

To look at a painting by Kanevsky is to look at it for the first time, even if one has visited the piece before. By condensing the structure, content and assorted ephemera of a given scene into a single, saturated moment, refigured forms and gestures are continually impelled to the painting’s surface only to recede in accommodation of future findings. Such honesty and freshness is rooted in Kanevsky’s fidelity to a naïve gaze, an exercise in which the faculties of knowledge are constantly reset so as to stave off tidy assumptions about how things work or what they mean.… read more

September 2 - October 2, 2010… read more

Working mostly from reproductions of Renaissance drawings featuring the human figure in different states of movement and repose, Armstrong eliminates much of the original perspective by painting over figure and background with a striking set of colors. Enough shading is visible through the paint, however, to give the figures a subtle sense of modeling. By setting his camera to infinity before photographing the images, the resulting prints are rendered mysteriously out of focus.… read more

Intrigued by dualities and the phenomena of coexistence, Blum introduces aspects of realism into certain sections – typically the upper register – of his compositions as a means of creating stylistic opposition. His use of trompe l’loeil to realistically render swatches of paper held up by strips of cellophane tape challenges the distinction between art and life and sheds light on the way in which representation is translated from experience.  Like miniature paintings, these tangible bits of paper mimic the abstract renderings often found in the bottom half of the composition. By employing divergent styles to create a picture within a picture, the viewer comes away from Blum’s work with the understanding that oppositions can exist harmoniously in the same space.… read more

The impressionistic quality of Chelsea James’ landscapes and interiors reveals the measured stroke of a mature and confident artist. She skillfully endows her traditional subject matter—an atypical choice for such a young age—with a sensitivity and lyricism verging on the precocious. And though James’ paintings derive from her experiences within the world, they are also intimately mediated through the artist’s own temperament and interpretative sensibilities.… read more

April 1 - May 29, 2010… read more

Kirsten Stolle takes on the role of a future naturalist and documentarian: discovering, cataloging and visually recording potential new generations of flora. Continuing to develop her contemporary vision of an odd, unsettling, and sometimes humorous account of the future, she visually explores the issue of climate change and its potential ramifications on plant life.… read more

The title of Glovaski’s upcoming exhibition “Painting in a Minor Key” evokes a melancholy and reflective perspective, which is exactly what the artist is striving for. When looking at Glovaski’s abstractions one might think of a waterfall, a repeated and moving image that never begins or ends. A meditation. Glovaski is influenced by the words “all things must pass” and takes this phrase to remind himself to stay in the moment and focus on what is important in his life.… read more

An important figure in the California Clay Movement, De Staebler’s works in both clay and bronze call to mind archetypes of the collective unconscious. Totemic and fragmented in form, the sculptures waiver between the dichotomies of earthly and spiritual, body and landscape and fragility and resiliency.… read more