July 2 – August 24, 2014
Opening reception: Wednesday, July 2, 6:00–9:00pm
Closing brunch: Sunday, August 24, 3:00–6:00pm
Amanda Alic + Ethan Crenson
Rachel Feinstein + John Currin
Jolynn Krystosek + Halsey Hathaway
Katherine Newbegin + Todd Knopke
Alexandra Posen + Nils Folke Anderson
Sascha Mallon + Stephen Mallon
Jessica Sucher + Sasha Bezzubov
Kathleen Vance + Daniel Aycock
Cibele Vieira + Peter Fox
Ursula Weissmüller + Robert Ortega
Julia Whitney Barnes + Sean Hemmerle
Front Room gallery is proud to present: “Summer Love” a group show curated by Julia Whitney Barnes celebrating artists’ love in tandem with her recent nuptials with Sean Hemmerle. As part of their wedding celebration, artist Julia Whitney Barnes selected eleven married artist couples, each of whom have a personal connection to the newlyweds. The concept for the show developed while Julia was going over their wedding invite list and noticed how many artist couples were included. Several of the artists work collaboratively, and without question, each couple is influenced by each other's work. About half the artists are Front Room regulars and for the other half, this will mark their first show with the gallery.
Whitney Barnes structured the selection of artworks by directing each spouse to choose which piece would represent their partner in the exhibition, or the artists selected collaborative work. This process mimics the couples selecting each other to marry, with the artworks exhibited in pairs.
ABOUT THE WORK:
Amanda Alic and Ethan Crenson collaborated on the video "People in Trees." Very much as the title implies, single figures appear high in a tree in a snowy, quiet, otherwise depopulated landscape. It is ambiguous and meditative. With David Ramirez, John Keefe, Edie Winograde and Matthew Crenson.
World-renowned artist couple, Rachel Feinstein and John Currincollaborated on a graphite drawing of two topless women wearing glasses, based on vintage porn images. The more buxom figure is looking at nude photographs on the floor and the skinnier figure is grasping open a book on top of a stack of other books. In making these works, Rachel draws the playful contours and John elaborates with refined shading.
Jolynn Krystosek's wall mounted gray felt sculpture creates a space of both shallow and infinite depth. The felt works inspire a variety of aesthetic references including hoods, bonnets, or habits and are suggestive of feminine anatomy. Halsey Hathaway’s tall acrylic on dyed canvas painting is imbued with translucent overlapping fields of color. The accumulated forms build up to a space that can be seen both as figure and as void, intentionally allowing the work to change with each viewer’s own subjectivity.
Katherine Newbegin's Chromogenic print of a Mosque in Mumbai is from her solo travels in India during 2010 and 2011. Though Todd initially aimed to select one of Katherine's works from their frequent mutual travels, his love of this charged yet tranquil space won out. Todd Knopke's wall mounted fabric work combines the traditions of American quilting and European tapestry making, mixed with contemporary ideas of collage, painting, and sculpture. The work uses repurposed fabric including his friends and family's clothes, sheets and towels and is reminiscent of a sunny figure emerging from water with mountains in the background.
Alexandra Posen's "Soft Paintings," call on a unique language of abstraction that engages color, transparency, shadow and ephemerality to project imaginary spaces. They are created from translucent painted silk, stretched over wooden bars. Nils Folke Anderson's painted Aquaresin sculpture looks like bent wood on first glance. His sensuous work hovers in the enigmatic territory between abstraction and evocation
Sascha (Prinz zu Schaumburg-Lippe) Mallon's multifaceted drawing, infused with surrealist-influenced narrative, is populated with creatures that are like the unseen within the obvious: animals, half-humans, imaginary hybrid beings in a constant state of change. Stephen Mallon's Chromogenic print "New Grass" was shot on the Coast of Ireland on the day he proposed to Sascha in 2005. It is part of his series about vacation places out of season.
Jessica Sucher and Sasha Bezzubov's collaborative black and white silver gelatin prints are of untended olive trees, found throughout the Palestinian Occupied Territories from their series “Facts on the Ground.” Raggedly beautiful, these trees are visible evidence of Israeli policies that have made many orchards in the West Bank inaccessible to Palestinian farmers. Ties to these trees run deep, and cutting off farmers and families from their orchards is a powerful strategy of symbolic and economic discouragement.
Kathleen Vance's "Rogue Stream" is a site-specific installation of a miniature meandering stream that transverses a wall, connecting intermittently, through the use of wooden trestles. This piece explores issues of ground water rights and environmental issues relative to the source stream referenced in the installation. Daniel Aycock’s “Geisen Family Journal” uses manipulated tintype photographs to trace the lineage of a family that was documented in a found journal written in 1896.
Cibele Vieira and Peter Fox 's selected works are from the era that they got together in 2006. Cibele's photo from her “Single and Looking for…” series explores the nature of relationships and interaction. The works are an invitation to enter and explore a world of desires and expectations on how people relate to each other. Peter's painting “Quiet Sort” was his homecoming gift to Cibele and their newborn son Sam, on their arrival home from the hospital. The painting is from a transitional moment in the evolution of his spilled paint series, shortly before he discovered the striped drip, of which he is known.
Ursula Weissmüller and Robert Ortega installation of drawings, collages and illustrated love letters from the past decade shows the couples passion for each other and the art of paper. The two also collaborated on the design of the show's exhibition card.
Julia Whitney Barnes and Sean Hemmerle's work relates to their travels in Iceland last summer. Julia's oil painting on mylar is from her "Bricks and Stones May Break" series and features cairns (manmade stacks of stones) that have since ancient times been erected as landmarks. For thousands of years they have also been built as sepulchral monuments, or used for defensive, hunting, ceremonial, astronomical and other purposes. The stacks in Julia’s painting are along the road to Þingvallavatn, where the North American and Eurasian continental plates meet. Sean's Chromogenic print shows three pairs of Icelandic sheep in a meadow just below the Eyjafjallajökull Volcano that erupted in 2010, covering in ash all of the immediate area and spanning across a large area of northern Europe. The sheep are immersed in lush greenery and seem unaware of the volcano's previous effects.
