front room gallery

Emily Roz: "The Rutting Season" Opens Friday, September 9th

Join us for the opening reception for Emily Roz's upcoming exhibition: "The Rutting Season" Friday, September 9th from 7-9pm.

Emily Roz
"The Rutting Season"

September 9th-October 9th, 2011
Reception Friday, September 9th.

The Front Room Gallery is proud to present, “The Rutting Season,” a solo exhibition of new works by Emily Roz. This series of paintings play with the volatile activity of animals com- peting to satiate themselves amidst a perpetual spring of bloom and decay. Through heightened realism, flowers, seedpods, branches and carcasses coexist in a world of dreamlike unreality. As the animals in these scenes fight for position under the teasing petals, the muted color backdrops preserve the freshness of such eroticism found in nature and violence. The palette in Roz’s paintings captures the deep hues and tones of a dawn and dusk atmosphere, which are the prime hunting times for the predatory animals she depicts.

The ‘rut’ is the breeding season of ruminant animals, which makes them vulnerable to predators, as they are distracted with their desire to mate. Emily Roz captures the tenuous balance between this animalistic desire to mate and propagate, paired with the need to feed and kill. These carnal urges are reflected in their flora counterparts with blossoming flowers, sprays of budding tips and foreboding barren branches. The luminous arousal of either flora or flesh is temporal, regardless of the promise of one’s cyclical return and the other’s inevitability.

Roz’s paintings present the ambition of spring and the voracity of nature through compositions of stark, fruitless tree limbs, echoed in the understructure of delicately interwoven curtains of blooms and blankets of lush green. The balance of these selected floral components with the harsh realism of perched predators and open flesh heightens our awareness of our own vulnerability and natural desires.

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Stephen Mallon Exhibiting at 60Six Gallery, Opening August 20th

"Passage: Capturing Movement
August 20 - September 16th

Saturday, August 20, 2011

opening reception 6–8:30pm
closing party September 16, 6–9pm

David King
Steve Bird
Anne Terpstra
David Magnusson
Stephen Mallon
Michael Jang

Passage: capturing movement

This exhibit, featuring the work of diverse photographers, explores themes of: the immediacy of contemporary photography (camera phone images by Dave King), panoramic collages revealing and distorting perception while presenting a static moment captured within places of extreme movement (Steve Bird), filmic blurry nuanced images of societies in flux (Anne Terpstra), the compensatory response to digital culture of returning to high craft...ulilizing photography as sculpture (David Magnusson), dramatic documentation of construction and deconstruction (Stephen Mallon), shifts in the value of photographic images with the passage of time. (Michael Jang).

60SIX Gallery

66 Elgin Park
San Francisco, CA 94103

Stephen Mallon's "Next Stop Atlantic" Exhibition Opens Tonight at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey

Mitzi & Warren Eisenberg Gallery

STEPHEN MALLON: NEXT STOP ATLANTIC
July 29 - September 25, 2011
Opening Reception: Friday, July 29, 6 pm - 8 pm
Closing Reception: Friday, September 23, 6 pm - 8 pm

The industrial landscape has held a life-long attraction for photographer Stephen Mallon. Seeking what he calls “a surreal beauty” in its machinery and sites, he creates powerful images and captures some extraordinary moments. Mallon also has a special interest in reclamation projects that salvage, rebuild or repurpose the products of industry. These twin impulses led him to spend three years documenting the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority’s recycling program that builds artificial underwater reefs from decommissioned subway cars. Next Stop Atlantic tracks the final journey of these cars as they travel toward their last stop, the Atlantic Ocean.

This photographic series dramatically depicts the moments before, during, and after the cars are dropped into the ocean to create a new home for undersea life. Mallon shows us the subway cars in a transitional stage between their former and future lives, before their transformation from active to passive is complete. He offers two kinds of images: cars at rest—stripped, stockpiled, and seemingly at the end of the line—and cars put back in motion as they are dropped off the barges. The poignancy of the images may result from the displacement of the trains—they are quite literally out of their element. There is a poetic, even elegiac quality to many of these photographs. Virginia Placement, which freezes the moment just before a car hits the water, suggests a burial at sea. In images like Sink and Settling we witness the instant before the ocean swallows the cars whole. The American flag on the side of the sinking train in Pool is a stunning reminder of Nature’s ultimate power over Man.

It is almost possible to hear the sounds implicit in these photographs—the clanking of steel, the large “splash” and then the final, eerie silence. The rapid motion, dynamism and often overpowering noises associated with working subway cars are distant memories. The future of these trains will be quiet and stationary; the only movement they experience will be the water’s currents and the darting fish. They are a perfect symbol of the surreal beauty Mallon seeks.

Mary Birmingham, Curator

Front Room Heats Up with this Year's "Summer Sampler" Exhibition

Join us this Friday evening for the opening reception of "Summer Sampler" and Williamsburg's "Second Friday" event.

"Summer Sampler"

Opening Reception: Friday July 8th, 7-9
July 8th-31st
Hours Fri-Sun 1-6 and by appt.

The Front Room Gallery is proud to present "Summer Sampler", a tantalizing treat featuring works by the last season's Front Room artists as well as a preview of the shows to come, and some splendid new selections. With works by: Sasha Bezzubov, Thomas Broadbent, Peter Fox, Stephen Mallon, Allan Packer, Melissa Pokorny, Ross Racine, Emily Roz, Patricia Smith, Julia Whitney Barnes, and more.

Sasha Bezzubov's ongoing series "Things Fall Apart," is large-scale landscape photographs of the aftermath of natural disasters— forest fires, earthquakes, tidal waves, and tornados, around the world. These heartwrenchly beautiful landscapes draw us in and confront us with the uncomfortable notion that we might be somehow to blame.

Thomas Broadbent's works on paper incorporate trompe l'oeil representations of seemingly unrelated objects and scenes, which allude to existentialistic ideas and create sophisticated associative meaning within each piece. His sensitivity to color, tactility, and structure propel these thoughts into reality, while maintaining a key tie to illusion and metaphor.

Peter Fox's brilliantly colorful paintings use elements of Minimalism, OP art and Psychadelia. Fox spills paint onto the canvas, allowing chance and fluid dynamics a central role in shaping process and outcome.

Stephen Mallon's ongoing body of work, "American Reclamation" tracts the recycling industry in the United States. Mallon's striking series, "Brace for Impact: The Salvage of Flight 1549," presents photographs documenting the salvaging of the US Airway flight that, amazingly, airline captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger had managed to safely emergency land in the Hudson River.

Allan Packer's extensive and impressive body of work examines elemental and cultural ideas, often referencing time and matter and to addresse our understanding of infinity.

Melissa Pokorny uses overtly artificial means to represent space, coupled with uncannily realistic animal figurines and casts, to question our estrangement from, and subsequent longing for connection to the natural world, and the resulting substitution of the real by the fake.

Ross Racine depicts realistic aerial views of fictional suburban communities, which amplify an awareness of modern choices in building and living styles. Racine employs common structural archetypes in his compositions, with an expanded view that exaggerates the rational utility of these imagined infrastructures.

Emily Roz's investigates this most basic primitive directive, with stunning depictions of wild animals in seemingly native habitats, revealed as illusion, with her insertion of domestic floral. These works display the incongruity within wild, natural impulses and the human desire to cultivate beauty through the propagation of plant-life.

Patricia Smith's meticulous, quietly subversive works on paper commingle elements of architectural drawings, medical illustrations, and antique maps. Labeled with text captions, these imaginary structures address the anxieties of contemporary life and the coping mechanisms that develop in the collective psyche.

Julia Whitney Barnes's vivid, luminous paintings cull naturalistic imagery from an abstracted ground. These works are rooted simultaneously in science while evoking the fantastical.

Titanno Beasts are Coming at Sundown Tonight!!!

The Titanno Beasts vs. Super Defense Force, Tonight at 8:30

The Titanno Beast vs The Super Defense Force is a performance depicting a violent battle between giant robots and monsters amongst a downtown city center and high rise urban housing, created from cardboard and recycled materials. The action takes place in two darkened rooms of the Front Room gallery, which are somewhat illuminated from the flashing and multicolored light of the buildings. Brian Olin plays live music to accompany the actions of the costume performers with sounds that range from ambiant to creepy electronic noise. The style of music creates an overall sense of drama and mystery. Without the music the actions of the monsters and robots might appear more comical or whimsical. In this sense, The Titanno Beast vs The Super Defense Force is a true collaboration of visual art and music.

Art by: Mark Stilwell; Music by: Brian Olin;
Creative Team and Performers:
Francios Duboucheron, Carlos Hernandez, John Mejias,
Chris Paisley and Yoko Stilwell