June 23rd-July 15th, 2012
The Front Room Gallery is proud to present "Summer Sampler", a delectable delight for the eyes, 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: Thomas Broadbent, Peter Fox, Kim Holleman, Sascha Mallon, Stephen Mallon, Mark Masyga, Allan Packer, Melissa Pokorny, Ross Racine, Tom Rosenthal, Emily Roz, Jeremy Slater, Patricia Smith, Sasha Bezzubov and Jessica Sucher, and Julia Whitney Barnes.
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. In his "Process" series Fox creates directed forms through composed accident, creating a visual structure that accumulates on the surface of each painting, developing a textural world of color that is drenched in abstraction. Entering a new arena of self-reflexive discourse, Fox has established a nuanced language, built from his vocabulary developed through his signature style of drip painting.
Kim Holleman relates environmental issues of contamination of our natural resources, brought on by radioactive fallout, chemicals seeping into ground water, oil spills and the ephemera in our petro-chemical environment. She infers the impact of these elements and the increasing toll on our natural environment, presenting an installation of displays and scenes, colliding natural and artificial reality, both fantastical and frightening, into a curio collection gone awry.
Sascha Mallon has developed a style of abstract storytelling that integrates narratives from unfiltered impressions of human interactions, society and history. Emotions and impulses are reconciled amongst her complex compositions; her drawings and video works are abundant in their signifiers and concealed references.
Stephen Mallon's continuing photographic series, "American Reclamation", chronicles and examines recycling processes in the U.S. This series holds optimism in the innovation of salvaging techniques, showing the possible gains that can be made as industrial waste is revivified. Mallon's photographs often hit a deeply personal note as scenarios of subway cars sinking to the depths of the Atlantic, or airplanes driven on tractor-trailers through suburban New Jersey upend our notions of the status quo.
Mark Masyga employs traditions of abstraction, color field, and hard edge painting techniques, creating considered compositions made up of stacked rectangular forms on tonal grounds. His paintings give abstracted order to impressions taken from the chaos of discarded construction materials at industrial sites.
Allan Packer's extensive and impressive body of work examines elemental and cultural ideas, often referencing time and matter, and addressing our understanding of infinity.
Melissa Pokorny’s new photo/collage/sculptural works reveal the extraordinary beauty hidden in the guise of the quotidian. Domestic objects gleaned from estate sales are combined with photographs and casts of utilitarian things—hammers, flashlights, pin cushions and coat hooks, to create evocative tableau that blur the boundaries between the domestic sphere and the natural world, the animate and the inanimate, the magical and the mundane, and remembered or invented memories of places and things.
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.
Tom Rosenthal's paintings create visual tension though an optical composition informed and composed from graphic sources. The colorful grid paintings draw inspiration from commonplace shapes and forms such as helvetica letters, corporate logos and chinese characters. Abstracted through repetition, these elements never quite lose their original place or meaning, yet still become something wholly different.
Emily Roz investigates basic primitive directives of survival, 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.
Jeremy D. Slater works with the ephemeral qualities and conditions of the environment, capturing the subtle, often elusive tones and tenor of our modern world. In his photographic series, “Fade,” Slater relates the transformative and devolutionary affects of time through a series of distressed wall advertisements, shot in Seoul, South Korea during his residency at Seoul Art Space_Geumcheon.
Patricia Smith's meticulous, quietly subversive works commingle elements of architectural drawings, medical illustrations, and antique maps. Often labeled with text captions, these imaginary structures address the anxieties of contemporary life and the coping mechanisms that develop in the collective psyche.
Sasha Bezzubov and Jessica Sucher have been collaborating since 2002, creating photographic series which bring a perspective of clarity to conflicts and present an empathetic vision to charged social and political issues. The boldness of their subject matter is portrayed in evoking, poetic photographs that are masterfully composed. Their recent series "Facts on the Ground," photographs taken in Israel/Palestine contemplates the effects of the senseless and seemingly unresolvable conflict.
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.
