Kim Holleman | Joanne Ungar Opening January 9th

Consumed:

Kim Holleman | Joanne Ungar 

January 9th - February 8th

Opening Reception: January 9th 7-9PM

Front Room Gallery is proud to present: “Consumed” an exhibition of new works by artists: Kim Holleman and Joanne Ungar.  Each artist’s solo presentation opens a dialog about material matters, consumption and waste.   Objects are suspended and redefined by the artists’ divergent processes.  While Ungar utilizes the organic wax and recycled cardboard, Holleman conflates the synthetic and natural, with petrochemicals fusing collected materials.

Kim Holleman composes and assembles with found objects collected from the urban environment.  For this exhibition she has created a room-sized installation incorporating broken auto glass; poured resin returns the shards of glass to a solid state, transfixing the incident in time. The experience of the artist’s initial discovery of the objects is captured and re-related by Holleman’s references to a landscape, which is simultaneously in and out of balance with nature.

Holleman’s works elucidate the problematic choices we make as a society as well as the beautiful moments as we evolve and grapple with becoming a sustainable society.  Outmoded chemistry vessels are repurposed, culling back to a time of ethical chemical manipulations.  Holleman cultivates ecosystems of imagined origins, and creates landscapes which emerge from petrochemicals and trash.

While Holleman’s use of resin gives a clarity to the objects she has collected, Joanne Ungar’s use of wax obscures and mystifies the origin of the materials she has embedded.  Joanne Ungar reprocesses cardboard packaging; the corrugated lines and smooth surfaces are enhanced, transforming the byproduct of consumerism into a completely new entity.  Color and opacity plays a large role in Ungar’s process, in which she holds a tenuous control over the outcome of each poured layer of molten wax.

Joanne Ungar achieves a heightened visual depth through her choice of pigmentation and the level of translucence within each strata of wax.   Ungar examines the physical and ideological concept of packaging, considering the value of the stuff we cast off, misleading facades and the pervasiveness of materialism in our culture.

Ungar and Holleman exemplify their personal philosophies through the use of found objects  - frozen in composed display, heightening visual qualities of the inherent body of the materials, consumed by resin in the case of Holleman and wax for Ungar.