SUMMER SAMPLER
June 16 - July 16th, 2017
Reception: Friday, June 16th 7-9PM
Sasha Bezzubov, Thomas Broadbent, Phillip Buehler, Jade Doskow, Peter Fox, Sean Hemmerle, Amy Hill, Jesse Lambert, Mark Masyga, Stephen Mallon, Sascha Mallon, Melissa Pokorny, Ross Racine, Ken Ragsdale, Paul Raphaelson, Emily Roz, Patricia Smith, Joanne Ungar, Edie Winograde
For some people the summer begins with Memorial Day, for others it is the Summer Solstice, but for those in the know—it begins with "Summer Sampler." The Front Room Gallery is proud to present the 13th annual Summer Sampler featuring: Sasha Bezzubov, Thomas Broadbent, Phillip Buehler, Jade Doskow, Peter Fox, Sean Hemmerle, Amy Hill, Jesse Lambert, Mark Masyga, Stephen Mallon, Sascha Mallon, Melissa Pokorny, Ross Racine, Ken Ragsdale, Paul Raphaelson, Emily Roz, Patricia Smith, Joanne Ungar, Edie Winograde. Front Room Gallery's traditional Summer group exhibition is a sampling of works by the gallery's stable of painters, photographers, and sculptors featuring a selection of things from the upcoming season as well as some favorites by artists who have had recent shows at our new Lower East Side location.
Sasha Bezzubov’s photographic approach has developed through diverse series that address the contemporary condition and explore the nature of the document. Working both solo and with his sometime collaborator Jessica Sucher, Sasha Bezzubov uses a large format camera to photograph the people and the land in diverse series including, The Gringo Project, Expats and Natives, Things Fall Apart, The Searchers, Albedo Zone, Facts on the Ground and most recently, Republic of Dust.
Thomas Broadbent has shown extensively throughout the U.S. as well as internationally. Broadbent’s work won the Pulse Prize for best solo booth at Pulse Art Fair. Broadbent’s large-scale watercolors have an absurdity to them that borders on the surreal, they are plausible scenarios, but the unlikely combination of elements, objects, and animals are otherworldly and common at the same time.
Phillip Buehler, Phillip Buehler has been photographing abandoned places around the world since he rowed to the (then abandoned) Ellis Island in 1974. Many, like Greystone Park Hospital, have since been demolished; some, like Ellis Island and the High Line, have been restored, and some, like the S.S. United States and the New York State Pavilion, are now in jeopardy.
Jade Doskow’s “Lost Utopias” documents what remains of these World Fairgrounds, in their profound grandeur, but also the relics of less notable attractions that have been repurposed or left to decline. Lost Utopias project juxtaposes emblematic monuments with sad and abandoned decaying structures, provoking the viewer to consider how idealistic feats of architecture can either succeed or disappear into obscurity.
Peter Fox, Expanding on his signature style of drip painting, Peter Fox's spilled paint works have taken on bold gestural movements. Referencing formal systems of Abstract Painting, he explores the language of relational color, as articulated through layered processes. Each composition is developed through variance and repetition, and evolves with the allowance of chance.
Sean Hemmerle, He quickly established his reputation as a sought-after architectural and urban landscape photographer, and since 9/11 has turned his eye toward documenting the effects of war in New York, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Amy Hill’s paintings are updates of works from earlier eras. She has chosen portraiture as it is a genre that runs through art history and allows her through poses, gestures and fashion detail to make social, psychological and anthropological statements about her subjects. Humor emerges through the juxtaposition of modern day fashion and historical figures.
Jesse Lambert's ink and watercolor paintings on paper depict ad-hoc structures constructed out of scraps of wood and debris such as bent nails, string, cloth, clothespins, discarded tools and other household implements. Evoking the universal human desire for shelter and protection, these assemblages reference domestic spaces, but fail to function as those spaces normally would.
Mark Masyga's compositions have lively linear elements balanced with a sensitive, yet intense sense of color. Mark Masyga uses line to enhance both specificity and ambiguity, creating a sense of mystery.
Stephen Mallon, Mallon is known for his photographs of big (with a capital “B”) things crashing, sinking, levitating, being dismantled or constructed. In his long running series “American Reclamation” many of the subjects are small bails, stacks, compressed cubes, mounds, random/shapeless units, and swirling vortexes. Light gleams of the corners and facets of gears and chrome strips or fades indistinctly into bails of office papers that have been squished into abstract forms.
Sascha Mallon’s drawings are personal and metaphoric with a focus on love, pleasure, longing, reflections on body and passion. The source of her inspiration are daydreams mixed with reality, which she transforms into visual fairytales. Her works expand on her interest in life, the end of life and transitions. The narratives she creates are filled with strong memories and feelings; they are visual poems full of meaning.
Melissa Pokorny's constructed systems and collective actions suggest something akin to speculative biomes, or psychological landscapes. Individual works are re-collections of moments: lived, imagined, and borrowed. They are experientially derived, suggesting layered relationships based on memories of place, material affinities, (un)natural phenomena, and the desires of things.
Ross Racine creates his hyper-real suburban landscapes with a uniquely developed drawing method combining the languages of drawing and digital imaging. The importance of color varies greatly from image to image, as some images are saturated, some have subdued tints, and some revert back to pure gray scale. The decisions about color are made as each image evolves during the process of creation, and its final form is meant to reinforce a particular mood that matches the character of the landscape.
Ken Ragsdale, Memories and personal recollections inform Ragsdale’s works and help to identify the key components of each work. Once the composition and components are determined as to capture the aura of a memory, schematic drawings are documented and prepared for hand assembly. Laboriously the schematics are cut out, folded and tabbed to create their final 3-dimensional formats. As each object is placed and the structures oriented, Ragsdale modifies the scenes to perfectly frame each scenario for the final photograph.
Paul Raphaelson's photographs of the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn document a topic of continuing controversy. It was once the biggest sugar refinery in the world. Originally a complex, now just one historically landmarked building still stands on the Brooklyn waterfront. On it's way to becoming high-rise condos it might well be the best symbol of the climate in Brooklyn today.
Emily Roz uses addition and omission to morph segmented botanical shapes into incongruous bodily juxtapositions. In browns, pinks and orange, the sexualized forms hover on a white gessoed background of negative space. Roz’s compositions exist in a void. The permutations are fluid and re-embodied to infer figuration.
Patricia Smith is known for her idiosyncratic cartographic explorations of the psyche and mental states, Smith incorporates new outer and inner geographical regions in her latest works. Smith's mappings are not exclusively anchored in external geography. Often she organizes and analyzes texts, and maps their intersections with her own thoughts. The results are a highly individual infiltration of mapping into the fluid and mysterious regions of the mind.
Joanne Ungar , Joanne Ungar’s background in collage arts transitioned into her current process works when she began working with wax in the 1990’s. This current series began as a "packaging" double entendre: it was a way to address and explore feelings about the cosmetics industry and her own involvement in it.
Edie Winograde captures the temporal relationships between past and present through landscape photography and unstaged photographs taken in American national parks and monuments throughout the United States. These photographs expose the mundane moments and often unnoticed coincidences that occur to travelers and tourists against the backdrop of grandeur that is the American "Wilderness."
