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Location: 530 West 25th Street, 4th floor, New York, NY 10001
Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11am- 6pm
Moscow – New York – Barcelona
April 30—May 25, 2013Opening Reception: Saturday, May 4, 3—7 pm
Noho – M55
530 West 25th Street. 4th floor New York, NY 10001 present
Moscow – New York – Barcelona
Ludmila Aristova
Recent fiber and mixed media work exploring the artist’s vision of three cities.
A graduate of Moscow Textile Institute, Ludmila Aristova came to fiber art after a career in fashion design. Aristova’s work is included in collections of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, International Quilt Study Center & Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the All Russia Museum of Applied and Decorative Art in Moscow, as well as numerous private collections in United States, Canada, Asia and Europe.
“… Aristova’s Barcelona series are among the most daring works in her oeuvre to date, with their silvery gray, golden yellow, blue and purple harmonies creating a sense of “color as light,” to borrow J.M.W. Turner’s felicitous term. Capturing something so ethereal by its very nature is a more daunting task in fabric than in pigment, mind you, especially considering Aristova’s painstaking hand-sewing technique, involving layered pleats and tucks, raised fabric folds, hidden seams, and a wide variety of stitching techniques –– all of which combine to give her pieces a tactile sensuousness that is every bit as impressive as their coloristic richness.
Although more figurative, Aristova’s Moscow and New York fiber art works are equally exciting in their own manner. The predominant forms in many of the Moscow pieces are the onion domes and steeples, sometimes enhanced by the artist’s intricate beadwork, so ubiquitous in the architecture of that country, often topped by crosses.”
Ed McCormack, Gallery & Studio, April—May 2013
Birds and Dogs
April 2 to April 27, 2013Opening Reception: TBA
Noho – M55
530 West 25th Street. 4th floor New York, NY 10001 present
Birds and Dogs
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Irving Barrett has been making art since the mid 1970s when he began to take an interest in drawing while a student at Columbia University. Forsaking an academic degree in favor of art, he studied painting and life drawing at the Art Students League until gaining a B.F.A. at Parsons in 1983 and later an M.F.A. at Pratt Institute in 1991. His first entry in a group show was at the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, Long Island in 1978. Since then he has had numerous entries in various group exhibits as well as a one man show at LaGrange College, Georgia in 1998. Among the group show galleries have been the Elaine Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton, Long Island and the Arras Gallery, 57th Street, NYC. Irving Barrett has been a member of Noho Gallery since 1994.
ABOUT THE WORK
Irving Barrett has always been interested in both montage and collage as effective approaches and techniques for the making of art. The acrylic painting “Kestrel and Sparrow” (2005) is an example of the use of montage to create an imaginary scene. “Sharpshin” (2009), on the other hand, is done with an intricate collage technique to create a surreal setting with imaginary figurations emerging from the foliage. The work is usually a blend of realism and surrealism with a hint of Dada or pop art in places. Intrigue and illusionism are given frequent voice. In recent years, he has concentrated on the depiction of birds as his favorite content, using the environs of Aquidneck Island, Rhode Island as a source of inspiration for his art.
Vicissitudes
March 5 to March 30, 2013Opening Reception: Saturday, March 9, 3 - 5pm. 2013
Noho – M55
530 West 25th Street. 4th floor New York, NY 10001 present
Vicissitudes
Arlene Baker
The Silk Space Series
Arlene Baker will present “Vicissitudes,” a selection of recent work from her “Silk Spaces” series at the Noho-M55 gallery from March 5th to March 30th 2013.
Arlene Baker’s “Silk Spaces” series evolved from her earlier work, which explored subtle interplays of color, horizon, and space, in the context of large free-hanging paintings and gouache paintings on paper. Where the color field artist Morris Louis veiled his canvases with poured layers of paint, Arlene’s Silk Spaces paintings hide a painted surface under layers of diaphanous silk. These elements interact to create an evasive world of their own. All paintings are a uniform 8” and 20” size and shape and relate to each other as if in a family.
About The Artist
Arlene Baker was raised in New York City where she studied art at City College, completing her BA at the University of Minnesota and her MA and MFA at the University of Iowa, followed by post-graduate study in London. She has taught art in colleges and universities in Detroit, London, and New York. Her work, which has been exhibited in one-person and group shows nationally and internationally, has been awarded numerous prizes and is in corporate and university collections as well as collections of fellow artists and private collectors. She usually lives in New York State but returns to London from time to time to work with the Barbican Arts Group, an artists’ collective.
Arlene will be present at the opening reception.
Felted Fields
February 5 - March 2, 2013Opening Reception: Saturday, February 9, 4 - 6pm. 2013
Noho – M55
530 West 25th Street. 4th floor New York, NY 10001 present
Felted Fields
Erma Martin Yost
Erma Martin Yost presents “Felted Fields,” hand-felted stitched constructions, as pictorial and poetic metaphors. Using felt as her canvas and thread as her paintbrush the magical mesh of fibers creates a language of symbolic images and archetypal forms. Some fields lie dormant where shadowy shapes shift mysteriously. Other fields burst with brilliant color and fertile life. In all of Yost’s work a strong sense of place and personal poetry emerge as she fuses her natural and inner worlds.
Felt, an ancient textile form, predates spinning and weaving by several thousand years. Nomadic peoples discovered felt when subjecting wool to heat and moisture, pounding it until it matted into a strong cohesive structure. They formed these densely packed fibers into durable objects ranging from the utilitarian to the religious, even constructing sturdy waterproof tents. Today felt is a favored medium for fiber artists and the commercial textile industry as wool is a versatile renewable resource.
This is Yost’s 19th solo exhibition at Noho Gallery. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Art and Design and was included in their “New Acquisitions” exhibit in 1995. In 2009 and 2012 Yost’s work was included in “Art of the State” at The State Museum of Pennsylvania. Also in 2009 Yost soloed at the Johnson & Johnson World Headquarters. Yost received New Jersey Council on the Arts fellowships in 1991 and 1999. Through the New Jersey Art Annual: Crafts exhibitions, her work has been exhibited in the Jersey City Museum, the Newark Museum, the New Jersey State Museum, the Hunterdon Museum, and the Morris Museum. Her work is included in twenty-one books, including “The Art Quilt Book” by Robert Shaw and “Object Lessons” published by GUILD, Inc. and juried by Michael Monroe, former curator of the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery. View Yost’s work at ermamartinyost.com
Paintings and drawings 2009-2012
January 8 - February 2, 2013Opening Reception: Saturday, January 19, 3 - 6pm. 2013
Noho – M55
530 West 25th Street. 4th floor New York, NY 10001 present
Paintings and drawings 2009-2012
Philadelphia Artist Corliss Cavalieri
Paintings and drawings 2009-2012 showcases Corliss Cavalieri’s work of the last three years. A continuation of his imaginative hide-and-seek forms, this body of work was inspired by Fabric-Row, the South Street Corridor neighborhood where the artist resides — a carnival of pattern, neon, and popular culture. The NOHO – M55 exhibition showcases an array of marvelously idiosyncratic and somewhat wacky large paintings and small drawings completed in his Philadelphia studio as well as at artist residencies.
Fanciful imagery commingles with the vestiges of expressionist technique. The artist is pinning the work directly to the gallery walls, just as he would make them in the studio. By applying a canvas directly to the walls of his workspace, Cavalieri incorporates the bumps and offset surfaces of the rigid support into nuanced, textured multi-layers of thinly applied paint.
Corliss Cavalieri lives and works in Philadelphia. He has exhibited throughout the northeast, receiving his MFA from Tyler School of Art, and BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He has held residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Arts, and Yaddo. Cavalieri is former Curator of the Philadelphia Civic Center Museum and past Gallery Director of the Paul Robeson Art Gallery Rutgers – Newark.
Moments of Being
December 18, 2012 – January 5, 2013Opening Reception: Thursday, Dec 20. 6 - 8pm, 2012
M55 ART 530 West 25th Street. 4th floor New York, NY 10001 is pleased to present
Moments of Being
Inaugural group exhibition of Noho Gallery /M55 Art
In association with Noho Gallery an exhibit of work featuring members of M55 Art at the new Chelsea location.
Artists
Alexis Kuhr
Alfred Martinez
Annette Morriss
Anowar Hossain
Deborah Kriger
Ed Rath
Eileen Mislove
Emily Stedman
John Beardman
Joyce Silver
Judy Russell
Karen Gentile
Nicolette Reim
Richard Pitts
Virginia Pierrepont
Yosuke Ito
Anowar Hossain's Annual Solo Exhibition
November 10 - November 30, 2012Opening Reception: Saturday, November 10, 4-8pm
M55 ART 44-02 23rd Street Long Island City NY 11101 present
Anowar Hossain’s Annual Solo Exhibition
Anowar Hossain
M55 Art Gallery presents Anowar Hossain’s annual solo exhibition in New York of recent work and paintings, abstract and figurative complex compositions intricately crafted and rich color palettes, inner visions and constant reflections. Anowar brings the work alive with exuberant brushwork and highly creative color interactions creating an endless journey of shapes and images in flux for each spectator.
About Anowar Hossain
Anowar comes from a family of artists, scholars and supporters of the arts and other cultural events. Early on, his parents discovered that he had a gift for art and encouraged him to explore his talent. As a young man Anowar participated in art shows and competitions; he won many prizes and awards for his work.
Growing up in Bangladesh, Anowar was strongly influenced by the vibrant Bengali creative community, which included the writer Ravindrath Tagore, film maker Satyajit Ray and musician Ravi Shankar.
The young artist came to the U.S. in the 1980’s and became involved with the flourishing New York art community through his art study and training at the School of Visual Arts and The Art Students League of New York. His works have been shown in many galleries and exhibitions both nationally and internationally and have won many awards. Anowar has sold many artworks and is represented in many private collections around the world, including the United States, England, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Germany.
Anowar is very philosophically minded. He believes human life is fully intertwined with nature and the universe; “Every thing we do in our life has a result and we have to remember this.” Anowar has been traveling internationally since an early age and has met many diverse individuals. Along the way, he has gathered knowledge and wisdom and this has influenced his canvases.
Landscape re. Form
October 17 – November 3 , 2012Opening Reception: Wednesday, October 17, 6-8pm
M55 ART 44-02 23rd Street Long Island City NY 11101 present
Landscape re. Form
Bill Hochhausen
Video inside painting – Lisa Karrer
Music inside painting – John Morton
Landscape Re. Form M55 Art Gallery presents Bill Hochhausen’s second New York show of landscape “constructions”, that now includes sculpture. Direct carving into large pine timbers brings landscape forcefully into Bill’s ongoing work in three dimensions. The paintings, more nuanced and complex, reflect back on themselves by way of multiple images, photographs, video and his (signature) idiosyncratic framing.
The multi-paneled works build upon a core of direct, painterly renderings of natural phenomena; landscapes of light, water, foliage, changing seasons. Immersed in the landscape one is supremely ‘retinal’, reactive, in the moment. But unfolding an easel, setting colors out, fixing panels in place and dealing with mosquitoes becomes an act of calculation and strategy. In the (faded) light of a degraded modern world the bucolic setting still feels good, but somewhat absurd.
Marcel Duchamp’s disdain for the ‘retinal’, including its unthinkingly craft-bound tradition, among other things, led him to the readymade. Rather than painterly expressiveness, this shift to the conceptual has proven to prescient and influential in modernist art since the 60’s.
For Hochhausen the retinal becomes the conceptual. Each panel painted in the landscape is, as it must be, a synthesis of optical reaction and calculated choice. Later, sometimes months later, in the studio, the panels are treated as if they were found objects, readymades; to be considered as elements of a new synthesis. Like his compatriots at Yale – Nacy Graves, Brice Marden and Rackstraw Downes among many other notables – Hochhausen fashions a unique, naturalist response to the conceptualist force exerted on modernist art.
The overall composition may combine three paintings of the same view, in a manner suited to the moment (painterly expressiveness) but different in size and proportion. A photograph (“Day Lilies with Dorothy” includes a video), manipulated framing and other evidence of process expand the retinal to confound the underlying naturalism.
“Day Lilies with Dorothy” a bucolic view of summer lilies in bloom, has a video monitor set into the upper right side of the painting. The eleven minute video, made in collaboration with video artist/performer Lisa Karrer, and composer John Morton uses his composition “Pandemonium”. The video eye scans and in other ways regards the painting into which it is set. The use of video and music as an integral part of a painting may be original with this work.
“Branch” and “Flooded Track” are held at top and bottom by framing sections cut from local red cedar (branch) and finished to emphasize grain pattern and natural color. Hochhausen’s framing strategy breaks with convention as it ‘breaks’ the frame. The sometimes jarring color, texture and shapes that the framing employs seeks to build an optical paradox to the smooth perspective of landscape naturalism.
Following the notion that every optical, as well as material, moment in the development of a work opens onto a new vista, Hochhausen challenges his own affinity to direct landscape painting by folding observation back upon itself. We are made to experience (observe?) our various modes of observation, now forced together by this new synthesis, reinforcing the primacy of perception.
Over the Reflection
October 12th to October 13th, 2012Opening Reception: Saturday, October 13, 5-8pm
M55 Art 44-02 23rd Street Long Island City NY 11101 is pleased to present
Over the Reflection
A site – specific installation
Artists
Hideyuki Kubo
Hisami Taniguchi
ikemeso
Laura Mega
Takuya Maeda
Yusuke Ochiai
Black & White
September 26 – October 11, 2012Opening Reception: Thursday, September 27, 2012 6-8pm
M55 ART 44-02 23rd Street Long Island City NY 11101 present
Black & White
Photography
Artists
Alessio Ortu
Colleen Lidz
Elaine Chan-Dow
Feng Lu
Iulian Budea
Lou Roole
Najib Aschrafzai
Ramiro Spindler
Silvia Forni
Whitney Anne Ellis
Local Party on the Block
September 8, 2012Opening Reception: September 8, 2012
M55 Art in association with Local Project are pleased to present:
Ikemeso
№5 Handwork
Chain
___
LOCAL PARTY ON THE BLOCK
Located in the heart of LIC, between PS1 MoMA and 5 Pointz, and in partnership with the Queens Museum, LP invites everyone who wants to be part of this to come and participate, there will be great music from local DJs, dancing, and exciting surprises.
Local Project ends the summer but will continue to warm your hearts with many more exiting events. Stay tuned.
Bringing the community together: M55 Art, Project Luz, Artefacting, Antagonist Movement, eL Paper magazine, Fluid among other exiting art & cultural projects.
DJs: Texas, Pampa, Santamaria, Karl Schoenemann, R-Tronika, Prince of Queens
The Public Life of Flowers
September 5 – 22, 2012Opening Reception: Saturday, September 8th 2012 6-8pm
M55 ART 44-02 23rd Street Long Island City NY 11101 present
The Public Life of Flowers is a nod to the ongoing relationship between poets and artists. In particular, the concept of poets gathering words as one would gather flowers for a bouquet, a gathering of colors. I don’t “compose” these drawings of flowers, so much as “write them,” as I see them in front of me. The line of composition is fluid , not a hesitating, searching one. Why would one prefer to draw than write? Perhaps it is not one over the other, but the intensity of both. The history of exchange between poet and visual artist is intense. Who would not want to be part of that dialogue? I “write” the flowers in this exhibit into a form of visual poetry.
Nicolette Reim studied at The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. She has lived and worked for most of her life in New York City. For many years she collaborated in video film, primarily as art director/set designer. Her works were exhibited and aired in the United States and Mexico. They are a part of permanent collections such as in the Museum of Modern Art, NYC and the Public Television and Museum of Broadcast Communications, Chicago. She continues to work in visual mediums that include elements of words and currently makes pictures on paper and canvas, showing in Atlanta, Ga., where she lives part time, and New York City.
Emergency Orange
September 5 – 22, 2012Opening Reception: Saturday, September 8th 2012 6-8pm.
M55 ART 44-02 23rd Street Long Island City NY 11101 present
Deanna Sirlin
Drawings, Collages and Installation
Emergency Orange
New York M55 ART is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of drawings, collages, and an installation by Deanna Sirlin. These works all date from 2012 and result from the artist’s exploration of a bold new palette of fluorescent, neon, and electric colors. They reflect the direct impact of our current visual environment: the colors of highway emergency gear, the colors that make athletes stand out on the playing field, the colors of the packaging for myriad consumer products. These colors were fashionable in the 1960s, then went out of favor, but now are tightly woven into the fabric of our visual landscape. Sirlin’s mixed media collages incorporate elements directly from this landscape, including pieces of advertisements, product packaging, and other bits of commercial design, which Sirlin combines with transparency film and transforms through drawing and painting. Although they possess the immediacy of current visual culture, they also evoke art historical references from Bauhaus fabric design and color experiments to the gesturality of Abstract Expressionism and the high-keyed colors and cultural referentiality of Pop Art. Sirlin likens her work to fusion cuisine, saying: “I mix colors from our urban landscape and popular culture with the intimate gestures of Abstract Expressionism to make my work.”
A highlight of the exhibition will be a new, site-specific installation for the gallery’s windows derived from the imagery of the collages.
About Deanna Sirlin
Deanna Sirlin was born in Brooklyn, New York and currently has a studio outside of Atlanta. As a painter who works in multiple mediums and creates site works, commissions, and projects she passionately blends multiple disciplines in her work. “I am walking a tightrope between traditional image making and digital technology. By bridging this gap in my work I have created a new language that is reflective of my viewpoint of the visual world around me.” Sirlin’s notable works include Retracings, commissioned by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and Vanishing Point for Ca’ Fosscari, the University of Venice, Italy.
I am a painter. Although shape, form and content are crucially important, it is color that has always moved me, intrigued me, and prompted my ongoing investigations of the painted world. The new colors I am using are related to my older palettes, but they present the challenge of the glare of colors for which I have no art historical references, only the contemporary world of sport, fashion, design and safety clothes. I always want to steal the emergency orange cones that line the highways, especially when I see that they had been splashed with marks that range from a gestural brushstroke of tar to geometric tapes of hot pink and lime. Maybe I already have.
Deanna Sirlin
Milton, Georgia
August 2012
www.deannasirlin.com
Relationships Undressed
August 15-September 1, 2012Opening Reception: Wednesday, August 15th, 5-8 p.m
The Lover’s Bath Watercolor on Paper 34 in x 50 in
M55 ART 44-02 23rd Street Long Island City NY 11101 present
Relationships Undressed
Emily Stedman / Watercolor Paintings
Figurative paintings exploring the physical and emotional relationships between people is the theme of Emily Stedman’s first solo show at M55 Art. In this exhibition of large watercolor paintings, entitled “Relationships Undressed”, nude figures posed erotically or pensively seem engaged in either a metaphysical dance or quiet contemplation.
These accurately observed and deftly rendered nude figures embrace each other, undress each other, or share in a ritual. They meet in the non-exploitative, but sensual, space of I-thou.
What Stedman does exploit is the medium of watercolor. In her hands it becomes fluid; it blends, runs, bubbles and splashes. Pattern, lacy foliage, and suggested interiors become the Eden for many of her figures. Working together, a gentle narrative and paint handling cast a spell on the viewer.
Emily Stedman’s watercolors and oils have been in solo and group exhibits throughout the United States including the Brooklyn Museum; The Rotunda Gallery; The Seattle Erotic Art Festival; Searles Castle, in Great Barrington, MA; Lana Santarelli Gallery and NYU’s Contemporary Art Gallery.
In the place we live 2012
July 25 – August 11 2012Opening Reception: Friday July 27, 5-8pm. 2012
M55 Art in association with The Secret Theatre
and the assistant of Queens Council on the Arts
are please to Present:
In the place we live 2012
A group exhibition of L.I.C artists
From the time of the Internet, the idea of community has evolved to a different meaning of the original word, but there is still a need to bring back or maintain the sense of community where people engage in human interaction.
In this show we invite artist to explore with their own creative process the meaning of community, whether is working together or alone, using technology or not, the artist is invited to experiment with the original
meaning of community and engage the public to reflect on their own.
The exhibition will celebrate and capture the talent, creativity and spirit of LIC artists in a show that explores the significance of collaboration, social interaction and the sense of community. The exhibition
will showcase the diversity of all visual arts media (2D, 3D, Video/Installation and performance artists).
There are 2 venues for the exhibition. The main gallery space will be M55 Art gallery located at the Long Island City Art Center at 44-02 23rd Street.
The second exhibition space is The Secret Theatre Gallery located at the entrance lobby of the theatre as a satellite project gallery for the exhibition.
Artists:
Adam Handler
Adele Shtern
Amy Geller
Anna Maria Hernandez
Arturo Amaya
Bertille de Baudiniere
Bonnie Rothchild
Cari Clare
Chain
Deborah Sherman
Eleanor Rahim
Eliot Lable
Elle Maldonado
Erin Treacy
Florina Sbircea
Ged Merino
Ig Mata
Jean-Marie Guyaux
Karen Kettering Dimit
Kim Sheridan
Kristen L Martin
Lauren Nikou
Lou Roole
Marianne Barcellona
Mary Pinto
Matthew F. Greco
Matti Havens
Mihai Stancescu
Nobuyuki Narita
Olja Stipanovic
Paul Farinacci
Priscilla Stadler
Rachel Kohn
Raul Sanchez de la Sierra
Richard George
Robert Lobe
Rouska Valkova
Roxanne Baldwin
Tamar Hirschl
Violet Baxter
Yanka Cantor
Yu Sato
Small Works
July 5 – July 21, 2012Opening Reception: Friday, July 6, 6 to 8pm. 2012
M55 ART 44-02 23rd Street Long Island City NY 11101 present
Small Works
Arturo Amaya
Caia Benack
Courtney Kates
Dagmar Hricková
Jeff Williamson
Laura Pawson
Patricio Jijon
Peter Dannenbaum
Rebecca Lowry
Ryan DeLaurentis
Spencer Brainard
Xin Wen
Yu Sato
Ask the I-Ching: a Public Oracle Interaction Open to All
Saturday June 16 from 3 – 6 pmOpening Reception: Saturday June 16 from 3 – 6 pm
M55 ART 44-02 23rd Street Long Island City NY 11101
and the The Book of Changed present
Ask the I-Ching: a Public Oracle Interaction Open to All
Saturday June 16 from 3 – 6 pm
Raindate Sunday June 17 from 3 – 6 pm
A Gallery of the Streets Project presented by M55 Art and The Book of Changed in conjunction with QAX (Queens Arts Express) 2012.
Bring your questions – political, personal , or professional – to the tiny park across from PS1 MoMA at Jackson and 46th Ave., Long Island City, NY, on 6/16 from 3 – 6 pm (raindate 6/17).
Join artist Priscilla Stadler and philosopher Gary Richmond for interactive consultations with the I-Ching (The Book of Change), a 5000 year old Chinese text. Based on interpreting a randomly-generated set of six solid or open lines, the I-Ching has been consulted for guidance on topics ranging from military strategy to personal relationships.
The 2012 Queens Arts Express challenges us to consider how health care, housing and economic policies affect our lives. QAX asks us to answer the question “How would YOU change public policy?” specifically in these three areas.
These questions are very challenging for most of us to answer. Can an oracle like the I-Ching help?
Stadler and Richmond are members of The Book of Changed , a group of eight multidisciplinary artists using theI-Ching to inform creative exploration.
Let’s see what the I-Ching can tell us about these topics, or any other questions you may be pondering.
For more information write to Priscilla P. Stadler priscillastudio@gmail.com
Recent Works by Eillen Mislove & Karen Gentile
June 13 – June 30, 2012Opening Reception: Thursday, June 14, 5 to 8 pm
M55 ART 44-02 23rd Street Long Island City NY 11101
is pleased to present
Recent Work
Painting as re-creation
May 23 - June 9Opening Reception: May 24, 6-8pm
M55 ART 44-02 23rd Street Long Island City NY 11101
is pleased to present
Painting as Re-creation
By
John Beardman
As I enter the last stage of my life I face a wholly unexpected audience. I had hoped for a place in the art world, but like most areas in this consumer society, this world is the market, and that has spoken. (I once met a curator who thought that it was not possible that a first-rate painter could have escaped the notice of professional curators.) In that world, if you are not known, you are not.
As with most failures, this has come with a hidden reward—freedom. I’ve had the good fortune to not have been given the approval and accolades I had so wanted, that of a faceless audience of people who would re-enforce and reward me with a place, if not eminence. My prayers have been denied and I thank whatever gods have denied me.
Perhaps failure is not the word for I’m not being completely truthful in what I wanted, for part of me has always been afraid that if I were to succeed I would stop growing. I have lacked the faith in myself to be able to resist corruption. I have seen so many artists be destroyed by fame that I have done everything to sabotage myself professionally.
There is a touch of bitterness that comes with the knowledge that, conscious and unconscious aside, it’s just not going to happen, and for good reason. I make art but I can’t sell it. The art that is marketed is the art that reflects who its audience is. It’s not just fashion or investment that drives the mavens who steer the art world, it’s that they see themselves there. To mangle Emerson, you can choose the paint—or the extension cords— you will, you will make but a picture of who you are. My critical facilities have not been diminished. The art market that rejects me feeds me nevertheless.
I have the great fortune to be able to visit my past in a very physical way—through the art I have made in the past. To re paint an old image is to search for integrity. It’s my recreation, and a demanding one it is. How rarely can we recycle our past.
To be completely present with a piece of the past is to transcend time. All time is now.
Past, present, future melt as I approach a painting done some 40 years ago. I see it fresh and it dictates to me. I am its tool. Time slips through my fingers, becomes coagulated, as it were, in the paint—a brush stroke opens a wound that is formed by that which seals and heals it.
The melting and dissolution of any sense of myself that results with simply following the task at hand is not just akin to love. It is love. This is not a small gift.
That audience is but one fellow and he is about to have his breakfast.
John Beardman 2012
11
May 20Opening Reception: May 20 12-6pm
M55 Art in collaboration with LIC ARTS OPEN and the support of Beit Issie Shapiro is pleased to present
Artist Valentina DuBasky is pleased to present her student, Oron Tal, age 11, in his first solo exhibition. This exhibition titled “11, Paintings and Drawings, 2010-2012” will take place at the M55 Gallery on May 20, 2012, 12-6pm. In 2010, Valentina accepted Oron, then an eight year old student, after recognizing his passion for art. For two years, he has been coming to Valentina’s painting studio in the West Village in New York City for weekly art lessons. This exhibition marks Oron’s first two years of art study with a selection of paintings and drawings in a variety of media on the themes of travel, reading, media, fashion and family.
Valentina is an exhibiting artist whose work has been included in more than 150 exhibitions nationally and internationally. She is also the founder and Executive Director of Art-in-a-Box, an international nonprofit organization. Oron’s artwork has been influenced through a combination of Valentina’s unique expertise, Oron’s diverse experiences, his rich imagination and love of learning. Oron writes of his relationship to art:
Oron Tal is a student at Solomon Schechter School of Queens. Oron’s academic environment is a place where curiosity rules and where children learn to honor timeless traditions and think for themselves. The students are encouraged to become global citizens – the classroom is a launching pad that enables students to view the world from an extraordinary new perspective. Oron’s artwork projects his global lens and the recognition that we are all part of something greater than ourselves.
Being a global citizen encompasses a commitment to social responsibility – a call-to-action as compassionate human beings. Oron will be donating proceeds from the sale of his artwork to Beit Issie Shapiro, Israel’s most effective nonprofit organization in 2012. Beit Issie Shapiro is a leading innovator of new therapies for children and adults with disabilities, sharing best practices internationally. Beit Issie plays a leading role in promoting the inclusion of people with disabilities in society. Oron is happy that his art can help people in need and invites all to join him in supporting Beit Issie Shapiro.
Oron’s show, “11”, Paintings and Drawings, 2010-2012, presents 50 original works of art that demonstrate the breadth and depth of Oron’s creativity, intellect and skill in expressing his ideas and interpreting the world around him. Please join us to celebrate the beginning of a unique creative journey of a young artist.
M55 PROFILES - LIC ARTS OPEN
May 14 – May 19, 2012Opening Reception: Tuesday, May 15, 6 to 8 pm
M55 ART in collaboration with LIC ARTS OPEN is pleased to present
LIC ARTS OPEN is an exciting celebration of the thriving arts community in Long Island City, Queens. Featuring 200+ Open Studios, Painting, Sculpture, Music, Dance, Theater, and more. The event is organized by the LIC Arts Open organization, a collaboration of arts entities, businesses and individuals seeking to spotlight the diverse artistic community in LIC.
M55 PROFILES
In collaboration with LIC Arts Open, an exhibit of work featuring members of M55 Art and invited guest artist .
Celebrating Long Island City Arts!
Artists
John Beardman
Karen Gentile
Iris Levinson
Alfred Martinez
Eileen Mislove
Annette Morriss
Carolyn Oberst
Virginia Pierrepont
Richard Pitts
Alice Plusch
Ed Rath
Judy Russell
Shiro Sasaki
George Schulman
Joyce Silver
Emily Stedman
Jeff Way
Studio of the Absurd. "Good-Bye Amsterdam"
April 25 – May 12, 2012Opening Reception: Wednesday, April 25, 5 - 8pm
M55 ART 44-02 23rd Street Long Island City NY 11101
is pleased to presents:
STUDIO OF THE ABSURD
“Good-Bye Amsterdam”
by
Virginia Pierrepont
Featured Artists:
Judy Glantzman
Jeffrey Bishop
Chuck Webster
Eddie Martinez
Virginia Pierrepont
Shari Mendelson
Yoshihito Ito & Kazuya Kubo
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In her latest installation at M55 ART, artist and curator Virginia Pierrepont reconstructs her personal studio practice into an allegorical showcase of her personal touchstones. Reversing of the normal order of things, she invites her artist friends, family, and social contacts to participate in her creative process while she develops new paintings during the course of the exhibition. Eschewing the idea that creativity is an internal process, Pierrepont is directly inspired by the energy of her social interactions. She has gathered together the work of six simpatico artists, whose paths collide in an expression of pure freedom and wild temporal energy. The combined effects evoke a historic theme of seduction and allure that reference back to the fading red light district of Amsterdam. As the main character in this theatre of the absurd, Pierrepont positions herself within the red light space of the Galleries main window. In what appears to be the artist’s studio space, she actively paints from a voluptuous reclining model.
Participating artists Eddie Martinez, Judy Glantzman and Chuck Webster exhibit an almost 80’s wild, Pier 34, East Village feeling. Sculptor artist Shari Mendelson juxtaposes her talents of recycling with ancient history through use of modern products. Jeffrey Bishop works on multiple series that don’t necessarily cohere to a singular signature style. Yosi and Kazuya Kobo complete this perpetual space with bizarre furniture creations that seem to echo Adirondack chic from old world stock. Seen together, these eloquently defiant artworks conjure up the ancient muse of poetry in our world absurd.
Judy Glantzman
War Series: The Roses I began this series after visiting the Guernica, at the Reina Sophia Museum in Spain, in 2009. I had seen the Guernica many times at the Museum of Modern Art, but this time it had a more profound effect on me. Dark imagery had always appeared in my previous paintings. After seeing the Guernica, I decided to make war, or whatever I could imagine that war looked like, as the subject of my work. What has resulted is a group of collaged and painted paper works. In these, distinct sets of imagery: observed, imagined, and the accidental spills of paint are torn, cut, and recombined over and over, many times, over a long period of time. The goal, the moment when the work is finished, is when all the elements collide and recombine to make a palpable feeling. These paintings are my continued attempts to see what WAR looks like to me, and they encompass terror, mourning, and loss.
Jeffrey Bishop
By nature I tend to work on multiple series that don’t necessarily cohere to a singular signature style. The Turks utilize the same constant irregular shape, hard of edge and spiky, perhaps comic, which I articulate in a variety of ways while retaining serial constancy. The Untitled watercolors were executed during an artist residency in Rome. They reflect a more intimate, atmospheric and whimsical approach to space. The Black and Green works employ a resinous surface that is poured and into which shaved charcoal is added. A migration occurs while the resin is setting up. The result conjures for me something both visceral and aquatic.
Chuck Webster
I work in paintings, drawings, collage and prints. I am interested in an image that engages the viewer on many levels. Forms are drawn from personal history as well as from shapes and phenomena that I observe in the world. I am interested in creating a narrative that comes from the work, my life, and the intersection of these with shapes, scale and color.
The work of making the picture and contacting the surface with the brush and hand leaves a journey of decisions, much as a well-worn tool contains the history of the touch and work of its owner.
I work on panels on an absorbent gesso. My surfaces are polished to a sheen that evokes encaustic paint and preserves gesture and glaze while showing a history of touch and work. I want the work to be both immediate and remote, as though you are encountering something for the first time that has been present in the world for 1,000 years.
Eddie Martinez
It’s easy to imagine Martinez standing with his nose nearly pressed into the wet canvas, craning his tall frame in order to examine an area where thick paint curls like breaking surf. We can imagine him deciding to act, and dragging a thick wet brush into more fresh paint with a decisive gesture. In that way his paintings evoke the memory of a host of heroic painters, and like those heroic modernists associated with the early to mid-twentieth century, Martinez uses his canvases to make paintings which flirt with abstraction, but keep one foot planted in the referential.
Martinez’s work is both less serious and more serious than his forebears. The less seriousness mirrors the central turn in philosophy and art over the past sixty years, which has been the cementing of the unconscious into every facet of human activity. The paintings are more serious in the sense that, once the subject is decentered, the topic shifts from the individual towards relationships and communication. You’ll notice that the figures in Martinez’s paintings aren’t isolated. They are either in relationship to one another, or looking pointedly out at you, or in the case of Sun Setter, deliberately looking away.
In a world that loves to talk about the death of painting, Martinez offers optimism to lovers of painting. Martinez’s paintings have their own internal logic, and the startling clarity of his vision creates a testimony regarding the way he sees the world. In the same way that the works of Van Gogh or de Kooning evoke worlds and change the way we see, by meeting our world and leaving a trace behind, Martinez also discloses a world. His work holds the potential for historical continuity with earlier traditions, while breaking from their fallacies and charting new territory.
Virginia Pierrepont
“A short trip can make an indelible impression and forever alter the everyday character of the senses. The sensory universe is assailed persistently with everything new. We are struck by the fresh qualities that form the individual nature of a new place. For an artist the challenge is a cognitive shift: how to adapt perception to the new dynamic.” – Fran Coleman, 2012
For me painting is a diary, an interpretive record of how I feel and react to my environment. I express a spectrum of emotions as well as intellectual processes in my canvases. Working in Plein Aire lends a more immediate connection to these perceptions and thoughts. Back in the studio, working from memory, the image is experienced and sensed once more through the filter of emotion and personal vision. The Natural world is reinterpreted through the passionate use of color, brush stroke and form. The act of painting is an additive and subtractive process. The landscape becomes layered with associative memories, as paint is scraped away or added, “I am interested in exploring how natural elements, such as time, distance, space, light, shadow and color coincide in a perceived image, and which element best expresses the essence of that image. The effect is truly sculptural: the layers of paint do not completely cover each other. Color radiates from underneath, like so many levels of the human experience, unseen but not forgotten.
Shari Mendelson
My current work is constructed from found plastic bottles and refers to sources as varied as the painting of Giorgio Morandi, ancient Greek, Roman and Islamic glass and ceramic vessels, Boli Figures from Mali and Egyptian Sculpture. I collect discarded bottles, cut them into pieces and use the parts to create new vessels and small sculptures. Some of my pieces are coated with mixed materials and/or glaze-like layers of polymers and paint, which vary the levels of transparency and opacity, emphasize or obscure the original material, and alter the visual and actual weight. Many of my works are based on specific pieces that I’ve admired for years at the Metropolitan Museum. Others are based on collected images or built more intuitively through the playful reassembly of the individual parts.
Using today’s trash as material for sculptures that refer to early works of art may seem incongruent, yet it enables me to comment on our current throw-away culture while investigating issues of authenticity, originality, material, history, culture and the relative value of objects.
Yoshihito Ito, Kazuya Kubo & Tim Ito of D2 Creations
D2 is a NYC based Japanese design collective specializing in interior decor and clothing. We call ourselves Creator. We aimed at playful creation with designs and art aspects. Main focus is on contemporary furniture and clothing applying existing items such as vintage, antique, and junk, by changing its function. In other words, utilizing wasted items and giving them new functions and new life. That gives us new finds and interests, and inspires us.
Inside-Outliers’ Alchemy: Working the Edges of Perception
April 4– April 21, 2012Opening Reception: Wednesday, April 4, 6 - 9pm
M55 ART & Urban Studio Unbound are pleased to present
Inside-Outliers’ Alchemy: Working the Edges of Perception
New York artists Abigail Deville and Stephen Woods flip the script with their offer of installed works exploring the unruly nature of histories personal and political, while simultaneously questioning the stability of our prescribed notions by employing iconographic imagery, objets en flux, and permutations of assemblage/bricolage, to impart meta-static statements which function and communicate on the edges of multi and cross – sensory perception.
Putting the tangible in service of the elusive, the works suggest a dynamic exchange questioning the reliability of the systems and sciences in our physical world, with a revisionist bent of the highest order.
How items- as – receptacles gather, hold, and release meaning, as well as serve as place markers for our experiences as individuals and societies at large alike, combined with an examination of the patterns of manifestation and process, the works imply an overarching, active trust in the mutability of the universe, an order in chaos if you will, and a willingness to walk the talk of pioneers demonstrating frontier genres.
Woods’ arresting “Empty Vessels Float” achieves a visual poetic stance in which the interplay of redefined axiomatic prose, along with iconographic and archetypal imagery, creates a metaphoric dialogueof refreshing, if divergent, relationship, and a definitively original language. The final visual resolution may be mined for conventional interpretation, or alternately, and preferably, stand alone successfully as a collaborative whole, unfettered by the trappings of process and meaning; and therefore surpassing the conversation or “noise” surrounding the work, and allowing the images to sustain.
“Invisibility Blues,” DeVille’s reprieve of her March 10, 2012, Dependent Art Fair install, is a second iteration exploring a legacy of social oppression, struggle and material poverty through the accumulated remains, or “intergenerational debris” Deville considers heirlooms; a domestic collectionfrom a Bronx apartment her grandmother left in December when she passed away. The artist herself occupied the apartment (which had been passed down through three generation as part of the larger narratives of the great migration Southern Blacks to Northern Cities and the new struggles presented to them through various inequalities) until evicted March 9, 2012. In this specific installation she has taken the broken pieces of yesterday’s life as a stand for the developments of a specific material culture in America over last forty years.The excess of historical material will result in a layered, densely expansive sculptural collage environment in which the disarray of excess reveals the impossibility of a consistent narrative
Background:
ARTIST’S STATEMENTS
Abigail DeVille
Through bricolage, painting, and sculpture, Abigail DeVille cobbles together a visual mass that speaks to the material culture of the present moment. She experiments using found and inherited domestic objects in order to make a connection to the universe. W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of double-consciousness is the conceptual frame DeVille uses to deconstruct two spatial relationships: the claustrophobic space of the urban environment violently clashing with the infinite expanse of the universe. Black holes are an integral metaphor. DeVille warps the time of physical objects. Her objects speak to the physical infinite expanse of universal time and societal ills of the present moment. DeVille’s work is making the visible representation of the invisible.
Stephen Woods
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My current work employs objects and images and their associated meanings, in favor over words, to create an original language of visual
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