Summer Sampler 2018
June 29th - July 29th
Opening Reception: Friday June 29th, 7-9 PM
Featuring: Sasha Bezzubov, Thomas Broadbent, Phillip Buehler, Jade Doskow, Peter Fox, Sean Hemmerle, Amy Hill, David Kramer, Jesse Lambert, Stephen Mallon, Sascha Mallon, Mark Masyga, Melissa Pokorny, Ross Racine, Ken Ragsdale, Paul Raphaelson, Emily Roz, Ashok Sinha, Patricia Smith, Joanne Ungar, Zoe Wetherall, and Edie Winograde
The Front Room Gallery is proud to present the 14th annual Summer Sampler featuring: Sasha Bezzubov, Thomas Broadbent, Phillip Buehler, Jade Doskow, Peter Fox, Sean Hemmerle, Amy Hill, David Kramer, Jesse Lambert, Stephen Mallon, Sascha Mallon, Mark Masyga, Melissa Pokorny, Ross Racine, Ken Ragsdale, Paul Raphaelson, Emily Roz, Ashok Sinha, Patricia Smith, Joanne Ungar, Zoe Wetherall, and 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.
Sasha Bezzubov’s photographic approach has developed through a variety of series that address the contemporary condition and explore the nature of the document. Working both solo and with his sometimes collaborator Jessica Sucher, Sasha Bezzubov uses a large format camera to photograph the people and the land in various 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’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 somehow otherworldly and common at the same time.
Phillip Buehler has been photographing abandoned places around the world since he rowed to (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, which have been repurposed or left to decline. "Lost Utopias" juxtaposes emblematic monuments with abandoned, decaying structures provoking the viewer to consider how the ideals of architecture succeed or disappear into obscurity.
Expanding on his signature style of drip painting, Peter Fox's spilled paint works are bold gestural movements. Referencing formal systems of Abstract Painting, he explores the relational language of color as articulated through layered processes. Each composition is developed through variance and evolving repetition with the allowance of chance.
Sean Hemmerle’s photographic work ranges from international conflict zones to deserted industrial towns in the United States. His conflict images span over 10 years, beginning with the World Trade Center collapse, and continuing with sites such as Kabul, Baghdad, Gaza, Juarez and Beirut.
Amy Hill’s paintings are updates of works from earlier eras. In choosing a genre which runs through art history, Amy's portraiture employs poses, gestures and stylistic details to make social, psychological and anthropological statements about her subjects. Humor emerges through the juxtaposition of modern day fashion and historical figures.
David Kramer’s ironic oil paintings draw their imagery from lifestyle advertisements from the 1970s. Kramer’s “one-liners” present an idealized world that is possible, but, sadly, unlikely.
Jesse Lambert's ink and watercolor paintings on paper depict ad-hoc structures of scrap wood, debris, 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.
Stephen Mallon is known for his photographs of big (with a capital “B”) things crashing, sinking, levitating, being constructed or deconstructed. In his long running series “American Reclamation,” many of the subjects are small bails, stacks, compressed cubes, mounds, randomly shaped units, and swirling vortexes. Light gleams off 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, desire, bodies and passion. The source of her inspiration is 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 filled with meaning.
Mark Masyga's compositions are made up of lively, linear elements in balance with a sensitive, intense sense of color. Mark uses line to enhance both specificity and ambiguity, creating a sense of mystery.
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 places, material affinities, un/natural phenomena, and the latent desires of objects.
Ross Racine creates his hyperreal 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- some images are saturated, some are subdued, while others default to a grayscale. The decisions on color are made as each image evolves during the process of creation, and its final form is meant to reinforce a mood matching the character of the landscape.
Memories and personal recollections inform the key components of Ken Ragsdale’s works. Content and composition are determined to capture the aura of memory, working alongside schematic drawings, which are documented and prepared for hand assembly. The schematics are laboriously cut out, folded and tabbed to create their final 3-dimensional forms. 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. Once the biggest sugar refinery in the world, the building is now a historically landmarked building standing on the Brooklyn waterfront on its way to becoming a high-rise condo, symbolizing the cultural 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 over white gessoed negative space- Roz’s compositions exist in a void. The permutations are fluid and re-embodied to infer figuration.
In Ashok Sinha’s series “New York to Los Angeles,” Sinha manages to capture the beauty and abstractions of the landscape below that often go unnoticed by millions of travelers every day. In this ongoing series, shot during commercial flights Sinha continues to take on cross continental trips between the two cities he does not use any special photographic equipment in making these images, except using a specific technique to shoot through airplane windows.
Patricia Smith is known for her idiosyncratic, cartographic explorations of the psyche and various mental states. Smith incorporates new outer and inner geographical regions in her latest works. Smith's mappings are not exclusively anchored in external geography. She often organizes and analyzes texts, mapping their intersections with her own thoughts. The results are individualized maps of the fluid and mysterious regions of the mind.
Joanne Ungar’s background in collage arts allowed her to transition into her current process when she began working with wax in the 1990’s. This current series is a "packaging" double entendre: a way to address and explore feelings about the cosmetics industry, including her own involvement in it.
Zoe Wetherall’s photos are taken just above us, a bird’s eye view. From a few hundred feet Wetherall photographs straight downward, excluding the horizon, sky, or any visual reference point.
Edie Winograde observes the experience of iconic yet somewhat obscure American landscapes. Human nature, nature and history all collide or coincide in these places and moments. Many people recognize these sites even if they never go to them, because painters, photographers, writers and filmmakers have depicted these landscapes, used them as symbols in their work (of nature, of conquest, of the Sublime, of Manifest Destiny, etc.) and told their stories—in both historical fact and legendary fiction.