SUMMER SAMPLER
SUMMER SAMPLER
on view by appointment through September
please call 718-782-2556 or email info@frontroom.org to make an appointment.
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, and 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 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 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 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 quickly established his reputation as a sought-after architectural and urban landscape photographer. Since 9/11 he has turned his lens toward documenting the effects of war in New York, Afghanistan and Iraq.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edie Winograde captures the temporal relationships between past and present through landscape photography and candid 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 grand backdrop of the American "Wilderness."
Front Room Gallery • 48 Hester Street • NY, NY 10002 • 718-782-2556
gallery hours: Wednesday- Sunday 1-6PM