FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Process + Reprocess
The Front Room Gallery is proud to present “Process + Reprocess”, featuring the works of Jaynie Gillman Crimmins and Joanne Ungar. In “Process + Reprocess” Crimmins and Ungar both use the recycled materials, cardboard and paper as the base materials to create their sculptural wall works, addressing physical and cultural issues of waste. Both sculptors address consumerism and societal issues, from advertising, cosmetics, beauty, and excess. Yet, despite the similarly humble ingredients these two are creating from decidedly different ‘recipes’. Each artist uses their own unique preservation method to transform the mundane into objects of glory.
In pairing these two artists together for this exhibition, the process of layering and composition can be analyzed through their mode of construction. Crimmins’ process begins with transformation of flat materials of paper advertisements and catalogs into tubes and voluminous fringes, while Ungar take the inverse approach of flattening three-dimensional packaging to expose the core elemental design. Then the process of building begins. Ungar building up from the flat surface, casting layer upon layer of pigmented wax, creating a depth of fused color over the geometric design below. Crimmins, in an alternate additive process, assembles each shredded and built paper unit, sewing and stitching into place, in a nearly meditative process, creating sculptural reliefs that reference architectural design elements and ornamental forms.
Joanne Ungar’s luscious waxy pieces hang on the wall, the layers of detail exposed as light pierces the gemlike colors to reveal the geometric forms preserved below, as an insect in amber. Ungar’s works exist within themselves, with a depth that seems to go on endlessly. Jaynie Gillman Crimmins’ sculptural pieces protrude off the wall in 3 dimensions, in patterns that seem to have formed in nature, as fractals, as florets, or crystals.
Jaynie Gillman Crimmins
Jaynie Gillman Crimmins, creates alternative narratives from quotidian materials. Her work, “In Search of Beauty” contains fragments of information or imagery from mass marketing tools promoting the constructs of beauty, wealth and taste. Crimmins dismantles and deconstructs these conventions, rearranging them as repeated elements in patterns. The work is inspired by plant forms, architectural details, and geometric applications of design. The decorative surfaces of Crimmin’s work contains thousands of tiny components. Each incorporates a fragment of information or imagery from mass marketing tools that are re-contextualized to represent personal, domestic and cultural narratives.
Crimmin’s mixed media works are created through a process of layering discarded, disassembled, painted cardboard boxes with waxes. By repurposing solicitations, security envelopes, and catalogs, Crimmins creates sustainable objects using a repetitive practice mirroring domestic tasks. Shredding these promotional materials breaks down their physical and ascribed composition and Crimmins rolls, folds, sew sand fabricates the shreds into intimate sculptural reliefs.
Crimmin’s work has been exhibited at the Sharjah Museum of Art during the Islamic Arts Festival in the United Arab Emirates; the National Museum of Romanian Literature; Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William and Mary, VA; Hunterdon Art Museum, NJ; Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw State University, GA. in addition to museums throughout the United States.
Joanne Ungar
Joanne Ungar’s poured wax paintings by are composed with the geometric forms of recycled packaging, and layered and infused with pigmented wax. Ungar’s complex sense of color transforms base patterns through multiple luminous strata of graded hues, overlaid with controlled density to either obscure or reveal the accumulated layered color. Her luminous wax paintings are created with refined, purified beeswaxes and encaustic medium, creating work that is archival and stable.
From the sidelong view one can see how deep the wax is, but frontally it is visually disorienting: sometimes the forms are right at the surface, but at times seem to fade into the distance. These physically encapsulated structures feel like landscapes, or often cityscapes with abstracted modular building forms getting sharper and fading in the distance. The wax has an inherent atmospheric tone, of sky, fog, or water. And the boxes themselves replete with repetition, angles on angles, do not readily divulge their humble origins. These pieces are cast in thick wax, and the depth is visceral.
Underpinning this work is an interest in consumerism and its accompanying waste, packaging. Packaging is not only the refuse of consumerism, but the wrapping of it, too. Ungar re-presents, or re-packages, these scraps, creating mementos and embalming them to function as time-capsule-like objects, possible future reminders of how casually careless we were with our only earth. There is an inherent tension between the organic and the geometric as it begins to break down after being subjected to various processes, with wisps or hints of corrugation often the last recognizable clue to what Ungar has done. In this group of work, Ungar is incorporating several new techniques and ideas, including: packaging that has inherent negative space resulting from the die-cutting process; hand-made relief collages, offering a variety of surfaces, materials and images; and relief carvings of the wood substrate. These new elements and geometries introduce a complex visual language beyond “the box.
Ungar is originally from Minneapolis. After studies at Oberlin College in Ohio she moved to New York City and earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts. Joanne Ungar is a New York Foundation for the Arts NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship program Grant recipient. Ungar has exhibited extensively in New York and nationally. Ungar currently works in Brooklyn, New York.
For press inquires please contact Kathleen Vance, k@frontroom.org