James Greenfield
The Indomitable Human Spirit, sticks and dirt, approx. 7'x66"x30" - June-July, 2006
The impulse to wage battle is perhaps as ingrained in man's psyche as his will to survive. In this world of ever shrinking resources, increased environmental crises, the collision of cultures, and the explosion of scientific and technologic development, the need for a new way of being could not be more critical. What will bring about this evolution of human spirit or are we destined to self destruct?
Travis Clarke, "Wishing Dead Trees Back To Life", September 2006
Brian Fekete, "Deer", October 2006
Sandra Osip
"Eco-Effective", Found objects and mixed media, 68"x70"x40" - October 2006
In the book "Cradle to Cradle," William McDonough and Michael Braungart talk about products you would find in a typical landfill today. "Most of these products were made from valuable materials that required effort and expense to extract and make, billions of dollard worth of material assets. Unfortunately, all of these things are heaped in a landfill, where their value is wasted." My work incorporates the throw-away landfill items with a return to a life overtaken with growing organisms. I attempt to mimic the "cradle to cradle" concept McDonough and Braugart explore in their book. -- Sandra Osip
Larry Carter, "Warriors", November 2006
Winicjusz Lysik, "Tank", December 2006
Anders Knutsson, "Great American Elm", January 2007
Ernest Duku, March 2007
Torild Stray, "You'll End Up Alone, Like An Animal", April 07
Limor Gasko, "Breaker Morant", May 2007
Halina Marki, "Trouble In Paradise", June 2007
Carol Bruns, "Selection Of Sculpture Shadows With Drawings", August 2007
Douglas James, "Halloween", October 2008
Maia Palileo, "Lola's House", December 2008
Guy Ambrosino, "What Was", March 2009
Fred Bendheim
"Big Bang", April 2009
I make paintings, drawings and sculpture. My recent work is the result of thirty years of exploring mind through art. Each piece’s structure is made from a line that forms a circuit of shapes, colors, gestures and feelings. Like small universes, the works contain endless differences, and yet they are essentially one.
Sandra Osip
"After Life", Found objects and mixed media - June 4-28, 2009
picasaweb.google.com/Sandra.Osip/Sculptures#slideshow
"After Life" is a statement about environmental sustainability. My art reflects how nature would take over after humans no longer exists.
Austin Kennedy
"Untitled (20th Century)", C-prints on aluminum, 19x24 inches each - July 2-19, 2009
The series "Untitled (20th Century)" draws from a personal collection of printed images to expand the interstices of memory. Stepping beyond the original piece of fetishized memorabilia by extracting minute textures and details, the work confronts the nature of the photograph as a vessel for meaning.
Mikhail Iliatov
"A road To Shuri-Jo", July 20 - August 5
I start with memories of my dreams searching for places that I never visited and lives that I never lived.
On the way there other questions come up and I often get side-tracked.
Realizing the dreams I forget the memories.
Recalling the memories I stop dreaming.
And so it all ends up being a struggle to hold on to ephemeral instances.
Also see Marcel Proust on madeleine cakes and 'Proust' by Samuel Beckett – they said it better.
Guy Nelson
"Mimics and Mutualists", August 6-19 2009
Guy Nelson is interested in mass, form, and color. He uses dichotomous materials- resins, candy, and elements of nature- with the common threads and interrelated concepts of structure, self-preservation, and survival.
Kelly Evers Jackson
"Paintings", August 22-September 3 2009
My work is all about the little things, conglomerating into a mass that represents the meeting place between thoughts and actual events.
I try to acknowledge the beauty and humor that results from the human tendency to attempt to control chaos and nature, while simultaneously venerating both.
My perspective is distinctly human, reveling in all of its limits, trying to eke out a perception beyond them.
Pauline Halper
September 4-September 17 2009
I work in different mediums and sizes at once. Moving between these different kinds of drawing keeps my ideas fresh. My paintings in oil tend to be large, while my drawings and collages are mostly smaller. I work quickly and on several pieces at once. Characters—old men, birds, pyramids—are recurring symbols in my work and often form loose narrative series.
Jonathan Cowan
September 18-October 1 2009
This piece is about the good things dying.
Rex Hausmann
"This is my body, this is my blood", October 2-16, 2009
Winicjusz Lysik
"Doctor"
Art captures the present moment. When I complete a painting, it is no longer “mine;” it belongs to the past. I live in the present. My newest painting is always closest to me—communicating my emotions and reactions to what is happening in the world around me. I’m living in the trenches looking for the portal.
Halina Marki
"Evolution"
The enigma of human existence is the pivitol subject of my paintings. I try to make sense of chaos needing to be sorted through. My intention is to suggest the relationship between the cessation of life and its rebirth. Juxtaposing abstract patterns with realistic images or symbols, my motive is to reveal the interconnectedness of abstraction with realism, expressionism with precision, and chaos with order.
Jessica Baker
“Seasonal Fall” - December 4-17, 2009 (12-10pm daily) - Opening Sunday, Dec 6, 4-7pm
Visual artist Jessica Baker’s work has been lauded by The New York Times as, "brilliant…subtle…absolutely beautiful," and featured on National Public Radio. Her window installation, "Seasonal Fall", presents a final glimpse of the retreating season’s majesty. Seasonal Fall represents the culmination of the artist’s three-year journey collecting fall leaves from the parks and streets of Brooklyn.
" …[the] all too short-lived prints resonate in the mind long after one leaves the show. They are absolutely beautiful."
– NY Times
"…the leaves are like a one-of-a-kind piece of paper…highlight[ing] the leaf’s singular beauty."
– The Brooklyn Daily Eagle
"By using a leaf that has fallen from a tree in November, I try to capture a moment in the growth and life cycle of a tree and to convey its transient beauty,"explains Baker. “It is perhaps this ongoing transformation through the inexorable passage of time, this mirroring of life, that has the greatest effect on me."
Jessica Baker lives and works in Brooklyn, where she collects her materials from the streets and parks of Brooklyn, and creates all of her own prints on a table-top etching press in her studio near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Her prints have been presented in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. For more information, visit www.jessicabaker.net.
Rebeca Olguin
“Naive Artifacts of Compulsion + Almost Trying to Forget” (A series of drawings & an installation) - Dec 18-Jan 04, 2009 (Interior gallery 12-6 pm daily/Street level installation)
Statement
Regarding themes
I'm easily fascinated by the physical world, by things and their representation. Consequently, I represent things in a rather primitive state of contemplation in which making follows seeing. Perhaps representation works as an enchantment that liberates me from their spell, and allows me to experience a brief control over their chaos and multiplicity, to posses them, in a way, or, better, to participate in the configuration of their meanings. Creating becomes the act of naming the specific within a gigantic, monstrous world.
However, there are objects, ideas and symbols in this world that reveal themselves as denser, or as more monstrous than others. Within culture, one of the densest symbols I have found is encompassed by male and female sexual organs (which could be collapsed in the concept of sex). I explore those symbols in my work because they posses multiple meanings and forces. They are powerful, magical objects, objects of desire and taboo, symbols that unleash power calculations, mechanisms of control, but also of liberation; they are bearers of identity, meaning and the sense of belonging, as well as the sense of absence, loss and dissolution. They are arcana of life and death. They are symbols I like to dismantle and dissect in my work. I like to put them in relation with other objects, to arm and disarm them in order to extract, through an alchemic process that also involves the reactions others have when they see my work, some sort of meaning.
Regarding my creative process
My process is always in motion. I can only see this retroactively, and I really don't know what to expect from it in the future. It is eminently intuitive. It usually manifests itself as the tension between my search for meaning and the opaque forces of the world, which oppose it (time, matter, chance, love and death, my own ignorance and finitude). In practical terms, my creative process generates out of an inquietude that is hard to explain, but which I experience when I see some objects or concepts that suddenly shine more than others. I believe those objects are related with each other, but I can't tell how, I don't know their specific syntax. This moves me to try to give them a meaning; since I'm an artist, I do so by creating things. To create is, for me, to manipulate the material world through a sort of ritual (my artistic process) in which I must communicate with the spirituality as well as the materiality of the media I use, of culture, and of other forces I cannot name. Usually, when an object or series of objects appear to me as possible objects of representation, I seek and contemplate other existing representations of those same objects in culture before I start my own task. A piece, for me, is finished when I experience a sort of consolation by contemplating it, when I forget my personal, human experience by seeing it. It is, indeed, some kind of transcendence.
Regarding media
I'm interested in exploring the expressive capacity of different media. However, I find some materials especially appealing, for different reasons. I particularly like oil painting, because it has a direct connection with earthly elements. Besides, its process is slow, so it gives room for a constant rethinking of the meanings and paths the piece will take; this also allows me to create effects such as transparencies and sfumatto.
Pencil drawing interests me because it allows a sensual communication between the artist and graphite and, through it, between artist and paper. Thus, I conceive drawing as a tactile exchange of forces that must find a balance through an intuitive equation between the artist's idea and the resistances of the media, which are, in the end, the resistances the world (space and time) poses against being modified through my creative action. Regarding this, ink is similar to pencil, the difference being that, instead of graphite, water serves as a mean of communication and, therefore, the whole equation loses balance, because water is a primordial, physical and spiritual force of the universe.
I'm interested in digital collage because it's evident that new media have generated physical realities, concepts and particular ways of interaction which can only be explored through their specific, hyper-codified languages. I enjoy the possibility to approach these new media through collage, i.e. through the manipulation of representations already generated by these media in order to put them in communication with each other, and to do all this from an external, human perspective. Digital collage allows me to have an intuitive, basic and innocent dialogue with machines. Play with their combinations.
Creation of artifacts (tridimensional objects) is also an expressive medium that has grasped my attention, and I'm beginning to explore.
Works of art by Brad Darcy and Chaw Ei Thein, curated by Nunu Hung
“Transformed Conversation” - February 19 to March 18, 2010 - Opening Reception Friday, February 19, 6pm–9pm
Soapbox Gallery is pleased to present the two person exhibition "Transformed Conversation" with New York based artist Brad Darcy and Burma based artist Chaw Ei Thein. In "Transformed Conversation", Mr. Darcy and Ms Chaw Ei Thein explore the artist's self conscious role in the engagement of social and political issues, and the responsibility to communicate perspectives on an aesthetic level.
Mr. Darcy has been concentrating on human evolution as the central theme of his work, and for "Transformed Conversation" his exploration consists of abstracted cyclical interpretations. Through sketches, animations, and paintings, his physically charged lines and manipulated imagery touch on various themes including mass media, connectivity, as well as natural phenomena.
Ms Chaw Ei Thein explores political truths of her native country, Burma. Assimilating current Burmese realities, her sculptures are dedicated to those who have suffered political repression and human rights abuses. In her latest work, "Bed", Chaw Ei Thein transforms her bittersweet memories and emotions of her exiled hometown into a meditative installation.
"Transformed Conversation" is curated by NuNu Hung
Michael Pribich
“Too Much Sugar for a Dime” - March 19-April 2, 2010
Too Much Sugar for a Dime: 9' x 7' x 8'h, Materials used: corregated tin, steel and wood machetes, 100lb sugar bags, 22k gold leaf, steel plate, Haitian and Dominican Republic flags, 3" brass tubing, chain.
Too Much Sugar for a Dime critiques the social condition that emphasizes otherness, transterritory geography, and refugee status as told through Haitian sugar cane workers living and working in the Dominican Republic. This place-based work, affirms and deepens our understanding of the globalization that sweetens our coffee.
Leigh Davis
“Debra Freeman, Room 1006” (from "Residence" series), Archival Pigment Prints, 43" x 55" - April, 2010
My photography projects are investigations of how people utilize, inhabit and conceive of their living spaces. Residence is a project I conducted at a residence hall for women located within the YWCA of Brooklyn. For two years I worked in this community, visiting twenty-five women in their individual rooms. I developed a process that focused on forming relationships, resulting in a series of photographs. These images of intimate spaces capture the dialect between engagement and voyeurism that has been fundamental to my practice.
Michelle Carollo
April 16-29, 2010
Michelle Carollo’s multi-disciplinary practice – painting, sculpture, drawing and installation – grows out of a process based on Modernist ideals: simplifying form, eliminating ornament, and arranging pure color. She invents her visual language with the use of found materials, geometric shapes and three-dimensional space to create her installations.
Alex White Mazzarella
“Society Under Fire” - April 30-May 15, 2010
The Soapbox Gallery is pleased to announce an upcoming exhibition that presents recent works by artist Alex White Mazzarella. The show, titled “Society Under Fire”, presents six neo-expressionist mixed media paintings that visually communicate our perceived societal condition and the increasing threat it holds to our humanity.
Highlighting the show is a seven-foot red, yellow and gray painting/drawing, titled “Becoming Bubble Gum”. Here alongside an iconic language and provocative script, a punk like fetus lays hostage to an arriving sharp and jagged environment. This painting is made from oil pastel, charcoal, acrylic paint, enamel, coffee grounds and buckets of water. It will remain in the storefront gallery window through May 15.
Building upon street art and graffiti as the cave paintings of today, Alex White Mazzarella intense yet whimsical work expresses perspectives on the contemporary human in an urban language derived from his current working city, New York.
John Davis
“Cut Out” - May 14-May 28, 2010 (Interior gallery 12-6pm daily/Street level installation *Anytime*)
Soapbox Gallery is pleased to present “Cut Out”, a solo exhibition by San Antonio-based artist John Davis.
John Davis’ practice of painting investigates problems with communication, fragmented living and identity roles. Personal concerns derived from a background in 80’s suburbia inspire methodical, at times obsessive pictures. The painting process and resulting works are a way to edit culture. By cutting out, removing, and rearranging images on a surface Davis exposes the underlying tension within the American lifestyle. Through lack of dialogue a dialogue emerges. The division of picture planes indicate divisions between people, and suggest a syndrome of pretension and miscommunication. Materials and image sources for the work come from everyday unapologetic content: cassettes, comics, white out and other memorabilia.
John Davis lives and works in San Antonio, TX. He received his MFA from the University of New Orleans. He has exhibited paintings in Italy, Austria, New York and Chicago. While in New Orleans his work was purchased by the New Orleans Museum of Art. In 2007 Davis contributed as a visiting artist to the graduate program at Yale.
Brian Dupont
“Gravity and Array” — May 28–June 10, 2010. Reception Friday, May 28 6–8 PM Street level installation *Anytime*.
Soapbox Gallery is pleased to present “Gravity and Array,” a solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based painter Brian Dupont.
Brian Dupont studies the transmission — and distortion — of the visual aspects of information within the framework of abstract painting. In each painting he uses diagrams, scientific images, written language, symbols, and musical notation to establish an underlying pattern or structure, which he then stresses through a process of editing, erasure, and re-transcription. The final image emerges from these accumulations and removals of layers of paint and reverberates with contemporary anxieties about the threat of collapse, decay, miscommunication, and information overload.
Brian Dupont lives and works in Brooklyn. He received his MFA from Cornell University. He has exhibited his work in New York, Kansas City, and Houston. He also writes on art and painting at briandupont.wordpress.com.
Stephanie Borgese
“Sanctify” — June 11-24, 2010
Stephanie's current body of work deals with the rites and rituals. This piece speaks to the rituals that man performs in search of sanctity, holiness and purity. The suspended figure, encased in gold and paper, sheds his exterior shell in the process of transformation.
BIO:
Stephanie Borgese is a New York City-based figurative sculptor. Her love of the human form led her to the art of sculpture in 2002. Since then she has received scholarships from The National Sculpture Society, The Art Students League of New York and New York Academy of Art, where she completed her MFA in 2007.
Vanessa Hill
“From My Streets” — 3 photos on vinyl - 54"x78" each - June 25-July 8, 2010
I'm inspired by my Barrio...it brings music to my eyes.