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Email PageA Collective Exhibition: Contemporary Art at its Best: Part VI
November 14, 2006- December 5, 2006
Reception: November 16, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Paul Gu, Helen Lee, Roni Pinto, Miklos Sipos, Mia Gjerdrum Helgesen, Steven Dickey, Michael Misha Kennedy, Paul Robinson, Penrod Unger, Eva Antonini, Christian G. Brandner, Jules Gotay, Marty Maehr, Sanjeev Misra, Jan Wheeler, Allyson Norwood Bush
Agora Gallery
530 W 25th StContemplative and surreal, inspiring and visionary, spirited and more than a little provocative, Agora Gallery's November Collective Exhibition features a wide variety of artistic expression. Presented in five parts, each assemblage is a distinctive artistic happening that allows the artists’ pieces to engage in a thematic dialog. From November 14 through December 5, 2006, Collective Exhibition: Contemporary Art at its Best features the idiosyncratic art of artists Paul Gu, Helen Lee, Roni Pinto, Miklos Sipos, Mia Gjerdrum Helgesen, Steven Dickey, Michael Misha Kennedy, Paul Robinson, Penrod Unger, Eva Antonini, Christian G. Brandner, Jules Gotay, Marty Maehr, Sanjeev Misra, Jan Wheeler, and Allyson Norwood Bush.
In Fluid Visions, the artists focus on the more contemplative aspect of the visual arts. Helen Lee composes a union of textures in which flora and seascapes, presenting generous backgrounds that support finely detailed foreground work. A contemplative dialogue is also strong in Paul Gu's "Bumper Harvest," where a yin-yang quality is conjured by the black-and-white harlequin's mask floating off-center among the sea-green calm. Roni Pinto's bursts of color and vortexes enhance the passion of Fluid Visions' contemplative stance. The dramatic images from Roni's mixed-media works are exuberant portals to her concerns of life, love and eternity.
Miklos Sipos's abstracts are explorations of texture and color, with equal weight given to his patterned frames. His works are untitled so as to liberate the viewer to compose their own free-associative response. Within the show's category of Pathway to Reverie, Mia Gjerdrum Helgesen's paintings experiment with text and printmaking to suggest the poetics of industrialized graphics. Her shapes emerge from the canvas backgrounds as the eye's gaze traces their assertive vertical-horizontal axis. What results is a study of composition informed by passion.
The artists of Verse and Vigor boldly confront the distinction between real-world objects and their own idiosyncratic visions. Steven Dickey's sculptures rethink the shapes of violins and basses to summon hybrids of stone and space. The tuning pegs and scroll are present, and these realistic details act as a counterpoint to the works' poetic fusions. Michael Misha Kennedy also makes use of the material world by focusing on the drama of glass meeting light; the results are unique still-lives buoyed by a kaleidoscopic resonance.
In Paul Robinson's mixed-media domestic scenes, his subjects and settings are stripped of all but their elemental geometrics. His canvases are pried-open displays of visceral color and line.
By contrast, the surreal compositions of Penrod Unger strongly invite narrative interpretation. The women of "Hieronomoglyphics" could be versions of the same consciousness, an inner life unfolding in a surreal garden. There is hope in these images: even "The Lord and the Fly" holds the promise of change to an otherwise immobilized king.
Overtures is an opening, and in the artists represented here, a satisfying challenge. Christian Brandner's works suggest surreal altarpieces with dimension-shattering icons. "Painting 77377" is a triptych with identifiable objects mixed with pure images. Accessing a Galilean mythos of stars and spheres, the works also suggest tapestries, the flags of Brandner's worldly, confident vision. Another type of overture is Eva Antonini's work. Concerned with the female body and its sensual ambiguities, Antonini's erotically vulnerable figures are wrapped in cloth-like strips which invite query: Are they bound against their will or merely draped in a way that signifies their inner lives? One approaches the sculptures as one would a particularly raw emotion.
Jules Gotay's transparent figures are also deceivingly innocuous, and yet they are eerie receptacles for domestic items elevated to treasure. Internalizing the world as his subjects, a bandit's thievery is combined with the added drama of a childlike starry sky.
A dove's liberation from the dark adds fire to the symmetry of Marty Maehr's "Bird Outta the Cage," while a fox hiding behind dreamlike trees injects the otherwise placid "Fox in the Forest" with a sense of tension. Stained glass images pervade Maehr's works, and we unavoidably question the relation between these animals and their womblike confines.
Sanjeev Misra relies upon the eye's tendency towards pattern recognition. We inject his disjointed portraits with an emotional subtext, as if a medical scan pulsing with glowing fluid. Out of our diagnoses we co-create his subject's enigmatic concerns, thus completing Misra's goal of deeply engaging us. Jan Wheeler's work also demands you meet her halfway. Her paintings present nature as undulating patterns, and while her work is a lush landscape, Wheeler's composition also suggests the organic shapes of the body, a world both outer and inner.
For the theme of Beneath the Surface, Allyson Norwood Bush's work presents a painterly style which varies from ideal seascape to the up-close portrait of an enigmatic figure in "Dressed for Fun." There's open invitation here, with no menace in the enigma, just an invitation to query beyond the placid blues and whites. The artistic visions and styles of the works in Agora Gallery's November group show are as varied as they are extraordinary. The artists gathered for this event display concerns far beyond formalistic or academic issues. They are reaching for a more visceral and challenging engagement, a truly personal moment within the varied collective.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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