Please - Opening Night

We had a full house last night for the opening of Please, thanks to everyone who came out to see the excellent work of Garrett Gould and Joshua Mathews in person

Statement & video below - we'll see you next month! 

Please Timelapse from Andrew Edman on Vimeo.

Much of how we assess the worth of an image (moving or still) or an object (banal or luxurious) is based on our sense of that thing’s production value. Not its intrinsic qualities, but the extrinsic one of perception.

If the smoke and mirrors are sufficient we are swept up in a distortion of reality.

We can come to feel as if we live someone else’s life, a different time or class, if only for a little while. Whether we get that through a movie or a jacket we can’t really afford doesn’t matter much. Eventually the noise is gone and the production struck, the interest rates stay after the crispness fades. The joke of this mismatch between perception and reality, where our senses run amok after what is impossible is what lingers.

The images and objects of Garrett Gould and Joshua Mathews appear at the margins of this grand, illusory show, like the background scenery of an L.A. noir, or stage props of an absurdist comedy. But when taken in on their own, despite these references pointing to a dramatized narrative they take on a strange, amplified presence, as if they could fill the whole story and screen on their own. They are the ghosts of sensations that didn’t really happen to us after all, someone else’s laughter, someone else’s wanderlust meanderings.

“Please” is either hospitable invitation or desperate imploration - to suspend our disbelief and live in among the artifice for a little while, so when we resurface (for better or worse) what is real comes back with full force, a mass and volume of life that is suddenly so much more than it was before.

Lord Help Us Get It All Together - Opening Night

Thanks to everyone who came out last night to help celebrate the opening of Lord Help Us Get It All Together, featuring the paintings of Adam O'Day and Vanessa Irzyk. 

Check out the timelapse and the show statement below: 

OPENING NIGHT - Lord Help Us Get It All Together from Andrew Edman on Vimeo.

Adam O’Day delves into the spaces of the subconscious; the sleeping mind that spools out reams of fantastical spaces and constructions: tiny beings rampaging across apocalyptic landscapes, patterns of meat and bone, and byzantine architectural constructions that defy gravity. These visionary images recall the biblical surrealism of John the Revelator, telling stories with pictures that are meant to prepare us for some possible future of upheaval, both spiritual and spatial.

Vanessa Irzyk makes her human hands perform mechanical feats of precise shape making that are filled with intense color, digital seeming spaces converted to analog through skilled human labor, an aesthetic celebration of both realms that demonstrates our boundaries of the real and digital spaces may be what is in fact artificial.

The artists in Lord Help Us Get It All Together assemble their own reality via paint and surface, brilliant color and unusual shapes, all in a chaotic jumble. Like a screenshot of creation itself, or the generative spark of something great and expansive stuck on pause, jittery with the threat of sudden movement.

Come bask in the anxious glow of that bright moment, where anything seems possible, though it may come off its axis and fly apart.

Let the center hold a little longer, and lord, help us get it all together.

Belly - Opening Night

Wow. A great show and an incredibly fun opening. Thanks to everyone who came out to soak up the visuals and make it feel like one big party. 

Timelapse of the opening & full statement on the show below: 

OPENING NIGHT - Belly @ Lens Gallery from Andrew Edman on Vimeo.

Large drawings of flowers stretch from floor to ceiling, interspersed with childlike doodles and rubbery human heads.

The gallery is transformed into something like the space of the mind in remembering or dreaming; a place that flickers in and out of three dimensions and linear time.

We might find an insight in the unreal space, but it refuses to be held onto. The feeling of a tangible crystal clear truth evaporates, but the images remain to haunt at a greater truth lost in our waking hours.

There’s no boundary box of frame, edges of drawing overlap and scrawls knit together, jumping from one paper surface to another, pink-skinned heads float freely and invert. The work in Belly combines for an aesthetic that feels much like a psychedelia of the self, with visuals that oscillate rapidly between the mental constructions of a child or adult, or out of chronology altogether.

It is a reconstructed space of frozen moments, replayed motion and esoteric annotations. As in dreams or memories we try to find the truth, where choices lead to divergent paths, what could have been and still could be, looking for signal among the noise.

In our heads the kaleidoscopic potential of imagination unfurls, possibilities for the grand and absurd exploding like shrapnel, our perception of crisp boundaries around the self become perforated and eventually disintegrate.

In that dissolution there are sensations of curiosity, terror, joy- but ultimately some sublime beauty: that what we are, and may be, is so much more than what is seen.