Thanks to everyone who came out this past Friday to see the work of Sarah Pollman and Vanessa Michalak in person!
Confluences Opening Night from Andrew Edman on Vimeo.
Confluences
Work by Sarah Pollman and Vanessa Michalak
Like moths with their celestial ambitions, we are drawn to light whether literal or symbolic. When it falls upon a surface just so, it lends the mundane a temporary significance, a flicker of something transcendent.
Sarah Pollman’s photographs capture moments when our prosaic surroundings glimmer with suggestion at something more. Intimate interior spaces and instances of a pedestrian’s gaze meeting the sidewalk have a quiet presence of life and warmth while remaining strangely distant.
Vanessa Michalak’s paintings of landscapes depict a swirling, sweeping amassing of light that breaks through canopy or maps across topographies of snowy plains with neon exuberance.
As a phenomena that illuminates, we sometimes expect answers beyond the revealing of form. From Bernini sculptures to Instagram sunsets, we attempt to fix the light in place and to share the personal, intangible experience of something like grace.
Opening Reception: July 8, 2016, 6pm-8:30pm
Profiles
Work by Lavaughan Jenkins and Gary Duehr
The eyeless, flat black silhouettes by Gary Duehr are like oversized shadows without mass, looming from an indeterminate space. It is the space that we stare into, our minds sorting the edges and bumps, inferring 100 things inside of a millisecond and delivering judgement before we have registered the moment itself. We see the undefined as an open invitation (even in the form of another person) we readily project ourselves to satisfy the need for a conclusive understanding of someone else, prescribing arbitrarily and trusting automatically.
Lavaughan Jenkins takes an entirely different tack, building up the individual in with great specificity and detail in a thick topography of paint. Features are formed in pigment, presenting the messy complexities of identity - a self that is moving and living rather than maintained. In these paintings the subject is not trapped within the tidy boundaries of the picture plane, instead their presence projects into ours.
What are we looking for when we look to someone else? What can we know or understand of a mind or body not our own? Lavaughan Jenkins and Gary Duehr take the familiar genre of portraiture to provoke questions about the boundaries between us and them, me and you.
Opening reception: Friday June 3, 6pm-8:30pm
Thanks to everyone who came out last night and participated in building the shifting solo cup sculpture as the night went on - you can watch it build in the time lapse.
See you all next month!
Hung Out to Dry
works by John Roy
Empty solo cups, shopping bags and cigarette butts - the familiar debris that marks the inevitable end of the party. The sun comes up, illuminates the empty vessels, shines into eyes unable to welcome the start of another day, forgetting how and when the last one stopped.
John Roy’s work examines the allure of the party, the toll of relentlessly pursuing the good times, and the aftermath. Taking the common and ephemeral elements of the party and recasting them as permanent, elevated artifacts - Roy creates objects that reflect back to us misspent nights and days, the marks of time that are now part of us that we are unable to simply discard.
Opening Reception: Friday, May 6th 6pm- 9:30pm