Five Years and Counting....

In August of 2003, I began to curate a very special space in the heart of downtown Williamsburg. Only one hundred and eight square feet of space with one wall and windows on three sides, Realform Project Space was not a gallery but an incubator, where public and private met through a veil of shop-window glass. Prior to my stewardship it was curated by Larry Walczak of Eyewash Gallery, and before that it was just a dusty corner of the entrance vestibule of the Realform Girdle Building, housing various local businesses such as The Verb Cafe, UVA Wines, Spoonbill and Sugartown Bookshop, and The Bedford Cheese Shop.

What made Realform Project Space different from its predecessor is that I didn’t make a visible effort to establish it as a purely installation-oriented space, but also used it to showcase artists who made small-scale sculpture, painting, and drawings—works which would not necessarily translate into a larger exhibition in a big Chelsea gallery, for instance. Some of the best ideas are small ideas, ones that are allowed to hibernate in the mind until they hatch into grand schemes, or develop into subtler and more refined versions of themselves. I liked the idea of a space that would allow such ideas to be exhibited on their own terms.

With each exhibition mounted at Realform, I learned something new about how to choose and install artworks for a venue as intimate yet public as this one was. The result of a successful installation is a good show. Many different types of work was chosen to be exhibited at Realform, and I never regretted any of the choices we made. The first one was more of necessity, since it was important to hang something quickly for the month of August, and it had to be someone who was in favor of that. Since the venue was new, and people didn’t yet know about it, it had to be work that wasn’t usually seen in those corners. I asked Grace Roselli to be the first artist. Grace is a painter whose work was at that time just turning the corner to a new subject matter and a new way of depicting it. For a few years she had been producing these large scale drawings that were basically portraits, drawn larger than life with a double image, either side by side facing forward, or with a larger image of the same person in back of the first. Her new work was less prosaic, and intertwined portraits with a personal mythology the comprehension of which, in any verbalized sense, was still taking shape. These were depictions of emotional sates, and of issues that reacted to femaleness, history, and issues if the painterly depiction of emotional issues. There was nothing slick and trendy about these images, nothing hip or ironic. They were personal yet sacred. I knew they would elicit a response from even the most casual passerby.

GRACE ROSELLI: DRAWINGS, August 9-September 6, 2003



MARK POWER: NEW SCULPTURE, September 12-October 19, 2003



CYNTHIA HARTLING: PAINTINGS, October 24-November 30, 2003



AMY CHAIKLIN: PORTALS OF TRUTH, December 5, 2003–January 4, 2004



MICHAEL NORKIN: VARYING EXPANSES, January 9–February 8, 2004



CAROLINE BURTON: WINDOW WORKS, February 13–March 21, 2004



MARCY BRAFMAN: NEGATIVE RECIPROCAL, April 2-May 2, 2004



LAURA FAYER: RAPT
May 7-June 13, 2004


NATASHA SWEETEN: A MINI RETROSPECTIVE
June 18-July 25, 2004


LIZ-N-VAL: DOWNPOUR
September 3–October 3, 2004


RUTH WALDMAN: DRAWINGS
October 8–November 7, 2004


FLAVIA SOUZA: STRUGGLE IN PARADISE
Curated by Kim Connerton
November 12–December 12, 2004



KRISTIN ANDERSON: THE BLOCK WHERE I GREW UP
November 12–December 12, 2004


KIM CONNERTON: NICO
December 17, 2004–January 16, 2005


CINDY TOWER: ROAD SHOW
January 21–February 20, 2005

MARY ANN STRANDELL: THE MOVING WALL
February 25–March 27, 2005

GELAH PENN: ON DANGEROUS GROUND
April 8–May 8, 2005

“On Dangerous Ground” by Gelah Penn is a site-specific installation that explores sculptural space through the linear language of drawing. Penn’s recent work explores drawing in space, using the lexicon of gestural abstraction to articulate landscapes of mark making. By manipulating colored monofilament and other tendril-like materials, it conveys the scruffiness and fragility of line on paper, while retaining the integrity of sculptural form. The accretion of marks and their shadows settles into a luminous sea of suspended animation, with allusions to microscopic activity, arterial systems, knots, and weather.

KATHERINE DANIELS: WINDOW BOX ARABESQUE
May 13–June 12, 2005

“Window Box Arabesque” by Katherine Daniels explores the territory between craft and fine art with the Buddhist concept of “outrageous elegance,” which combines passion, sensuousness, sense of play, and humor. Daniels’s sculptures induce pleasure by unabashedly embracing abstract ornament. She is interested in visual form overpowering emotional and intellectual content. Daniels’ work is a conglomeration of materials and forms of organic abstraction that uses patterns and motifs as compositional structure. It forms a pastiche of styles referencing ornament from the American folk art of my Appalachian roots, a fascination with Islamic and Asian art, Italian art from the Renaissance to the Rococo, as well as contemporary art.

SARAH TRIGG: SOME ECONOMIC TISSUES
June 17–July 17, 2005

“Some Economic Tissues” by Sarah Trigg presents a series of paintings which initiate a dialogue between the visual significance of cartographically depicted locations, the events which occur in them, and the metaphorical relationships between events and movements to a biomorphic degree of symbolic inference. Trigg’s interest in systems is clearly not limited to the perceived structure of maps and graphs, but also to the integrative character of organic portent which human relationships and events of great historical significance occlude when viewed from afar. The distance of the artist’s chosen perspective specifically dictates our attention to themes which are imperative to follow. As the artist’s statement explains:The theme throughout my work is that the selected sites reveal some sort of socioeconomic activity behaving similarly to cancerous mutation. By studying man-made tracings and mineralization (architecture) on the earth's surface, I find the systems that emerge are biodynamic in nature and that they could be opened up to a pathogenic analysis. Industrial mines appear as red-cell-producing spleens; stadium and airports like people-pumping lymph nodes; and burning oil fields like tissues undergoing cellular mutation. I choose sites that bear normal functioning tissue and tumor-forming tissue—cancer cells originate from normal functioning cells but are unable to healthfully self-terminate. The work developed from this examination are what I think of as biopsies of a non-linear history. [Partial statement by the Artist]

VERONICA CROSS: HOMECOMING
July 22–August 21, 2005

Homecoming implies return. The return is romantically associated with the male’s journey and rites of passage: the hero returns, the football team comes back, the return of the prodigal son. Veronica Cross borrows the term to mark a shift in perception as part of a more figurative passage of time. Utilizing feminine motifs, her exhibition Homecoming speaks of a personal reevaluation and dark projection of things to come. As an ultimate destination or temporary crash spot, the “home setting” that she creates has components both warm and fluffy as well as foreboding and ironic. Portraits of women rendered in nail polish on mylar with collage flank the windows and are held in place by scrollwork composed of mini-pads. There is a visual push-and-pull as the portraits are at different parts translucent, transparent or opaque. Peering within, through and beneath a world both soft and foreboding opens up to the viewer. Mirrored surfaces intensify and create possibility of what lurks beneath the surface. Diminutive staircases that lead to seemingly nowhere spring out of sacrificial offerings of libations comprised of fake nails and foodstuffs made from the most unexpected stuff on earth [Statement by the Artist].

MARCY BRAFMAN: FACE VALUE
August 26–September 25, 2005

“Face Value” by Marcy Brafman is a new series of drawings that operate halfway between the artist’s fascination with cultural images and the role of the artist as a recorder and commentator on the idiosyncrasies of everyday life. For the last year, Brafman has been making portraits of the characters that inhabit her circle of friends and acquaintances, friendly strangers and professional contacts, and the artist has in each case recorded her impressions of them. In an off-hand, spontaneous, and anonymous manner, Brafman has taken on the role of the court painter, depicting the social fabric of her world through the medium of the quick sketch. What these images reveal is the distance between character and the emotion it inspires in the thick of the moment. Many such moments build up the context of our social interaction, as well as our perspective on idiosyncratic mannerism and body language, and make a worthy adventure out of artifice.

MELANIE VOTE: THE LAP-TOP SERIES
September 30–October 30, 2005

“The Lap-Top Series” by Melanie Vote, focuses on an unconscious immersion in leisure and its formal consequences for narrating pose and gesture. In requiring each of her subjects to view a film for the duration of the sitting, she ironically subverts the authority of the artist, creating a sympathetic and code-pendent scenario which allows her to read their reactions to the films, which may include a range of pose and gesture that is both mundane and portentous. She is then able to de-pict both the outward appearance of the model and their state of mind. By placing within the composition of the portrait an element of focus other than the artist or some fourth wall, Vote exposes the innate susceptibility of the model, ironically redirecting the role of the artist, while directing us to recognize the tangent in deceptively simple images which contain both appearance and essence.

CONRAD VOGEL: ADVENTURES FROM THE PAST
November 4–December 4, 2005

“Adventures from the Past” by Conrad Vogel presents a set of four pop-up works, images culled from the era of the swashbuckling hero---of the perennial clash of nations, each seeking imperial and commercial dominance over the others. Motivated by the cogitations of an essentially Romantic sensibility, yet also informed by the moral tenor of current events, they provide a double bind of influence for an artist whose interests take him far from the art world insider’s game of mirroring the cognoscenti. Vogel is a natural storyteller, whose fascination with the fabric of history and the rigor in its accounting create a paradoxical state of esthetic fantasy that is palpable yet intimate.

LINDA BYRNE: RECYCLING NATURE
December 9, 2005-January 15, 2006

“Recycling Nature” by Linda Byrne is a diorama made for sculptures replicating natural forms in one of the exact materials, synthetic and industrial, that has undermined the efficacy of the natural world, interrupting the process of natural selection, and weakening the ecosphere. Her nests are comprised from the plastic molds that most commonly holds six-packs of beer together, but which when inappropriately disposed, have become a life threatening object for birds around the world. As the artist states, “Our vanishing bird population is one indicator of this destruction. Bird extinctions are on the increase, already topping 50 times the rate of natural loss. My newest work uses the image of an empty nest to express this loss. Though different species of birds build unique nests, they each fall into a category or type. Using plastic "O" rings from soda and beer cans, I have fashioned several of these types of nests. The materials I choose to execute my ideas are an important part of my work. They express the character of the pieces. Shaping objects that are recognizable out of materials that are unexpected brings them into sharper focus to the viewer. By using clear plastic, I comment both on the over-use of non-biodegradable materials that contribute to the pollution of our land and water, and on the vanishing birds which are important indicators of the health of our planet. Recycling Nature is an installation styled after a natural history museum diorama. Here, no birds are seen. They have disappeared, leaving behind only nests built out of the very plastics that caused their demise.” [Partial statement by the Artist]

ROBERT GRANT: ROBERTA’S REVENGE
January 20–February 19, 2006

“Roberta’s Revenge” by Robert Grant features paintings, xeroxes, colored self images, and props, all exploring the various sources from which identity and inspiration simultaneously emerge. The three major works in the exhibition are paintings of women’s dresses, which symbolize the feminine persona of Roberta Magenta, the artist’s doppelganger and muse. They are accompanied by several dramatic self-portraits of Roberta, each featured in gaudy or sentimental store-bought frames reminiscent of those found in a middle-class family home, each portraying the same face in alternating tones and colors, as if the woman in them were reinvented with each photographic treatment. The projection of the artist into a female persona is meant as an affirmation of his inspirations, which are accessible both from a personal and a universal perspective. He subverts cultural stereotypes while at the same time answering the call of inspiration from a source close to his human origins, highly connected to early family relationships. Grant brings us as close to his subject as his formal sensibility will allow, but holds back from telling all of his secrets, both because they are a private matter bound in introspection and doubt, and because he is actively engaged in creating a mystery through which both reason and identity can travel. The two bodies of work on view in “Roberta’s Revenge” offer a singular yet expansive perspective on the struggle to achieve an identity. The paintings of dresses are each in their own way an evocation of the absent wearer, yet by themselves they possess a totemic vigor, a painterly rigor, and a delight in fantasy and whimsy. Combined with the woman depicted in various home-styled portraits, a dramatic persona armed with both beauty and aggression, we see the mystery from both sides. Grant’s art is both suggestive and demonstrative in its espousal of a role that defines us rather than him.

TARA GIANNINI: LITTLE VANITIES
February 24-April 16, 2006

“Little Vanities” by Tara Giannini presents a theatrical view of reality, combining found objects such as Baroque sculptural motifs, taxidermy animals, costume jewelry, fake flowers, ornately designed textiles, and colorful, deeply slathered paint. It is a dramatic seduction into a surrogate reality that Giannini captures. The idea of a visual theatrical curtain of framing device acts as a means to imply an artificial reality--an event taking place. She incorporates and formulates her worlds out of many different materials, resulting in a surplus of material splendor that ensnares the viewer with its unabashed lushness and opulence. The scenes which she creates allow us to peer into the dark corners of the romantic psyche, in which an overload of sensory detail leads us through a view of aesthetic perfection that resembles madness. As Andre Breton states in Nadja: “Beauty must be convulsive or not at all.”

DEBRA STECKLER: ORDINARY PEOPLE
April 21-May 30, 2006

“Ordinary People” by Debra Steckler is an installed hanging of twelve acrylic portraits of people whose images have been taken from the mass media magazines of celebrity culture, and many of their faces will be familiar to visitors. They include Princess Diana, Marlon Brando, Martha Stewart, Michael Jackson, Margaret Thatcher, and the philosopher Adorno. But the also include a variety of visages whose attitude or bearing appealed to Steckler and came to signify an equal degree of specialness as those which we would find familar despite the crass context of their portrayal in the media. As the artist states about her work, “I am interested in how pop stars, icons in literature, music, and culture in general, are abundantly portrayed in magazines and newspapers, a sort of social leveler where pictures of the dead and living, famous and “washed-up” rest side by side. The images offer only so much information. The individual and cultural imagination fills in the rest. By painting these figures on decorator paint chips, the scale and social weight of these images is reduced; ultimately they are ordinary people.” [Partial statement by the Artist]

JENNY CARPENTER: BRANDED
July 21-September 30, 2006

"Branded" by Jenny Carpenter's focuses upon the many and varied manifestations of the female visage as it appears in the pages of glossy fashion magazines. She paints the faces as she finds them, upon a series of 12 by 12 inch birch panels, leaving the wood untreated and allowing the physical qualities of the wood grain to affect how her lines are drawn. Her paintings combine her influences in the working world with a particular notion of beauty, as well as all of the visual conceits that enter into the moment of aesthetic fascination when a beautiful woman appears on the printed page--a simulacra made palpable and commercial at the same time. Carpenter focuses mainly upon close-ups, and the images among these that I preferred were limited to a frame of the eyes, mouth, and cheekbones, with the eyes gazing deeply back at the spectator. Carpenter's need to portray women's faces--and she paints only women--has found perfect repository in the commercially viable and yet ultimately short lived use of such magazines. Here is where women are most notably typified, and if one wants a pictorial jumping-off point, there is no context more widespread than this, whether the point is to offer an alternative pictorial treatment or to freely sample the traditional modes of emotional expression which fashion models are forced to espouse. The specifically successful aspect of her portraits is that they portray all women in depicting the nameless ciphers used to exemplify the sort of passion that sells couture. Carpenter's paintings zoom past the trappings of the industry and reveal the fuel that runs it: emotional intimacy. She qualifies the essential humanness which makes models more than visceral clotheshorses.

YULIYA LANINA: PLAY WITH ME
October 27-December 31, 2006

Yuliya Lanina is a contemporary folklorist. She reaches back into the primordial memory of mankind to breach the deep seated emotions which rarely find accommodation in everyday life. If the images in her work scare us, it’s because we mistakenly marry artistic vision with the common sense of attitudes which rule all the little decisions in our lives. But Lanina’s work is a template to the unconscious world, in which truth glimmers under the bloody fingernails of a psychotic baby who is actually the god of the woods, wearing his innocence like a crocodile sheds his tears, with malevolence and guile.

TWILIGHT TIME

Jamie Chiarello, Emmanuelle Gauthier, Liz Insogna, Michael Norkin, Jeremy Olson, Leemour Pelli, Deborah Pohl, Grace Roselli, Michael Schall, Conrad Vogel
January 13-February 11, 2007

Elizabeth Insogna

Jamie Chiarello

Emmanuelle Gauthier

Michael Norkin

Jeremy Olson

Deborah Pohl

Michael Schall

Conrad Vogel

“Twilight Time” is an exploration of the ambiguity of human endeavor. It features the work of ten artists whose imagery presents a range of signification alternating between the iconic and the narrative, applied sometimes with humor or menace, but always with a sensitivity to the innate humanity of the subject. For instance, in “Estrangement from Nature” by Jamie Chiarello, a woman stands beneath a tall tree wearing a hat made of earth while an unknown collaborator sprinkles water on it to grow flowers, a fitting metaphor for human self-involvement from which emerges a beauty at one with the powers of nature, even as the woman remains stolidly unaware of her transformation. In the collage “Deepest Blue 2” by Emmanuelle Gauthier, we are presented with a palimpsest of images of empire, between the inside of a church and the exterior of a castle. The drawings “Our Desire” by Liz Insogna depicts a fantastic and eerily beguiling communication of lust in which mysterious eyes spy the two from either corner. Do they seem intimacy, fleeing from the world, or does their desire create the world around them? “Thrall” by Michael Norkin also presents a world pieces together by images of desire, each seen to interact with one another, though their textual sources are different. “Unfurled” and other drawings by Jeremy Olson presents us with people whose bodies are being attacked, or whose unconscious are actively manifesting, amoebic masses which resemble nothing so much as ghosts or viruses. In two untitled paintings by Leemour Pelli, liminally depicted protagonists encounter forms which resemble bodily organs, sources of illumination, or portals to another plane of existence (or all three at once). Three watercolors by Deborah Pohl present Arcadian landscapes in which disembodied persons identified only by coyly flashing eyes, resembling those of cartoon figures from an idle childhood, cute and malevolent at the same time. “Study for War Paint” by Grace Roselli is a portrait of an Arab woman who holds her hand in front of her marked face, the image of her rising above a modern city. She is marked by fate, yet she hides her identity, whether for shame or because she prizes her anonymity, we do not know. “Resource Switchboard” by Michael Schall makes the land itself into a entity, connected to a mysterious system of feeds as if drawing power from it, or giving it sustenance. The pop-up and print on view by Conrad Vogel presents morally charged scenes equally influenced by history, literature, and the follies of mankind that are only resolved in muted self-destruction that is aptly bathetic. This exhibition suits its season as well as its theme: a time of transition—when we are first made conscious of the workings of the night world and are given a momentary yet fleeting glimpse which reveals that the same rules apply in either sphere. Uncertainty is not the proprietary tenor of the night; it merely hides the horrors of natural law from the light of human reason and moral justification. Perhaps we are living in a dark age. But I prefer a more transitive analogy: that we are living in perpetual twilight, as we always have, partially in reason and partially in doubt. Each of us may act as agents of change, and as arbiters of succession.

EDUARDO CERVANTES: A NEW MAN

February 16-March 18, 2007

The series “A New Man” are an examination on the body as a fictitious entity. They synthesize some of my ideas on the deconstruction and appropriation of the found object, in this case low profile merchandise. They are built from 3-D puzzle cards made in China that I have been collecting for years; trinkets for junk food that defy you to punch out the pieces and assemble a small three-dimensional model. I have been subverting their use and looking out for their intangible potential. I think of them as accidents in a dislocated global economy. In a world of waste, male transformers share common identities in a totemic culture of youth war.

JULIANNA DAIL
WHEN DOROTHY MET ALICE

March 30-April 29, 2007
Reception: Friday, March 30, 7-9 PM

For its 32nd exhibition, Realform Project Space is proud to announce “When Dorothy Met Alice” by JULIANNA DAIL, an installation which utilizes a commonplace scenario—the crime scene—to relate the metaphorical tangent of two literary and mythological figures, the protagonists of Frank L. Baum’s The Wizard of Oz and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Dail identifies them as representing alternate aspects of then female psyche in turns aggressive and self-deprecating. Dail’s sculptures and installations originate from books and her memory of the story. As with most memories gaps and false impressions occur. Just like a prop used in theater there is fakery involved, rawness upon close inspection, a reference to the real. She twists the identifiable around questions about politics and social policies so that the memory becomes allegorical. In each of the sources for her current installation, the protagonist is thrust into a world of perverse challenges, presenting readers with not only an empathetic wanderer amidst bizarre fantasies, but a model of “common sense” whose innocent wisdom is the perfect perspective to gainsay which lessons are most worthwhile. Dail mines the detritus of cultural memory, leaving the answers to us. In a place where both Dorothy and Alice can co-exist, the possibilities for adventure, and its result in self-knowledge, are endless.

JENNY CARPENTER: MADAGASCAR

May 11-July 1, 2007

It goes without saying that all artists search for truth. Yet the manner and manifestation of that truth rely heavily upon the demands of talent and the rigor of what objectively fulfills an artist’s creative need. In the case of Jenny Carpenter, we have a painter whose work ardently and continuously fulfills the desire to manifest character. In her newest body of work, Carpenter has moved beyond the culturally stamped impressions we find in fashion magazines, and has traveled to another marginal territory—the precincts of Madagascar, in Africa. What she found there speaks both to a sense of the universal and the ‘other’.

As the artists states: “My current work pulls from a recent trip to southern Africa, in particular, Madagascar, from the women that inhabit the remote villages on the islands off the west coast. I painted these women from a culture that I will never fully know. I found myself taken with their overt beauty, not in terms of their physical appearance, but rather in what was concealed behind the melancholy expression in their eyes. It was this lack of information that I found truly compelling, causing an unsettling feeling, a discomfort. I sought something greater from them than simply a pretty face or a diverted gaze. I wanted from them what is missing in myself.

I choose to paint on walnut, cherry or birch panels. I allow the grain of each panel to dictate the figure’s form, allowing the image to gradually emerge from within the grain. In the wood, the woman becomes quietly present, her story hidden in the layers of the grain. I choose to paint thinly—almost as a stain—taking from the wood as the women do, using the subtle colors each possesses to tell their story.”

MICHAEL NORKIN: TRANSPARENCY

July 8-August 26, 2007

LIZ-N-VAL: OF CABBAGES AND KINGS

September 7-October 7, 2007

"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--of cabbages--and kings--and why the sea is boiling hot--and whether pigs have wings." (Lewis Carroll, The Walrus and the Carpenter, 1872)

Liz-N-Val, in this sparking show, sparkling because, among other things, it is reflective--touch on matters both sublime and ridiculous. The installation at REALFORM consists of three mirror panels painted black and a colorful, exuberant sculpture titled Eruption. The mirror pieces, “Cosmologies,” reflect and interact with Eruption, and of course with everything else. In the sculpture, colorful foam emerges from two wooden files. On one panel, little black figures are climbing a vast void of reflective nothing. In the second panel, black rays originate in an eyeball/sun and disappear--an exaggerated perspective into a celestial universe; in the third, black organic waves travel across the night sky, encountering geometric bodies and planetary shapes. A sense of personal wonder is countered by endless changes--earthly and cosmic reconfigurations.

The appeal of Liz-N-Val’s “Of Cabbages and Kings,” results from the decisive character of inspiration their work provides--as it is engaged equally by the fantastic and mundane. It tells us something that is both provocative and endearing, dealing in issues that address consciousness and existence yet in a manner which includes both humor and a hint of guile. This is where meaning creeps in. Starting with a children’s nursery rhyme, we confront the objects that comprise this installation in a quandary that involves our lost innocence and yet also taps into an epochal mentality, searching beyond and below the means of mere sensible attitudes toward the aesthetic experience. The elements that comprise “Of Cabbages and Kings” are, in both the poetical and the actual sense, effective and reflective. I hope you shall discover the same.

VICTORIA CALABRO

ORANGE

October 12-November 11, 2007

MEGHAN O'CONNOR

THE BIG BOAT

November 16-December 30, 2007

“The Big Boat” by Megan O'Connor explores the daily excesses of celebrities such as Kid Rock and Britney Spears as they lounge and cavort in their favorite private clubs. A fascination with celebrities, which in a culture that derides class difference but reveres beauty and youth yet celebrates the mediocrity as well as the inventiveness of is most prevalent cultural icons. O’Connor takes her fascination, bordering on the devotional, and turns it on its head, rendering the gleeful debauches of her heroes in hand made puppets and paintings culled straight from the pop archetypes of press imagery meant to divest a mainstream popularity. Her heroes become pathetic and in this, more human. The Big Boat is both a secret place and everyplace--it's humanity itself.

PAMELA GORDON

MISE-EN-SCENE

January 12-February 10, 2008

The theatre is a complex site, completing a different set of expectations for each group of people involved in it, whether director, actor, technician, or viewer. To a young girl growing up within the theatre, it can be both a real place and a site for dreams. Mise-en-Scene, is an expression of Pamela Gordon’s love for the backstage as a playground. Growing up, she aspired to become a famous actress and spent a lot of time in theatres. In retrospect the artist cherishes the time she spent discovering the backstage places more than the brief moments she spent on stage as an actress. The silhouettes of scenery, secret doors, and stairways placed her in the middle of her own theatrical performance. The backstage had become a childhood fantasy land. Mise-en-Scene allows us to see the theatre as she did, for which acting a part and acting out were one and the same, and in which the commonplace and the fantastic share the same physical and emotional space.

JORDAN BUSCHUR

IDLE HANDS

February 16-March 16, 2008

Jordan Buschur’s recent oil paintings are based on images from mid-century American magazines such as LIFE, National Geographic and Ladies Home Journal. These magazines present a specific history and worldview through the stories, news features and advertising. Behaviors, both individual and international, are clearly defined as good or bad, certain acts are glorified while others are disparaged or completely ignored. These magazines are full of images that feel like home; or more to the point- any home in a rural, religious community in the Midwest.

The act of making paintings from these sources is a way to problematize a clear, moralized viewpoint. Buschur wants to acknowledge the allure of a past era, and the glossed-over romance that accompanies a naïve longing for a ‘simpler’ past. Simultaneously she wants to identify nostalgia as a place of discomfort and anxiety. It is important to recognize that this longing is directed towards a pre-civil rights, pre-second wave feminism, pre-gay rights era. In this way, these paintings can function as a nexus for conflict and questioning.

The figures in her paintings are often engaged in an activity- sometimes work, sometimes leisure, and sometimes that distinction is unclear. Here, the paintings depart from traditional genre painting as the nature of the work or task, or the morality of the worker is left ambiguous. A woman is just as likely to make a painting as she is to make a sandwich.

MICHAEL YINGER
ANOTHER DRINK AND I WON'T MISS HER

March 22-April 20, 2008

In his first solo show, Michael Yinger shows his command of space to explore the concept of "home," with a personal sense of found materials and abstract political references. Raised in the heartland but a New Yorker since 2001, Yinger often deals with the shifting nature of his residence. His work is often an organizational task that places objects on the floors and walls of the gallery is ways that suggest drawing or painting. The rebelliousness of Yinger’s gestural refusal of ideas of high and low suggests the gritty hedonism of hipster dive-bars and a range of abuses, such as the gluttony and the pillage of natural resources. Yinger’s instinct for recycling and resistance in the face of American abundance and freedom isn’t entirely a show of youthful rebellion. Yinger’s heroically scaled installations in previous exhibitions have represented things from his autobiography, for instance maps of the United States or Buddhist symbols. Yet his choice of materials that are common to modern life complicates the idea of autobiography by showing how public the personal is in contemporary society.

Born in Bloomington, Indiana in 1973, he is a graduate of the MFA program at Hunter College, New York. His work has been shown both nationally and internationally, most notably with Green Gallery, Brooklyn; Midland Gallery, Indianapolis; and Galerie Griesmar & Tamer, Paris

MARY MURPHY
FOOLS FOR LUST

April 26-May 25, 2008
Reception: Saturday, April 26, 7-9 PM

Keep on Keeping On (2008) Oil on linen board, 18 x 24 inches

Article Projects Realform is pleased to present ‘Fools for Lust’ by Mary Katherine Murphy, an exhibition of paintings, collages, and installed objects that deals with the aesthetic aspect of the human gaze, its ability to express the permutations of desire, and its use in determining the character of both the observer and the observed.

Love begins with aesthetic attention, with a visual fascination that may tend to bring out the qualities of a person’s character, and it shows in their face. Sometimes the lust is not just for a person, perhaps it’s for an idea which we may have about them, making them more ideal than they are, or perhaps the ideal disconnects entirely from the person and becomes the object of fascination.

Each of these portraits depicts a different sort of person. In ‘Keep on Keeping On’ (2008) we have young girl whose faraway gaze makes us think that her lover is geographically distant, or perhaps exists only in reverie. Gripping her throat she is perhaps imagining his hands, or perhaps she is physically affected by the intensity of her longing. In ‘Orchid’ (2008) we have a woman who seems vain and almost furtive. Her lips are pursed, not for a kiss, but in distaste, and her sidelong glance betrays a suspicion which is otherwise unspoken. In ‘The Gaze’ (2008) we have a woman glancing down, perhaps depressed, whose seemingly damaged face is at odds with her elegant sense of style. In ‘Blue Eyes’ (2008) we have a young woman, the baby fat of her teenage years still present (or perhaps she is meant to depict a Rubenesque or zuftig beauty), while her lips are aquiver and her eyes, as big as the rest of her face, show how filled she is with lust, she seems ready to throw all caution to the wind.

We live in emotional times, and each of us expresses this dynamic in different ways. Mary Katherine Murphy is like an archaeologist of the emotions, excavating the truth of what we feel and the beauty of how we feel it.

Orchid (2008) Oil on linen board, 16 x 20 inches




The Gaze (2008) Oil on linen board, 18 x 24 inches




Blue Eyes (2008) Oil on linen board, 12 x 9 inches




Candy Bowl (2007) Oil on canvas, 12 x 16 inches

LING CHANG: THE CURIOUS LORE OF PRECIOUS STONES, MAY 31-JUNE 30, 2008

The dubious character of the artful is taken to task by Ling Chang in her installation “The Curious Lore of Precious Stones.” Her chosen forms are the geologic objects that contain ores and minerals, often prized for their rareness, and for their attractiveness. Her specific installation consists of an informal grouping of paintings, drawings, and a hand-made "mineral collection". It takes its title from a book written in 1913 by the mineralogist George Frederick Kunz, a compendium of myths and folktales about minerals and gems. Though Ling makes an effort to dramatize the exhibitionistic aspects of scientific discovery, there remains something spritely, even campy in her mannerist presentation of a bygone age. One can assume that she is a fan of nature in its obscure and fantastic aspects, like any child visiting the Museum of Natural History might be. Recognizable as these elements might be in their re-imagined forms, they yet retain a degree of the unknowable, in which the artist hopes to share.