"In Collaboration" Exhibition
Gitana Rosa Gallery
This event has ended.
Brooklyn-based artists, Jenny Hellman and Tom Billings, began their series of paintings, "In Collaboration", in 2010, but had worked together on occasion for a couple of years already. They merged their styles and mannerisms, the things they each knew, to create
an entity in itself, different than their own. "In Collaboration" is an enigma in its own right, as it should be.
Popular culture provides a context, but the themes of the paintings are personal, they come out of the everyday. A joke about a bear and Sarah Palin, a raccoon that roams the street outside the Brooklyn studio, and a small unfinished sculpture of a loon carved by
Tom’s father, all really do exist.
By painting with each other, and layering formats and technique, Billings and Hellman blend these narratives from one painting to the next in pursuit of a single body of work.
The painting “Means of Production” is about both Afghanistan and heroine addiction. A plastic toy cowboy has been with Tom since childhood.
Dog E. Style in its earliest incarnation, as a sketch on a page, was provocative because the structure was oddly reminiscent of a Nazi symbol, or a Hindu symbol depending on how you saw it, but once painted became an entity unto itself.
With no concern for formalism, what matters "In Collaboration" is whether or not what is being built will hold together on a wall. As long as it hangs on a wall it is presumed to exist.
Media
Schedule
from April 08, 2011 to May 07, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-04-08 from 18:00 to 21:00