Joan Snitzer "Letters from Home"
A.I.R. Gallery
This event has ended.
A.I.R. Gallery presents the opening of Joan Snitzerʼs exhibition entitled “Letters from Home”. The show will feature paintings, drawings and wall installations from the past two years.
Joan Snitzerʼs projects combine renditions of traditional art materials with images and cadences observed during daily activities in the home, both mundane and profound. All of the imagery in this exhibition originates from objects and images found in common living spaces. Snitzer embodies the traditionally feminine instinct to organize, design and care for domestic spaces. Her work speaks of these impulses through the ordering of a personal visual syntax into absorbable units.
“Letters From Home” is a wall installation composed of painted canvases, common household objects, and unmediated images found in the artistʼs home. The images are organized within a pencil grid drawn directly on the wall. Snitzerʼs grids reference the flexible system developed by typographers to improve coherency of content on the page. Although grids display images in a seemingly rational way, Snitzerʼs imagery, when displayed within a traditional layout, ironically highlights the discordant content that we are challenged to process everyday. This workʼs compositional order explores moments when social or cultural experience becomes aligned (or misaligned) with personal household objects. Social relationships to intimacy and private space animate each moment.
The exhibition also includes a selection of paintings and works on paper. “Crosswords” uses the iconography of the common puzzle to organize found and created visual information. As within the installation, images have been observed in the home and techniques from the traditional (painting with egg tempera) to the contemporary (vinyl and photographic transfers) have been employed. Snitzerʼs crosswordsʼ draw inspiration from her own daily experiences:“I found myself looking at the clock one morning while preparing coffee with a French press and glanced up at an image on my table of a demonstration happening in Egypt. Everything I observed was equally beautiful, designed and displayed”.
Snitzerʼs work speaks with a sense of intimacy as well as universality about the acceleration of visual representations in our private homes. Her works comment on the competition of desires and priorities made when much of the visual information read is influenced by chance associations in timing and attention.
Joan Snitzerʼs paintings and drawings have been exhibited in the United States and internationally. The artist resides in New York City and this is her third solo exhibition at the Gallery. She is the Director of Visual Art at Barnard College.
Media
Schedule
from September 07, 2011 to October 01, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-09-08 from 18:00 to 21:00