Ben Matthews, Masao Gozu, Stefan Beltzig, Blaise Tobia, Patrick Mangan Exhibitions
OK Harris Works of Art
This event has ended.
Ben Matthews continues his exploration into a unique, fantastical and sometimes unsettling universe. Works on canvas unveil a mysteriously disconcerting series of images and scenes from this not-quite time/place and aim to bring to light issues the world faces.
The work in this current exhibition is comprised of 5, full-scale, urban windowed walls made entirely of stones collected from the land surrounding the artist’s house in Pond Eddy, New York. Gozu has cut and shaped the stones to their present purpose while carefully preserving the moss that has grown on them for years. The moss represents eternity in the Japanese culture.
In his latest color pencil drawings, Stefan Beltzig continues his exploration of urban landscapes in transition. The muted palette and layered technique reminiscent of Northern European landscape paintings are used to depict both present and former industrial sites along Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal. The delicate and atmospheric renderings belie the grittiness of the subject matter and elicit an almost nostalgic view of our industrial past.
Blaise Tobia has worked throughout his artistic career with paired and multiple images. His photographs are “about” what they represent (generally urban landscapes and global material culture) but they gain additional - or alternate - meanings from the visual and conceptual interactions between and among them. Works from two of Tobia’s sets of paired images are included in this exhibition: “Signs and Wonders,” an ongoing series begun in 1992, centers on signage as a semiotic and visual presence in our culture. “Slight Perturbations of the Surface” is a newer and somewhat more enigmatic series playing off the essential flatness of the photograph, pairing image with a modulated spatial illusion.
Patrick Mangan uses innocuous, mundane materials such as duct tape, masking tape and brown paper to recreate the experience of the iconic house. This is “the house you grew up in” and it’s always the same house whether it is a barn or a shed, corncrib or school, factory or church. The final product is seemingly primitive, minimal almost childishly offhanded, and the final effect is one of startlingly recognizable clarity.
[Image: Ben Matthews “Bear Trap Moonshine” (2012) acrylic on canvas 46 x 42 in.]
Media
Schedule
from September 21, 2013 to October 26, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-09-21 from 15:00 to 17:00
Artist(s)
Ben Matthews, Masao Gozu, Stefan Beltzig, Blaise Tobia, Patrick Mangan