Billy Kidd, Nicholas Alan Cope, and Eric Mistretta “Sub Rosa”
Bleecker Street Arts Club
This event has ended.
As we become increasingly dependent on our urban spaces, flooded with architectural symbols, our relationship with nature is being challenged and redefined. The artists in Sub Rosa are illuminating this artificialness and simulacrum of nature by reducing the organic elements that are their subjects into abstract forms. Sub Rosa in this circumstance does not reference religious secrets, but the uncovering of latent architecture in the natural imagery, the secret structure that binds us all in nature. The works by Billy Kidd, Nicholas Alan Cope, and Eric Mistretta in the exhibitionzoom in on the natural world creating a new language in tune with the urban landscape.
Billy Kidd was influenced by the sparseness of the Arizona desert where he was raised prior to moving to New York City. His photographic works reference the desolate shapes of the desert, training the lens on one element only, thereby however, illuminating his subject and bestowing importance on the form. Kidd bathes the objects and the models he shoots with an empathetic richness. Dry landscapes become lush sculptural fields, the body – represented as a disparate part of the whole – unites gracefully with the constraints of a stiff architectural shape.
Similarly, Nicholas Alan Cope’s photographs are landscapes stripped bare, natural forms pared down to their basic shapes. Through reductionism and magnification, new forms are created from existing elements. Free of distraction, the shapes become architectural form and artifact of what it once were.
Eric Mistretta uses stockings to wrap tight grid-like shapes over his boxes of flowers, shielding the flowers and in effect blurring and abstracting them into the background. He mutes and pares the lush garden down to a shape and creates a separation between the object and viewer using the lines of the stockings that acts as a barrier between us and nature.
[Image: Nicholas Alan Cope “LOS ANGELES MAY 2009 II” (2009) Archival Pigment Print, 20 x30” image on 30 x 40” paper]
Media
Schedule
from September 10, 2013 to October 05, 2013