“Multiple/Universal” Exhibition

Storefront Ten Eyck

poster for “Multiple/Universal” Exhibition

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Universal/Multiple deals with the role of art and abstraction as a universal engine for self-differentiation and universal communication in the age of the internet. The artists in the show navigate the visual landscape by material experimentation, geometry, and color play in ways that vividly illuminate individual preference and experience. These works exhibit the connectedness of a universally vibrating network.

The underpinnings of this curatorial effort lie in the basic study of quantum physics. We live in a time where humanity is approaching a confluence between universal electronic consciousness (the internet) and an inchoate but growing understanding of the way that energy and consciousness are drawn from a universal field. How do easy access to information and the shift away from a mechanical view of the universe affect abstraction?

About the artists:

Hans Baumann is a Swiss-American artist whose work primarily addresses the interface between ecology and technology. His approach is informed by his extensive research in natural systems and visual art, anchored by studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Arnold Arboretum. His intimate knowledge of these subjects has led to an interest in artificial nature, a topic on which he has lectured at universities and other venues. Baumann currently resides in Seattle, his work inspired by the seamless continuum between nature and culture that the Pacific Northwest’s verdant climate affords. His work has been lauded internationally for its nuanced understanding of natural processes and his ability to elevate history above nostalgia.

Christian Berman is a Bushwick-based artist. Berman received his BA from Duke University in International Comparative Studies and Visual Arts in 2004 and his Masters in Landscape Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2010. He is currently an MFA candidate at the Tyler School of Art. Berman’s paintings are grounded in poetry, narrative, and the power of the graphic image. Recent works are influenced by sources as varied as Japanese printmakers, Amazonian feather-craft, and the architecture of his native Mexico. Berman’s paintings are improvisational constructions of imagined places and are often reminiscent of digital worlds. The work is as much a deeply individual conversation with the history of painting and abstraction as it is a celebration of globalization and internet age information sampling. Paint is sprayed through metal and lace, poured and cut, and brushed on in sheets and lines. Highly representational elements and real macaw feathers from animal shelters are used in contrast to more industrial materials and geometric patterning, and the constructions and colors are meant to evoke memories and stories. The work also speaks to broader themes of loss, renewal, globalization, and the contemporary conundrum of increased connectedness in concert with deeper isolation.

Jon Blank graduated from RISD in 06’ with a BFA in Industrial Design and is currently pursuing his MFA at Rutgers Mason Gross. Utilizing banal objects to produce low-fi forms of printing, Blank decodes their structures, reverting 3D objects to a 2D state. His systematic, hand-printed processes are intended to simulate mechanization, portraying the symbiotic interrelationship between man and machine. The dethreading of the canvas reiterates the idea of construction through deconstruction, building pattern and dismantling the woven surface to its most elemental increment. The canvases are displayed using obscure geometric “stretchers” that Blank customizes to the piece and to the locations where they are shown, actuating his paintings into the 3D realm.

Palma Blank’s boldly colored compositions emphasize their own meta-structure. Their diagonal lines respond to the architecture of the stretched canvas and to the various ways of dividing the painting’s rectangular shape compositionally. While shifts in line thickness imply illusionistic depth, the lines also contribute to a low-relief topography that reveals the process of the paint’s application. The color relationships, initiated through automatic, instinctual decisions, form their own internal structures. Such internal structures build phenomenological, durational experiences rather than specific illusionistic representations. The color palettes that result from these choices may correspond to the artist’s personal experiences, symbols, and interests. Interested as well in the changing visual experience of the digital age, Blank creates images that reveal strata of signification. Complicating Frank Stella’s declaration, “what you see is what you see,” Blank’s paintings urge viewers to unearth the various structures of her work. The construction of the work’s physical form, the covert layers of symbolic meaning, and the subtly shifting optical effects act as transparent layers.. Blank has an MFA in painting from Yale University and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Ted Gahl was born in 1983 and received his BFA from Pratt Institute in 2006 and his MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2010. Recent solo exhibitions include “Gin Blossoms” at Halsey McKay, East Hampton, New York, and “Ted Gahl” at the Peninsula School, Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, Portland, Maine. Recent group exhibitions include “Space Whole Karaoke” at Middlemarch, Brussels, Belgium, and “Bathers” at Morgan Lehman, New York, New York. Gahl lives and works in Connecticut.

Field Kallop lives in New York and received an MFA in Painting from The Rhode Island School of Design in 2009 and a BA in Art History from Princeton University in 2004. An Awards Program Nominee at the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, her work has recently been exhibited at Allegra LaViola Gallery, Simon Dickinson Gallery and Mixed Greens in New York, Tompkins Projects in Brooklyn, Gelman Gallery in Providence, and Boston University. Combining a fascination with chemistry, physics, and astronomy with prosaic, often toxic, materials like bleach and diamond dust, and drawing inspiration from 20th-century abstract artists like Emma Kunz and Agnes Martin, Kallop’s work occupies an uneasy site between the cosmic and mundane.

Karl LaRocca, a.k.a. Kayrock, is a Brooklyn based artist and a founding member of Kayrock Screenprinting. He has designed numerous posters, books, and records and worked with many contemporary artists to realize their fine art editions. His work has been collected by MOMA and the Allen Memorial Art Museum. His new paintings find their structure in folded and unfolded creased-paper patterns derived from origami models of regular polyhedra (tetrahedrons, octahedrons, dodecahedrons, and triangular prisms). Inside this framework and the square format that it dictates, LaRocca is free to explore relationships of color, creating a faceted surface that shifts the viewer’s focus.

Lyman Richardson is a New York City based artist and designer who works in the medium of collage and textile applique. His areas of artistic interest include urban settings, globalism, consumerism, commercialism, gay rights activism, landscapes, and empty buildings dissected to reveal their interiors. He is an alumnus of Johns Hopkins University, California Institute of the Arts, and Universitat der Kunste.

Kristen Schiele has lived and worked in both the Untied States and in Germany. She received a BFA from Indiana University and MFA from American University and studied at the Hochschule der Kunste in Berlin. Exhibitions include a solo show at Freight and Volume in New York City, the Soap Factory in Minneapolis, Curators Without Borders Gallery in Berlin, Germany, group shows in Cheim and Read, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) in Oregon, the Torrence Art Museum in Los Angeles, the Corcoran Galery of Art in Washington, D.C, among others. She has participated in the Bronx Museum of the Arts’s Artist in the Marketplace program, completed a residency at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Lower East Side Printshop, Ucross Foundation, Fountainhead, and the Wassaic Project.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1971, Oliver Warden moved to Los Angeles at age 17 to study at the Otis Parsons Institute of Art where he also assisted the artists Robert Overby and Linda Burnham. During his junior year, he transferred to the School of Visual Arts in New York and majored in sculpture. His work was in video, installation, and interactive performance. In 1995 he attended the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where he received his masters degree. He currently works on paintings, prints, video game photography, and interactive installation at his studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn. For his next work, he hopes to launch his own social network.

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Schedule

from July 31, 2013 to August 25, 2013

Opening Reception on 2013-07-31 from 18:00 to 21:00

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