“Ashen Branches, Vibrant Keys” Exhibition
Wayfarers
This event has ended.
With their emphasis on vividness of color and vitality of form and line, the works in the show provide a welcome counterpoint to the bleakness of midwinter in Brooklyn. The show takes its title from the poem “What to Eat, What to Drink, and What to Leave for Poison” by Camille T. Dungy. Dungy uses the winter’s lack of “flower heat” and its accompanying “white longing” as an introduction to the sensual promise of the coming spring and all its brightness. Wayfarers hopes to use winter similarly, as stark contradiction to the splendid warmth of Charlotte and Adam & Terri’s work.
Charlotte Evans’ large, radiant oil paintings on canvas attempt to recapture images of recent international travels. Filtered through the saturated palette of her memory, the warmth and lushness of her new work calls to mind the saturation and nuance of Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings. While Evans’ work has historically been primarily an investigation of color and form, the pieces in this show demonstrate a developing interest in narrative, with the figure playing a more dynamic role in her consistently assertive compositions. These paintings continue to demonstrate Evans’ signature approach to paint, with the translucent layers often revealing her gestural preliminary sketches.
Adam Frezza & Terri Chiao’s installation Paper Forests explores the intimate relationships and innate tensions at work among fictional plants and their environments, in a series of invented forest ecosystems. Competition, symbiosis, coexistence, and codependency work at a small scale in a table-top landscape of colorful paper plant forms, plexiglas reflecting pools, and brightly flocked forest floors. Each piece a set for an upcoming animation, they are displayed on slowly rotating bases in order to capture the shifting light and shadows cast from the surrounding environment.
Larger Paper Plants inhabit spaces around the gallery’s perimeter, transforming Wayfarers into a small winter garden. Created through various paper-building techniques, the plant sculptures draw from the seemingly supernatural qualities of real plants in the natural world. Inspired by the parallels between horticulture and art-making, the paper plants stem from an innate desire to control and beautify that which could be considered wild.
The work in Ashen Branches, Vibrant Keys is refreshingly direct and uncomplicated. Charlotte and Adam & Terri are all three masters at maintaining a deceptively precise balance between loose playfulness and refined craft; between lively gesture and tended detail.
Media
Schedule
from February 21, 2014 to March 29, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-02-21 from 19:00 to 22:00