Don Joint “Coney Island Blueprints”

Pavel Zoubok Gallery

poster for Don Joint “Coney Island Blueprints”

This event has ended.

DON JOINT’s newest series continues a painterly exploration of the Carnivalesque that began with the 2010 exhibition Waldameer, a visual return to the artist’s boyhood memories of the historic Pennsylvania amusement park of the same name. His collaged paintings build upon a lifelong fascination with amusement parks by structuring their seemingly abstract compositions around a collection of early 20th century blueprints of rides drawn from the Coney Island archives. Joint’s rhythmic, gestural works evoke both the sensory experience of these mechanical marvels and the mythological fantasies of his childhood. In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, poet and author Erik LaPrade writes:

In these new works, Joint combines elements of two different cultures to create his fantasy park: industrial and mechanical drawings of Coney Island rides, and the powerful, vivid colors and imagery of Japanese Ukiyo-e prints. The fantasy world of Joint’s amusement park is the world of Ukiyo-e, the floating world. Ukiyo-e prints almost always present us with a visual narrative, whether actual historical stories or mythological tales and legends. However, in Joint’s world, there is no narrative story; we are the narrators, and part of the fun of this park is for us to try to make sense of the fantasy through which we are moving.

There are sixteen collage paintings in Coney Island Blueprints: five tondos and eleven panels of various sizes. All of these capture some of the visual experience of being on an amusement ride such as the Cyclone or the Tickler, when sight becomes blurred as images of the surrounding landscape are pushed to the periphery. For a few minutes, the environment becomes an abstraction as colored light and physical objects are vividly moving across our eyes at high speed. Lines of color like shooting stars divide the picture plane while oddly shaped forms, resembling strange, mythological creatures from Japanese woodblock prints, float among the shades of colors. In Coney Island Blueprints, Joint has dismantled an old amusement park and recreated an abstract but not unrecognizable place made even more fantastical and enticing.

Don Joint has exhibited internationally since 1992. His work is in numerous private and public collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Oklahoma Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art. The artist lives and works in New York City and Milton, Pennsylvania. This is his third exhibition at Pavel Zoubok Gallery. A full-color catalogue with essay by Erik LaPrade accompanies this exhibition.

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Schedule

from April 24, 2014 to May 24, 2014

Opening Reception on 2014-04-24 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Don Joint

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