NYAB Event - “Receptive Fields” Exhibition

“Receptive Fields” Exhibition

Edward Thorp Gallery

This event has ended.

Edward Thorp Gallery presents Receptive Fields, a show of recent representational and abstract painting. Rife with visual shifts and transformations, this unique collection of works exploits a nebulous use of form, bringing forth thought-provoking associations. The paintings range from close detail to open playfulness, broadening the layered gap between observation and representation to blur their definitions.

Five artists, each engaged with the complexity of connective practice, present a multiplicity of themes in both subtle and vivid ways, coming together to manipulate creative and psychological meaning:

Farrell Brickhouse’s quasi-figurative paintings are visually compelling and intimate, combining metaphor and myth with lived experience. Figures and motifs are drawn with a rich impasto application that hovers on the verge of legibility. Brickhouse’s works, provocative explorations of sensation and persona, are potent metaphors for the intimacy of process.

Ariel Dill employs a fluid broad-brushed “automatic drawing” to create a mutant form of representation, with amorphous arrangements of detailed iconography and a lush layering of fragmented organic shapes. Her works, injected with schematic flavor, are portraitures of hybridity, in which transfigured elements are bounded by a nuanced precision.

The combination of contrasting sensibilities in Sarah Faux’s works appears almost effortless; with loosely depicted figurative images, she enfolds shifting boundaries to produce a tentatively calculated hypothesis. By embracing this composite approach, the artist can interweave contrasting parts, resulting in a composite map of progression.

Clint Jukkala builds his idiosyncratic paintings by mischievously combining elements of shape, color, and texture. They are often reminiscent of a modernist vocabulary, but are other times more reflective of an elemental, almost primitive, visual language. These carefully crafted ambiguous surfaces pose perceptual conundrums with economy and wit.

Pictorial surface tensions proliferate in the collages of Jess Willa Wheaton. Creating compositions that explore the possibilities inherent in re-inscribing found images with new meaning, these persuasive works allude to the impossibility of singular interpretation. Her method conveys a faith in the specific visual logic that she utilizes to construct shrewd and engaging realms.