“Sideshow on Mars” Exhibition

Life on Mars Gallery

poster for “Sideshow on Mars” Exhibition

This event has ended.

Life on Mars Gallery will ring in the New Year celebrating the vibrancy and diversity of our Brooklyn community of painters by partnering in a joint exhibition with Sideshow Gallery. The 15th annual Sideshow Gallery Invitational in Williamsburg and Life on Mars Gallery in Bushwick will have back-to-back openings January 8th and 9th.

Rich Timperio and Ernie Marciano’s annual winter group show was born out of their mutual distaste for holiday commercialism and a desire to create an artist community in the “forgotten place” that was mid-1990s Williamsburg. A holiday-season group show seemed like the perfect way to co-opt the Christmas spirit in the name of making and showing art.

The painters in our exhibition, who range in age from their twenties to their seventies and come from as far afield as Australia, California, Israel, and Georgia, include Mandy Lyn Ford, Pam Longobardi, Fran O’Neill, Zuska Vaclavik and Etty Yaniv. These artists are exhibiting side-by-side with painters who have been working for years in New York: Lizbeth Mitty, Art Guerra, Rich Timperio, Mary Devincentis, Joyce Yamada and Daniel John Gadd; cross-pollinations of artists with various backgrounds and personal histories that have formed communities around painting. This community of mutual influence is the heart of painting’s resurgence, ongoing renewal, and continuing relevance especially in Brooklyn.

Mandy Lyn Ford and Daniel John Gadd push the limits of abstraction by using non-conventional materials and irregular substrates, blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Drawing on influences from vernacular art and Abstraction Expressionism, they re-energize and redefine abstract painting.

Pam Longobardi and Etty Yaniv use recycled materials to create installations and wall reliefs to raise political and take a stand on social issues. Longobardi travels the world, swimming the oceans, collecting plastic debris and recycling it to create powerful works of art. Her practice has contributed to increased environmental awareness; her work contributed to legislation that banned the use of plastic bags in California. Yaniv’s delicate and fierce wall reliefs recycle newspaper clippings that often refer to the conflict in the Middle East, building an organic “Wall of Babel” in the hope of creating a dialogue.

Lizbeth Mitty and Joyce Yamada create narratives in their work using imagery of the natural world, ranging from Yamada’s depictions of deep-sea ocean creatures to Mitty’s urban landscapes in decay; they question the future of the environment, fueled by passion for their subject matter and commitment to the practice of painting.

Through a combination of imagery invoking Eastern Philosophy along with the fluidity and freedom found in their use of material, Mary DeVincentis and Zuska Vaclavik create beautiful relationships between their subjects and the execution of their respective works, a marriage of the conscious and subconscious.

Fran O’Neil and Art Guerra push the materiality of paint to its limits to create impactful abstract paintings of beautiful, vibrant color. Using her arm as a brush, O’Neil gestures and the transparency of paint mediate a space between an implied psychological portraiture and an internal landscape.

Art Guerra is a beloved veteran New York painter and master paint maker. He pulls and stretches paint to its chemical limits. With a consummate knowledge of the chemistry of paint, he adds glass beads, shards of rubber and the richest of pigments to alter the material’s very structure. The resulting paintings explore the very nature of paint and expand painting’s potential.

In partnering with Sideshow, Life on Mars celebrates the painters that work so hard to maintain studio practices in spite of rising costs and scarcity of studio spaces; an effort that is heroic and crucial to the development of the language of painting.

Michael David Artistic Director/Curator Life On Mars Gallery 12-20-15

Artists exhibiting at Life on Mars Gallery:
Mary DeVincentis, Mandy Lyn Ford, Daniel John Gadd, Art Guerra, Pam Longobardi, Lizbeth Mitty, Fran O’Neill, Rich Timperio, Zuzka Vaclavik, Joyce Yamada, and Etty Yaniv.

Life on Mars Gallery artists exhibiting at Sideshow Gallery:
Todd Bienvenu, Michael David, Brenda Goodman, and Karen Schwartz.

Media

Schedule

from January 08, 2016 to January 31, 2016

Opening Reception on 2016-01-08 from 18:00 to 21:00

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