“DOGS and BONES” Exhibition

Theodore:Art

This event has ended.

Theodore:Art presents DOGS and BONES, an exhibition of work that contemplates the potential for psyche and soul in our animal companions and ourselves, through life and after-life. Bringing together art and fashion star Scooter LaForge, the Manchester-based social media phenomenon Faye Scott-Farrington, and obsessive collage artist Nancy Handler from Florida, DOGS and BONES aims for laughs, tears, shivers, pathos, and visual riches.

Canine visitors are welcome on Sunday afternoons.

Faye Scott-Farrington’s collages began by using the dogs from women’s weekly magazines, “real life” publications purport to show real people going through real trauma, joy, love and drama as a proxy for humans, transforming suffering into a bland consumable, reality TV-type rubbernecking. In time the canines in her work have also begun to hint at the possibility of an inner life in these companion animals.

Faye Scott-Farrington is a Greater Manchester based artist working in a variety of media, her work is tongue in cheek and often reasonably obscene. She studied at Manchester Metropolitan University for both a BTEC foundation art and BA(Hons) interactive arts and later gained an Open Degree with art history at the Open University. She also spends an unreasonable amount of time in the company of dogs.

Nancy Handler incorporates collaged elements from all kinds of books and periodicals, illustration, and painting to create diminutive works of both kitsch and horror. Decay and dissolution of the body and its historical environs, are suggested in bright appealing flower-strewn tableaux, suggesting the specter of death and destruction that belies the living world, like Ophelia’s corpse in a beautiful forestial clearing.

Nancy Handler has a BFA from the University of Michigan and an MFA from Pratt Institute, as well as a post-graduate Educational Specialist degree in photography from Florida International University. After working in the fashion world for some time, Handler returned to her art practice, as well as teaching for Dade County Public Schools and as an adjunct for Miami-Dade College and the International Fine Arts College. She has shown her work in numerous group shows in Miami and New York. Handler lives and works in Miami.

Scooter LaForge (b. Las Cruces, New Mexico) is a New York-based artist who has lived in the East Village for the past 18 years. His unique style mines the catalog of art history by infusing classical themes with a colorful sensibility. LaForge works in various media, including painting, sculpture, and drawing, and employs unorthodox techniques and striking iconic images.

Often combine-like, his works are a walking journal of images where ideas are explored and refined. LaForge approaches painting intuitively, absorbing what surrounds him and working on the canvas with agility and focus—drawing from a fertile inner emotional realm and an extensive painterly vocabulary.

His paintings have been shown at the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York, the Friedrichshof Museum in Vienna, and the Spritmuseum/Absolut Art Collection in Sweden. In 2015, the artist was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. He holds a BFA in painting from the University of Arizona.