NYAB Event - "Little Languages / Coded Pictures" Exhibition

"Little Languages / Coded Pictures" Exhibition

Lesley Heller Workspace

This event has ended.

Curators Theresa Hackett and Michelle Weinberg’s exhibition, Little Languages/Coded Pictures, includes abstractions constructed of idiosyncratic painting languages that vibrate on the edge of being and representation. A glossolalia of marks, swerves of the brush, scrapes, dabs, and drips create the lexicon of painting. An anthology of the painter's experience is translated into pigmented pastes of varying transparencies and densities. Application of these little languages to the surface of a painting builds the story.

If we were to “read” these paintings, we would decipher the psychic spills in Alan Crockett’s Painter’s Dream, a petri dish of unknown adjectives in Julie Evans’ collage on mylar, and a Hitchcockian twist in David Humphrey’s Reclined.

An overheard conversation buzzes in Ron Gorchov’s work, and Jennifer Reeves’, The Butterfly Bomb, is a quiet void is that is interrupted by a complex dialogue of alternate forms. In Theresa Hackett’s Summer Trouble, her calm nuances of pink converse with a density that is both disturbing and clandestine. Laura Newman’s Span suggests a plateau with a structural solidity, while Mike Carroll’s architecture whooshes into outer space.

Pictorial space and logic are built of hermetic symbols created by the painter. One gesture is surrogate for a single thing, or an entire range of experience. Learning to de-code the painting’s surface is part of the pleasure for the viewer.

Little Languages/Coded Pictures is an exhibition in two parts, the second part, running concurrently at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in Chelsea