Group Show
Hot Fun in the Summertime
June 17 - July 21, 2023
Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
—through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.
-William Carlos Williams
The idea of leisure often exists as a counterpoint to work. It’s the goal and reward for completing the minutiae that compose daily adult life. Philosophically, idling is a refutation of fatalism, meaning that if our outcome is predetermined and our fates are sealed, then any efforts extended toward a self-determined goal are futile.
Conversely, idle aimlessness may allow for the highest form of freedom. Meandering in indetermination not only allows us to take refuge from our anxieties, but it lends itself to a Eureka effect, where our unoccupied minds are able to immediately solve quagmires. What does this mean? Fuck art, let’s dance. It’s summer, baby!
Abstraction has always been a fickle subject. It is the representation of something that is without representation. The abstraction that Dave Bopp represents is part catalyst who incites the chemistry of movement and part moderator whose hand guides the piece to become part of the conversation. This process is important as his works overwrite each other constantly, intermediate stages are being processed further, thus allowing the sovereignty of his works to stem from their own creation.
It is “on the edge of boredom” where Charles Dunn creates his works, where his use of layered colors blurs the shapeless shapes and trades the objectivity of geometry for floating forms and “blops”. Acrid greens and oranges induce a warm seduction over disembodied faces, hands, heads, and toes. Yellow becomes red becomes blue. The lines are there but there they are second to the forms, the colors, the washes. depression is not a declaration but a whisper. The edge, the slash in between the melancholic/euphoric, the shapely/shapeless, the real/imagined. Dunn’s work doesn’t ask us to choose a side. It rewards us for staying in the cracks.
Gereon Krebber is an artist that likes to push limits. Whether he’s creating works using such unconventional materials as toothpaste, clingfilm, gelatin, packing tape, caramel, or mayonnaise, or more traditional media, Krebber aims to create works that both intrigue and repulse. His ceramic pieces are fired at the highest temperature the material can withstand without reaching its breaking point, creating a glaze that shines, runs, and bubbles. The dome-topped squiggles are arranged in smacks that are as strangely animated as they are strange. Still, they invite you to investigate them while also serving as a reminder that touching a floating beauty does not always give you a kind reward.
Markus Linnenbrink’s paintings are the result of material and process. Barely an ounce of material is wasted during the production of his works; the “drip” paintings are poured from the tops of the panels and allowed to flow freely toward the bottom, creating a stalactite of colored epoxy resin at its edge before landing onto an awaiting paneled composition or sculpture. His 2-dimensional works are composed of layers of colored resin which are spotted, poured, swirled, airbrushed, and excavated into concentric circles that overlap from their centers to the lacy edges created by the disregard of the natural boundary by the artist, or routered into comic book lines that punctuate matte-colored arcs. He is adept with creating combinations of his uniquely mixed pigments but recognizes that “all interaction with color happens in and through the eye of the viewer. The same visual information then lands in receptors that are all molded by the whole life story of the individual that receives what is to be seen.”
Carlos Sandoval de Leon tackles the notions of origin, the symbolic, the folkloric, and erasure by bringing together materials charged with specificity in an instinctive juxtaposition. The materials he selects celebrate the care in every effort. He leaves space for his viewer to instinctively traverse the distance between the work and its meaning, high art and the everyday, minutia and artifact. It’s not about what’s there as much as it’s about what isn’t there; however, the absences aren’t eerie as much as they are ripe with a personal history to which we can all relate. Sandoval de Leon asks us to slow down and ruminate on the objects that surround us, both meaningful and banal.