Photisms
October 17-November 7, 2015
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 17, 6-8pm

Britta Deardorff
Ashley Garrett
Rema Ghuloum
Sharon Madanes
Leeza Meksin
Jenna Westra

“We might say the color of a ghost is that which I must mix on the palette in order to paint it accurately. But how do we determine what the accurate picture is?”

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color

The term “photisms” refers to a synesthetic state where image is luminous enough to be hallucinatory: present but beyond grasp. The artists in this show turn to geometry, texture, and saturated colors to allude to what is just beyond view.  

Britta Deardorff’s painting “Red Liar #3” draws on intuition, symbolism, and innate graphic powers to create charged images in which archetypal iconography, text, and checkerboard patterns overlay and cultivate an aggressive physicality. Deardorff incorporates sawdust, clay, and sand into her paint to create an earthen rocky texture, an effect of naturalism which is then contradicted by a surface coating of saturated reds, fluorescent oranges, discordant fertile greens, whites and blacks. In combination with the recurrence of snakes, silhouetted hands, and spiky tendrils the sum effect is one of animus and an anxious mysticism.

Rema Ghuloum’s painting “Seeing Stars” was made in response to a group of sculptures she produced earlier this year, mining the oscillation between abstraction, representation, flatness and dimensionality. Like the sculpture, the forms in the painting emerge from the process of building up the surface.  Ghuloum emphasizes these spatial contrasts as they appear, carving out shapes through the layering and excavation of marks, colors, and patterns.  

Leeza Meksin’s paintings similarly exist in an interstitial zone: “Lift My Eyelid” sits uncomfortably between states of painting and sculpture, male and female, queer and straight, dressed and naked, traditional and unfixed. Relating to the body, these paintings have curves, limbs, guts, and appendages. Like furniture, buildings and interiors, they refer back to where the body sits, walks, and lives.

In “Ladder, Legs, Lemon,” Jenna Westra focuses on the traits of photographic media, foregrounding direction, staging, lighting, and commercial tropes. The body becomes a tool for spatial organization, and the subject of the work is not what is displayed but how it is created.  The result is a psychological experience of looking and identifying with the print object.

Ashley Garrett’s two small paintings “Headdahoutie” and “Lightfoot” are two different kinds of portraits that take a very close and detailed look at familiar objects abstracted through the transformations of memory and emotion.  “Headdahoutie” maps the back of her brother’s head, showing a non-linear timeline of his life through color and texture while simultaneously opening up an expansive landscape space within the structure of the head.  In “Lightfoot,” the shapes and spaces of a childhood treasure, a pinecone, are broken up and examined as a way of holding singular memories that have been lost.  The structure of the pinecone disintegrates and reassembles as a heart and a head.  This shapeshifting, emerging/disappearing into dense spatial black, brings form to the way that time molds memory.

In “Over and Out,” and “Confirmation Bias,” Sharon Madanes uses found material as tromp l’eoil in paintings that center around the domestic sphere. The viewer is situated above and within, unable to escape the overlapping geometry of tables, chairs, arms, and legs. In “Confirmation Bias,” the tablecloth pattern becomes the formal blueprint for every object in the painting, including the flowers, arabesque of arms and the imagined three-dimensional source for the pattern, rendered in vacuform.

About the Artists:

Britta Deardorff (b. 1983, Honolulu, HI) received her MFA from Hunter College in 2011 and her BFA from Ohio University in 2005.  In 2014 Britta had her first solo show in New York, “Red Liar Paintings,” at Regina Rex at Bunker 259 in Brooklyn, NY.  Her work has also been included in group shows at Regina Rex and Novella Gallery in New York, Crane Arts in Philadelphia, PA, Mauve Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, and Cube Four Gallery in Athens, OH.  Britta received the Tony Smith Award from Hunter College in 2010.  She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.  

Ashley Garrett (b. 1984, Dover, NJ) is a painter living and working in New York.  She earned her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2008.  In spring 2015 Ashley had a solo show at Chase Gallery in West Hartford CT, for which Kari Adelaide wrote the catalogue essay - “Unearthed Stone.” Recent group shows include Geoffrey Young Gallery in Great Barrington, MA; Brain Morris Gallery, Novella Gallery, and Harbor Gallery in New York; and Schema Projects and Life On Mars in Brooklyn.  Her work has also been included in group shows at Apex Art in New York, Trestle Gallery in Brooklyn, and the Newark Arts Council and in exhibitions curated by Jed Perl and Jeanne Siegel.  Upcoming shows include a group exhibition at the Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles.  She is a member of the artist collective Underdonk located in Brooklyn, NY.  

Rema Ghuloum currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Rema received her BFA in Drawing and Painting from California State University, Long Beach in 2007 and her MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2010. Rema was a recipient of the Esalen Pacifica Prize in 2012, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2010, and the Max Gatov award in 2007. Rema has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Cue Foundation, UCLA’s New Wight Gallery, Sonce Alexander Gallery, George Lawson Gallery, den Contemporary, UCSB’s Gallery 479, UC Berkeley’s Worth Ryder Gallery, the Torrance Art Museum, and Arka Gallery in Vladivostok, Russia. Since 2012, Rema has been one of the four members of the curatorial collective – Manual History Machines. Manual History Machines was a recipient of the Curators Lab Exhibition Award by Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2013 and have presented exhibitions at venues thorough the Los Angeles area, including Fellows of Contemporary Art, Claremont Graduate University, DA Gallery, and Eastside International. Rema is currently represented by Sonce Alexander Gallery.

Sharon Madanes currently lives and works in New York City. She received her BA in Art from Yale University and her MFA in painting from Hunter College in 2014. Most recently, her work has been shown at 1708 Gallery in Richmond, VA, Columbia University’s Russ Berry Pavilion, Bannerette, This Friday or Next Friday, and Underdonk in Brooklyn, NY. Sharon co-directs 14x48, a public art organization that posts the work of emerging artists on vacant billboards in New York City (14x48.org).

Leeza Meksin is an interdisciplinary artist who makes paintings, installations, public art and multiples. She received an MFA from The Yale School of Art, a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a joint BA/MA in Comparative Literature from The University of Chicago. Meksin has exhibited her work at Regina Rex Gallery (2014, 2011), Airplane Gallery (2014), Primetime (2013), Adds Donna (2011) and Thomas Erben Gallery (2009). She has created site-specific public art installations at Brandeis University (2014), the former Donnell of the New York Public Library (2011), and in a National Endowment for the Arts funded project in New Haven, CT (2012). Her work has been featured in BOMB Magazine, TimeOut Chicago, Chicago Tribune and many other publications.  In 2013 Meksin co-founded Ortega y Gasset Projects, a gallery and artist collective in Brooklyn, NY. She lives in New York and is Assistant Professor of Art at Columbia University.  

Jenna Westra (b. 1986, Grand Rapids, MI) received an MFA from Hunter College (2015) and a BA from California State University, Northridge (2010). Her photographic works have been exhibited widely, most recently in New York at Silver Projects (solo) and Underdonk, and in Boston at The Institute for Contemporary Art. Publications include the Boston Globe, Papersafe, Bomb Magazine, and Hunted, a series of booklets produced by the Artists’ Institute. Jenna received the Marion Netter award from Hunter College, and will participate in the Hercules Studio Program from 2016-2018. She presently lives and works in Ridgewood, New York.