Repeater, curated by Kelsey Halliday Johnson
Lee Arnold, Mark Brosseau, Meg Lipke
Apr 1 - May 1, 2016
Opening Reception: Friday, April 1, 6pm-10pm

[Images] [Essay]

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philadelphia is pleased to present Repeater, a three-person exhibition featuring the work of Lee Arnold, TSA Co-Director Mark Brosseau, and Meg Lipke, curated by Kelsey Halliday Johnson. The show brings together three artists who have used a secondary or tertiary medium in the studio to prompt new tensions and dialogues within their work. United by certain graphic qualities –  patterns, grids, bold geometries and blocks of color – Repeater aims to create a playful installation between their works while examining the three artists’ novel generative and conceptual engines for employing these formal devices. The show opens with a First Friday reception on April 1st from 6 to 10 PM, and runs until Sunday, May 1st.

By making serialized drawing grids, digitally manipulated photographic works, and video animations, Arnold examines the history of phenomenology and human observation of the world we live in. His recent investigations reference the veracity of recorded observation in the site of Antonioni’s Blow Up, conceptual representations of cosmology and the way space has been represented before people could travel through it, and moments in the 17th/18th centuries where scientific investigation and artistic observation merged. On view will be three recent animations (“Mount Analogue”, “Signal”, and “Dark Nebula”) and a sequential drawing grid (“Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, Blue, and Green”) representative of the way his observational practice highlights how gestures and changing systems can go between the discrete frames of the page in drawing and those experienced through time in the same frame through animation.

Walking an exciting new line in two-dimensional practice, Brosseau is a painter who has updated his studio tools to include a digital tablet as a new drawing device for ideas and compositions; on view will be a larger-scale painting “Tacky”, a series of small panel paintings, and a framed tablet with a slideshow of recent digital drawings. Using various layers that are sandwiched together in his works or collided against one another in painterly space, Brosseau makes investigations into the psychological and emotional spaces of abstraction. By constructing his work in a graphic but physical way through gesture, color, and drawing-based techniques, he creates foreign formal spaces and forms that birth a new world. Here questions of relationships, humor, identity, and environment are raised – pointing to the elements of our human experience with the world around us that are perhaps best summarized outside of concrete language.

In unusual forms in both paint and dye, Meg Lipke employs post-minimalist sculptural techniques with her stuffed works deeply embedded to the history of feminist contemporary fiber art, but youthfully appropriate the grid of minimalism and patterns of decorative art as the painterly space on their surface. They bring up questions of the domestic and of feminine labor in deeply personal and playful forms. Simultaneously creating new sculptural forms from her own drawing and painting practice and seemingly responding to the new language of her pillow-like creations with novel calligraphies for their surfaces, she takes pride in the unique materials and techniques of fabrication of fiber arts in her process and with her personal history as a third-generation fiber artist within her family. Lipke will exhibit recent stuffed textile paintings including a new more sculptural work completed for this exhibition as well as an un-stretched muslin painting and a smaller sculptural work employing the raw materials (spools of thread) of her process.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a newsprint broadsheet with an essay by exhibit curator Kelsey Halliday Johnson.

Lee Arnold was born in London in 1972 and lives in Brooklyn. In his work he explores systems of natural phenomena using a variety of media, including film, video, animation, photography, collage, drawing and sound. He has exhibited at venues including Eyebeam, Exit Art, and NURTUREart in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, and SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles and Hong Kong. Arnold is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the DAAD, Berlin. He is an Associate Professor at Drew University.

Mark Brosseau was born in Lyndon, VT, in 1976, and currently lives and works in Philadelphia, acting as the co-director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philadelphia. He was recently the co-coordinator for Artist-Run at the Satellite Fair in Miami Beach in December 2015. Brosseau graduated with honors from Dartmouth in 1998 with a BA in Studio Art, earned an MFA in Painting from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, followed by a year of painting and printmaking in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar. Since then he has had multiple solo exhibitions between Vermont, Connecticut, Philadelphia, and Iceland. His work has been featured in numerous publications including New American Paintings (2003) and in dozens of group exhibitions at venues including The Painting Center, Dartmouth College, New Britain Museum of Art, and Bridgette Mayer Gallery.

Meg Lipke was born in 1969 in Portland, Oregon and was raised in Burlington, Vermont and Cheshire, England. She received her MFA from Cornell University and has taught at The University of Northern Iowa, Cornell University, and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and has been reviewed in Art in America, the Village Voice, the New York Times and many online publications. She lives and works in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Lipke has been a resident at the Vermont Studio Center and a nominee for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award. A new body of work is currently the focus of a solo exhibition at Freight & Volume in New York City.

Kelsey Halliday Johnson is a curator, artist and writer based in Philadelphia. She is a member of Vox Populi and a curatorial fellow in Photography & New Media at the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown. Previously, she held positions at Locks Gallery, Vox Populi, the Penn Museum and Blind Spot magazine and has studied at Wesleyan University, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University.

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philadelphia is an artist-run and artist-curated exhibition space, part of the Tiger Strikes Asteroid network along with other independently-run spaces located in New York and Los Angeles. TSA Philadelphia’s mission is to foster connections between the Philadelphia art scene and the global art community. Projects outside their regular exhibition schedule have included 2013’s Citywide initiative, Tiger Strikes Museum at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the 2014 (e)merge Art Fair in Washington, DC, and Artist-Run at The Satellite Show Miami Beach.