hello world

June 5 - June 28, 2021

Group show featuring works by
Mia Scarpa, Hannah Lupton Reinhard, James McBride, Carley Gmitro, Alexander Filimonov, Calliope Pavlides, Jaxon Demme, Maddy Parrasch, Max Hertz

PRESS RELEASE

Eight artists emerged from a paralyzed social existence to find that the familiar order has been stripped to its bones. There is visible evidence of strain. As the floodgates of physical culture open for the new decade, these artists contribute to the deluge totems of celebration, playfulness and curiosity, as well as a sense of yearning for innocence lost. 

A grouping of small paintings by Mia Scarpa is a mimetic lexicon of digital culture and cartoon heroes. Her work draws from the cultural output of the late 90’s-early aught’s, simultaneously investigating nostalgia fetishism while enshrining Evanescence and Jennifer Wakemen in the American canon. Carly Gmitro and Hannah Lupton Reinard’s work draws from a similar combination of personal experience and memory of culture. Reinhard’s enigmatic portraits of self conscious indulgence capture intermittent periods of contemplation amid festivities- the sudden realization of fun. Her subjects, now cognizant of the celebration, anxiously pose with their drinks or the leis donning their necks. Gmitro’s work explores emotional representation of the self through diagrammatic collaging, mediated imagery from the internet, and personal poetry. Her iconography is instructional and confusing, combining elements of humor and distress, obsession and order. 

Max Hertz recontextualizes educational toys into complex modular sculpture. The structure’s whole clashes with the simple origins of its combined parts of implements used to teach toddlers: brightly colored letters hang from a skeletal architecture of interlocking wooden mechanisms.

The late Maddy Parrasch’s paintings are composed of ceramic tiles, a hybrid of ancient medium and contemporary iconography. Her combination renders the experience of the present moment as uniquely one's own, with an awareness that trespasses humanity across time. Jaxon Demme’s sculpture creates new language and meanings. Through the pure joy of play she recreates profound moments that meld the nostalgic and the absurd.

James McBride wraps his lyrical and searching abstract paintings in a nostalgic crucible with a palette that includes old bedsheets, and a graffiti-style approach to the grid, while carrying hints of a Gustonian influence. Inversely, Alexander Filimonov puts a conscious distance between personal experience and the content of his rough-hewn woodcuts. His subjects are culled from a cultural superstrata of heroic actors, valorous men staged in dynamic tableaux. They fight pitched battles of rigid order, where one organic subject is rendered from a chaotic multitude of individual figurations. Calliope Pavlides’s pastel drawings on carved wood panels are objects of and about opulence and longing. Like Filimonov’s frozen brigade, the extravagant iconography is realized with the flatness of a dream, as one might gaze through a ballroom window to experience its palatial contours. 

“Now every field is clothed with grass, and every tree with leaves; now the woods put forth their blossoms, and the year assumes its gay attire” - Virgil