Elgin Gallery is pleased to announce Do Not Disturb, featuring veteran painters Judith Linhares, Mary Jo Vath, Farrell Brickhouse, and emerging artist Ashley Garrett.
Do Not Disturb is a collection of paintings created under a protective cloud of reverie. Depicting the everyday with an imaginative twist that essentially rides on freedom, these personal narratives encapsulate human nature, but are perhaps more actively a testament to the transcendence of mortality through means of the imagination.
“Like Holy Barbarians, these women are me. They come out of the California High Desert expressing their relationship to the landscape. Venuses of wild nights, they gather to stare into starlight…roast marshmallows over open campfires…or dip spoonfuls of honey from the hive.” — Judith Linhares
Linhares’ adventurous California series depicts the natural and playful human amidst wilderness, both of which are set against man-made patterned fabrics. Linhares’ seemingly effortless brush strokes further the qualities of playfulness and indulgence.
Mary Jo Vath’s paintings of ubiquitous mascots such as Batman or SpongeBob SquarePants, illustrate the phenomena of everyday objects recontexualized. In Spongebob Piñata, the immediate recognition of the SpongeBob prototype is undeniable, but it is transformed in the manifestation of this traditionally Mexican piñata. Ironically, Vath’s richly detailed and realistic depiction of the cartoon character starts to take on other forms. Vath states, “The uncanny frequently intrudes on our perception of the familiar, illuminating the tenuous hold our daytime mind has on the reality of any given moment.”
Ashley Garrett’s paintings, engineered through memory, depict ordinary objects abstracted by the early memories surrounding them. At first glance, Flood is perceived objectively as an image based on movement and texture, but on further examination, this image manifests as a typewriter that overwhelms the canvas. We learn its subjectivity. As Garrett explains, “It had such a strange, heavy force—very material, very solid, and so consuming that there seemed to exist only the typing and not my dad.”
Farrell Brickhouse describes Young Narcissus, a painting as much about the lush mutability of paint as it is the fanciful subject of the piece, as “a metaphor for the obsessive creative process, the required regarding of oneself that enables one to move forward with the work.”
Elgin gallery is located at 52 Tompkins Avenue Brooklyn, NY. Entrance on Park Avenue. Hours are Thursday – Sunday 1-6pm and by appointment. For more information call 917-439-1460 or visit www.elgingallery.com
November 8th – December 15th, 2013
Opening Reception: November 8th 6pm – 9pm