“Death: A Summer Show” is cheeky, magical and mysterious. The seven artists explore their own unique narratives and examine how we face little deaths throughout life, and a final death only once. On view, you will see a variety of mediums including sculpture, paintings, assemblage, drawings, and text, as well as music. You will see relationships in disrepair, disintegration of materials, and hear songs for the dead.
“The Black Laboratory” of Vincent Como shows different ideas executed in the color black. Presented is “The Temptation to Exist 016”. A large black painted canvas is rolled up and placed on a smaller shelf and the difference in measurement causes it to push out into space as well as collapse from gravity.
David Leggett uses humor and text in an imagist tradition that points at racism, sexism, and many other deficiencies of our culture. He mixes and matches his own imagery and found imagery from our immediate visual landscape of cartoons, in range of drawings on display confronting death.
By pouring chemicals onto styrofoam, Matt Miller transforms plastic foam and records improvised movements. His process warps and kills the original painting surface. By chemically reducing the ground of the original painting he creates tactile surface and literal depth around and within the mark.
Wallace Ludel’s poetic texts and imagery make us think about the ending of things. When a lover is no longer interested in you; getting clothing advice from your therapist; and the realization that heat of the summer makes one aware of how it is hard to make any “good art”. He transfers text onto paper and paints geometric forms that seem to want to complete a whole with missing parts.
Re McBride’s, “Holt Cemetery” was painted from a potter’s field in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is known for painting isolated figures that invoke a imposing sense of nature in oils. Here we have gravesite that has been affected by the elements as it feels shoved around and wind blown. The looming shapes of the gravestones with a handmade paint handling provide an eerie image.
Amanda Nedham’s works on paper and sculpture exhibit a technical proficiency and exploration of natural history’s complex structures. Nedham exhibits drawings with text and an infinity symbol made of cigarettes. A quote from one of her texts states: “… Death seeps through stone cracks and embeds itself in pulp and plastic. Nothing is beyond corruptible. This explains my decision to start smoking, and I think that you should too. I just wanted to give you a heads up.”
Sarah Schrift is a singer songwriter, visual artist, and medium. She paints portraits of those that have contacted her from the great beyond. Alongside her paintings she offers a musical track of her own making that can be heard with headphones. The track explains the concept of “fetch” which is a portion of soul that she says she is able to contact. Sarah knew each of her subjects well and her visual stories combined with her music give us a sense of the sacred experience of death and activity beyond this mortal plane.
“Death: A Summer Show” is curated by Brooklyn-based curator Melissa Staiger. She serves as the curator-in-residence for Trestle Gallery. The exhibition is on display between August 11 – September 16, 2016, the opening reception takes place on Thursday, Aug. 11 (7-9PM) at Trestle Projects 400 Third Ave Brooklyn, NY 11215. We are open on Saturday’s from 1-4PM & by appointment. For further information, please contact trestleprojects@gmail.com or call 917-923-8096.