Echo Spectrum
Fri, Feb 24, 2017 6:00pm Fri, Mar 24, 2017 7:00pm
Opening Reception: Friday, February 24th, 7-9pm
On view through March 24th, 2017
*image: Leslie Smith III, Tall Tales, 2015
Curated by Mel Prest and Kirk Stoller
Participating Artists:
Sarah Bednarek
Nelleke Beltjens
Vivien Collens
Hanz Hancock
Lauri Hopkins
Anna Kunz
Patrick Morrissey
Andy Parkinson
Leslie Smith III
Trestle Gallery is pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition, Echo Spectrum. This group show, co-curated by artists Mel Prest and Kirk Stoller, focuses on nine artists who share a common visual dialect through various media. Each artist explores fragile geometric structures
that simultaneously seem to build-up and fall apart. This aesthetic is revealed through painting, sculpture, and mixed media works that appear to share a sympathetic vision and artistic search, even though they have been made in distant geographic locations by artists who are working independently of one another. A primary focus of these resonating artistic practices is the unexpected ways that the picture plane is addressed, and how compositional structures defy pictorial conventions. In three-dimensional form, the sculptures in this exhibition embody the process of their assembly, thereby showing both the qualities of expansion, and deconstruction.
That this gathering of contemporary artworks, presented in Echo Spectrum, could be organized into such a cohesive whole exemplifies artists’ ability to authentically connect in a digital age. Each of the nine featured artists: Sarah Bednarek, Nelleke Beltjens, Vivien Collens, Hanz Hancock, Lauri Hopkins, Anna Kunz, Patrick Morrissey, Andy Parkinson, and Leslie Smith III, are currently working in locations as disparate as Ghent, Belgium; Nottingham and London, England; Brooklyn, Chicago, and Madison, WI in the US. The Internet helps artists and curators access creative dialogue by enabling geographically decentralized artistic movements. In turn, artists’ shared aesthetic pursuits surface, despite physical distance.
This exhibition presents proof of parallel work and artworks that emphasize the relevance of abstraction, and its inherent accessibility. By utilizing the objective qualities of color, form, movement, pattern, and repetition, the artwork featured in Echo Spectrum transcends age, culture, gender, place, and other isolating factors. The exhibited artworks deliver an intimate view into the ideas, intention, and labor of these artists, who wish to share of themselves and their work with others, by offering us a way, through their work, to connect across borders and time.
