There is a show opening at Lucky GalleryMarch 22 with some of my work in it.
Yeehaw!
I’d sure love to see you there!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Laura Arena
Laura@luckygallery.com
617 417 3899
Lucky Gallery Presents Art “Made in Red Hook”
Brooklyn-area art gallery presents a traditional salon exhibition by Red Hook artists Todd von Ammon, Laura Arena, Maria Baraybar, Andy Vernon-Jones, Christina Kelly, Heather Phelps-Lipton, Nate Luce, Rachel Mosler, L. Nichols, Julia Oldham, Anna Ortiz, Joshua Ray Stephens, Eric Taylor, Elizabeth Tomasetti, Tonky and Beriah Wall.
Brooklyn, NY, April 26, 2010 – From May 22nd to June 13th, Lucky Gallery is pleased to announce “Made in Red Hook”, a group show presenting the work of 16 artists living or working in Red Hook. The concept behind the exhibition is to introduce to the public the wide range of artistic capabilities of local artists and to provide an atmosphere to encourage the exchange of ideas between artists and the public. The artists’ production is presented through different mediums including photography, drawing, video, book making, collage, painting, contemporary crafts and sculpture.
“Made in Red Hook” is curated by gallery director and participating artist Laura Arena and Ana Bogdanovic, who plan to transform Lucky Gallery into the traditional setting reminiscent of Salon de Paris, the annual public exhibition of the French Royal Academy in the 18th and 19th that displayed the actual artistic production and presented the city’s most established artists at the time.
Artists’ works will be exhibited floor-to-ceiling and the artists and visitors are invited to spend time in our seating area where there will be literary materials and videos to view.
“The mission of this exhibition is to make Lucky Gallery the center of artistic intellectual conversation in Red Hook”, says Bogdanovic. “Where artists and art spectators can share their artistic sensibilities as well as have insight in the local artist community.”
Exhibition Dates: May 22, 2010 – June 13th, 2010
Opening Reception: May 22, 7-10 PM Gallery Hours: Sat/Sun 1-6 and by appt. only Gallery Address: Lucky Gallery, 176 Richards Street, Brooklyn, NY. 11231
Todd von Ammon Todd von Ammon is prone to attempting the impossible, quixotic projects, which reveal all of their mistakes and shortcomings—meticulously measuring and rebuilding some overlooked detritus from a street corner, or obsessing over some banal flotsam hanging around a construction site—as a spiritual exercise.
Rarely interested in the final product in its material but the hours of sublime scrutiny, frustration and freedom contained within. He is partial towards materials, which stand out and have funny connotations, like rabbit skin glue, balsa wood, elmer’s glue, scotch tape, fishing tackle vinyl, driftwood from the Gowanus canal.
He tries to make pieces, which dignify and flatter their own substance, and hopefully tell the viewer something about my point of view. He admires Sufi dervishes more than anyone.
Visit von Ammon’s portfolio at toddvonammon.com.
Laura Arena Laura Arena is the director of Lucky Gallery and with what time she has left from running the gallery, curating shows, and her occupation as graphic designer, she takes photographs with plastic cameras in exotic and not so exotic destinations.
Arena has show work in New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Pennsylvania and was just recently awarded her first artist residency, Dionysia in Iceland, which she will travel to in June.
Arena curated “Made in Red Hook” with Ana Bogdanovic, one of her most favorite people on the planet, and has been fortunate to have Bogdanovic come from Berlin to work at Lucky Gallery.
She has traveled and spent time in many different places but has finally found a place she considers home the corner of Seabring and Richards Streets. She has found great pleasure living in Red Hook and running Lucky Gallery. The people, the landscape, the quiet, the BBQ, the water makes Red Hook such a special place. But she admits, every day sitting in my cubicle, she still daydreams of traveling to exotic and not so exotic places.
Maria Baraybar
Maria Baraybar’s inspiration behind Artie’s Red Shoe Diaries came out of a personal situation in her life. Baraybar had to endure the difficult process of becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen all her life in the states.
Twenty years of hiding in the shadows with an unresolved immigration case left her with one choice: survival. Survival became more important than self, more important than happiness, more important than her dreams. Faced with her life’s own unique set of absurd trials and tribulations, she created an imaginary friend named Artie. This genderless character became her life force and opened up the opportunity to document the often “-peculiar” American life outside of metropolitan cities.
Visit Baraybar’s portfolio at www.mariabaraybar.com.
Andy Vernon-Jones
Andy Vernon-Jones grew up in Massachusetts and has been living, working and photographing in Red Hook for four years. He is 28 years old. His most recent work consists of documentary portraits and streetscapes that explore the character of Red Hook—its community, its buildings and its light. He is interested in how layers of the neighborhood’s history are visible in its physical environment and on the residents’ faces.
Vernon-Jones once worked as a deck hand on an old wooden schooner in Maine. He now works as a counselor at an alternative high school in Red Hook.
He earned a BA in Studio Art from Wesleyan University. His photography has been exhibited in New York at the Brooklyn Museum, the Kentler International Drawing Space and the Red Hook Library; in Connecticut at the Zilkha Gallery and the Olin Library; and in Massachusetts at the Amherst Town Hall.
Visit Vernon-Jones portfolio at www.vernjones.com and his blog at www.hereinredhook.blogspot.com.
Christina Kelly Christina Kelly is a Brooklyn based visual artist and film editor. Kelly has a BA in English Literature from Barnard College and an MFA in Film/Video from Bard.
She’s the editor of four feature films and was the assistant editor on the critically acclaimed films Man Push Cart and Chop Shop. Exhibited works include videos and installations.
Most recently she composted US Currency over several months in her worm bin for the piece “Pay Dirt: Transforming the Economy” (2009). This summer, her garden installations “Maize Field” is sponsored by the DOT Urban Art Program and the Brooklyn Arts Council re-grant program.
Visit Kelly’s portfolio at www.discobikini.com.
Heather Lipton-Phelps
Phelps-Lipton studied painting in college, and began her life in photography as a result of the heavy nudging of a good friend.
She has been shooting for 20 years (wow, how did that happen?) and dabbled in fashion while living in California, taking a considerable number of portraits, shooting events regularly and working on a body of work recently based on the American family at the turn of the century.
She has a tough time keeping her hands off her images and frequently end up being handled or moved out of the world of photography proper.
Phelps-Lipton work has been shown in Los Angeles, San Diego and New York. She has pictures published in the New York Magazine, Dutch Magazine, Guns, Time Out New York as well in additional to a number of other international magazines.
She lives on the corner of Verona + Imlay.
Visit Lipton-Phelps portfolio at cameragirl.com.
Nate Luce
Nate Luce lives and works in Red Hook. His work includes drawing, painting, animation, and bookmaking.
A New England boy, he graduated from Bennington College in 2009, where he studied art, played in bands, and went swimming. “Chews and Munches” was his senior project there, and continues his interest in combining complex and rudimentary art-making techniques. This particular work mixes stylistic cues from the silent shorts of Buster Keaton, the Rotoscope technique of the Fleischer Brothers, and the satisfying predictability of a mainstream romantic comedy. It was recently screened at the Hatch Asheville film festival.
Rachel Mosler Drawn in watercolor and ink with stunning care and grace, Rachel Mosler’s compositions range from sparse images of oceanic scenes to architecture or botanical forms in various states of growth and decay.
Her work is heavily influenced by a “post and beam house” upbringing on Martha’s Vineyard, where “my father carved botanical patterns and planted an orchard in her backyard, while my mother stitched and collected feathers alongside roads”. Growing up in such an environment offered little access to the forms of entertainment common to others of her generation, so that leisure activities were instead filled with “quiet observations of nature and time”, and careful crafting such as stitching and book binding.
Her drawings and sculptures are psychological inquiries into the construction and deconstruction of memories from her childhood. Mosler’s imagery is never quite literal, and often it is the space between drawn or painted forms that calls our attention. Mosler speaks of the forms in her work as “a safe space for tension to settle and rest.” These works display such a penchant for careful process and exude an aura of rhythmic contemplation. Much like a life spent staring at the sea.
Visit Mosler’s portfolio at www.rachelmosler.com and her blog at rachelmosler.blogspot.com
L. Nichols
Nichols is a compulsive workaholic who grew up in a town of ~3000 people in southwest Louisiana. She left Louisiana to study mechanical engineering at MIT.
Her love of keeping journals began while at MIT as a way to keep working on art even while in class. After graduating she moved to Brooklyn where she has continued to work as an artist, cartoonist, and graphic designer.
Visit Nichols’ portfolio at www.dirtbetweenmytoes.com.
Julia Oldham
Julia Oldham is a video artist whose performative works explore science and nature. She uses her body as a tool to understand the life cycles and behaviors of insects, to examine the fundamental constants of the universe, and to measure electrical emanations from plant forms. Her work often combines scientific inquiry with elements of experimental movement and dance.
A physicist, an avid gardener and a pack of dogs raised Oldham in rural Maryland, and her childhood was filled with adventures in the woods, bee stings, drawings and tree houses. Oldham studied art history at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and then received her MFA from the University of Chicago. She has called Red Hook home since 2007, and she also travels around the country to participate in residencies.
Oldham has shown her work in solo exhibitions at Art in General in New York, NY; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, IL; and Espaço3 in Lisbon, Portugal. Her videos have been included in recent screenings at PS1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, NY; the Dia Foundation at the Hispanic Society in New York, NY; the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC; and FACT in Liverpool, UK.
Visit Oldham’s portfolio at www.juliaoldham.com.
Ana Ortiz Anna Ortiz’s still lifes fuse the tradition of Flemish Vanitas painting, with the playful disposition of the Mexican Day of the Dead in a hyper-surrealist painting style.
Her Belgian and Mexican roots have influenced her love for accurate but eccentric imaging of mortality. In both of these traditions Death, the ultimate and only truth, is around us all the time. In the European tradition Death in still-lifes is a reminder of the ephemerally of materialism. Mexican imagery regarding Death is much more playful and approachable. Death is a character that is casually among us the dinner table, at the market, in Church. He reminds Mexicans how foolish day-to-day life is with a constant satirical smile.
Ortiz’s paintings are at times tediously constructed and labored over. In other places, the paint slips and falls apart. Repeating logos from the packaging of plastic flowers rupture the depth of space and put into question the autonomy of the image. Through contrasting techniques, Ortiz has managed to slow the otherwise immediate consumption of her pictures.
Ortiz is originally from Worcester MA and studied Painting and Art History at Tufts and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. She completed her MFA at the Tyler School of Art. She currently lives and paints in Red Hook.
Visit Ortiz’s portfolio at www.annaortiz.org.
Joshua Ray Stephens
Fluffy gray kittens raised Joshua Ray Stephens; he found it a shock to learn that this was an abnormal family environment. Upon completing his degree in Graphic Design at the University of Georgia he flew that very same day to Italy to begin a one-year stint at Fabrica.
Two years later he was inculcated into a secret organization whose true name may not be uttered, due to legal matters beyond our control, but often introduces itself as the Society for the Advancement of the Graphic Arts.
He now resides in the Bloody Hook underneath the Spotted R. He spends his time in an old warehouse concocting sacred and magic icons.
Visit Stephens’ blog at thursdaycitynews.blogspot.com and his portfolio at www.lostpropertyinformation.com.
Eric Taylor
Growing up in San Antonio, TX, Eric Taylor spent the majority of his youth skating and watching his friends’ bands play at local venues. After a few years of community college, he moved to San Francisco where he received a BFA in drawing and painting from SFAI. Taylor spent a few years living and working in San Francisco before making a slow move to Brooklyn, NY, where he currently lives and work.
Taylor has always been inspired by the possibilities that arise within the pictorial space and the freedom it allows to explore avenues of depicting reality.
He approaches his work as a maker of an aesthetic object and incorporates materials and processes used in carpentry, as they are specific to his life experiences.
He is interested in the concept of fabrication as it relates to cultural identity, and the effect this has on individual character and originality. The flattened images in his work are incorporated as symbols that depict a view of the American landscape from the perspective of a contemporary crafts person.
Elizabeth Tomasetti
Tomasetti’s work has continuously focused on personal space, both literal and representational, mirroring my transition through them.
She uses a fascination with invasiveness to convey the experience at hand, concentrating on documenting the anticipated expectations of interactions and relationships in daily life. Tomasetti believes a relationship is developed through the courting of a procedure until its completion, whether it is functional, traditional or emotional.
Visit Tomasetti’s portfolio at www.elizabethtomasetti.com.
Tonky Tonky is a Brooklyn based artist and designer. He immersed himself in the study of visual culture and the creation of studio art at NYU thereby earning a diploma that designates him a “Master Of Fine Arts.”
After graduation, Tonky worked in design and marketing at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and eventually started a full service creative firm called Tonky Designs. In this capacity he creates design objects, jewelry and also serves business clients on a variety of projects.
Pursuing the American dream of self-employment allows Tonky to pay back Chase Bank who graciously financed his education. More importantly it allows him to carve out time to nurture his philosophical studio practice which remains his priority.
The work explores the nature of power, sublimity vs. banality, humor, and beauty. Tonky intends to lead viewers to a more complex understanding of themselves and the Universe around them.
Visit Tonky’s portfolio at www.tonkydesigns.com.
Beriah Wall Beriah Wall is a resident/artist living and working in Red Hook since 1994. Wall’s worked as a plasterer, doing high-end work in Manhattan and Long Island which has supported his work as a painter and sculpture artist.
Wall’s coin project began in 1977 in which he began when he left Vermont to come to NY. Since then he estimates he has given away hundreds of thousands of these handmade, ceramic tokens.
His published kernels of wisdom – have included such sayings as “Real/Good”, “A Sharp Spear-Needs No Polish”, “Stuck in Brooklyn”, “Income/Outcome”, and “Wonder/Yonder”.
Wall just recently was just featured in the New York Times for his coin project.
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