Soloway Gallery is pleased to present Fixture, a group exhibition featuring work by six artists, and curated by Jack Wood. The exhibition opens May 20 from 6-9 and will be open to the public from 12-5 on Saturdays and Sundays (or by appointment) until June 18. 

A city is like a reflecting pool for humanity. If progress is a practice of aspiration then a city offers us a million mirrors in the people ever moving around us. Where else can such a breadth of human contact occur? Surely not on the internet, that isn’t contact, it’s networking. Metropolitan spaces organically whisper of Utopia by virtue of what they require logistically for mass movement. For every artist who lives in one, the city is a blessing and a curse. On one hand the artistic community becomes more physically real and there is an abundance of trash, learning and materials. Simultaneously the cost of living tends to be higher and ample spaces for working may seem hard to come by (though they are out there). In making my selections for this exhibition I wanted to look at artists rooting their work in architecture and human systems related to urban life. I wanted the conversation therein to be abstract, but tethered to the body.

Annie Pearlman is a painter, musician and filmmaker. Like her confluence of creative vocations, Pearlman's paintings are completely suffused with an aesthetic atmosphere. Her images relate city life with all of its highs, lows and psychological entanglements. The urban environment undulates opportunity, lights percolating, swelling against one another with an inviting denseness. The formal reality of the city gets gargled and regurgitated with a jazzy cool approach to the rectilinear. Pearlman’s paintings splinter the mundanity of your everyday life with acidic visions equal parts corrosive and regenerative. The familiar is mixed with the dreaming world where envisioning the next building is as easy as a rectangle full of rectangles. 

Emily Drew Miller’s works are architectural, algorithmic, elastic, indexical and geopolitical. Her paintings strike me as diagrammatic models of displacement dynamics, both here and abroad. Miller teases how habitable forms of architecture mutate within globalized capitalism (conflict) and then how those forms might live inside a painting. Her research and paintings are underscored and compounded by self investigation and reiteration. The formal language is obsessively retold and often composed of the circles it runs around itself. The resulting tension and seamlessness of the works, often coexisting as paint, assemblage, and image on a shared surface, reflect contemporary daily life, as we are constantly processing visual data in various mediums from one vision-space.

Lauren Clark’s work assembles natural and synthetic materials, taking cues from her urban environment and the animal, mineral, and vegetable worlds. Clark’s sculptural paintings resulted from a prolonged fascination with radial spiked gates, a form of hostile architecture meant to keep people from crossing forbidden thresholds. Though clearly designed to threaten, announcing “STAY BACK,” they are strangely alluring, with an almost iconic presence that is eyelike, watchful–- functioning as both a barrier and a portal. Clark’s work engages with this doubling, both insisting on embodied materiality and the (im)possibilities of illusionism. The pieces themselves look as though made through long processes of sedimentation or ecological tattoo; in fact they come out of an ongoing exchange between artist and materials–- as well as one another, with encounters between the works leading to new ones, the form and meaning of which are products of chance and chemical interactions.

Rebecca Shippee’s practice is based on observation. One summer at a residency Shippee began to paint the sink outside her studio whenever it would rain. The mixture of water and oil, and the presence of chance are all central to how Shippee conceives of image and portrait. Soon after, when Shippee began painting in the shower, the mediation of cleanliness between body and hardware became a fixation. The water ran over self portraits painted of her naked self observed in her warped reflection on the faucet. The process of making and disruption are fused by chance in wetness. Shippee discovers abstraction through a commitment to close looking. The paintings shift between recognizable image and unknown form, abstraction and representation intertwine.

Samuel Farrier’s practice concerns the dialogue between representation and the physically experienced world. The plastic detritus that he fuses into paintings playfully indict our relations with the natural world and the slippage of iconography inherent to the transition between form and picture. Working primarily with encountered materials, Farrier adopts a tentacular, nový lingua franca in the form of reflected image, textural moire and distortions from wear found in physical public space. Extrapolating on these witnessed realities, Farrier intertwines corporality and its inseparable relation to canon and system. Farrier employs a diversity of honed observations to scribe critical form for spaces of uncodified knowledge. He is reading our alienated channels of labor and consumption for important cues about the continued proliferation of the imperial project. 

Toussaint Rosefort’s hard-edged paintings examine the dualities of life where we realize joy and grief are inseparable. As a Black Hispanic, Rosefort’s work is intent on being critical of how certain environments are racialized and engineered to bring about violence and oppression. He addresses this by looking to the past and also at current events where the effects of this structure can still be seen to this day.  He deploys hard edged abstraction as a lure with a hook for deeper discussions of land, resources and history. The other side of Rosefort’s work is poetic and joyful, often expounding on impactful experiences of the natural world and place tied to sweet memory.

Soloway Gallery hours are Saturday-Sunday from 12-5 pm, or by appointment. For additional information please contact Jack Wood jackarthur1111@gmail.com