For Immediate Release:


Escape to Landscape… & Beyond

May 8 – June 2, 2007

Opening: Tuesday, May 8: 6-8 pm

 

“Art is in love with luck and art with art.”

--Agathan, 5thc. BCE

 

            We will be retreating – taking a break from humanity. A respite from cruel fate, from the smeared sidewalks and screeching tunnels of this tired, brilliant city. There will be no representation of the clever and bothersome race. There will be no truck bombs in the marketplace. We are engaged in other concerns. Gallery Onetwentyeight is offering an environment in which to “Escape to Landscape… & Beyond.” Nature transfigured – atmospheric configurations, hypodermic injections, freeze-framed videos, primordial forests, hidden frogs, buried words and forgotten photographs. These landscapes are already beyond landscape.

 

Timothy Chapman will be showing his enigmatic eight-foot tall curio cabinet-like construction filled with found, old photographs – sepia imagery evoking a visual novella.

 

Lee Everett’s intensely colored injection paintings are not what they appear (and yet somehow are).  The titles of his “organic abstractions” indicate the amount of paint injected into each canvas (“168 cc’s,” for example).

 

Sean Fuller tackles the idea of abstract landscape by using appropriated, obscured text to construct collages encased in wax.

 

Jefre Harwoods is attempting to “draw atmosphere” and ultraviolet light with his found object assemblages. The world premiere of his strange combine, “The Grove,” marks the culmination of a nine-year-long project.

 

Kaitlin Martin utilizes her photographs of rain forests in Costa Rica and prehistoric plants in Ireland in her new mixed-media work. She reworks the photos into colorful, baroque triptychs.

 

Justin Nissley, making his New York debut, downloads corrupted pornographic videos and makes the video manipulate itself into wildly colored abstracts, including one that evokes a western landscape.

 

These six artists, working in very different styles and mediums, have tackled, whether directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, landscape – a place absent of human narratives, no easy eyes staring back at you with which to connect. No egos forcing you to visually or psychologically relate. They are attempting to take you away from the cacophony outside (or inside your head), to contemplate atmosphere, the energy of color, dynamic forms, open spaces, unknowable geography, places to go when you’ve had enough. Yet all is not ideal here. This is no bucolic paradise. These are not easy, pretty pictures. This is work pulled from chaos.

 

Please join us as we “Escape to Landscape… & Beyond.”

 

                                                                                        -- J. Woods