October 11-November 30 2014
Gallery I Jeremy Burks & Hunter Stabler
Gallery II Denis Randall, Bryan Holland, Ben Venom & Max Kaufman
Jeremy Burks grew up an only child, in the industrial part of Ohio. Most of his childhood was spent lost in my imagination, reading and drawing constantly. He is primarily a self-taught artist. His formative influences were days spent exploring the scrap yard where his father worked and summers roaming the Dayton Art Institute. He was in turn obsessed with: mythology, magic, historical piracy, horror and mystery novels, fantasy, science fiction, comic books, heavy metal, hip-hop and punk rock. He spent four years with other transient artists, anarchists and weirdos, and graduated from Antioch College in 2001 with a degree in film production. Afterwards, he lived in a whole bunch of places (but often New Jersey), working in various capacities in fine art, film, and design. Jeremy currently resides in Austin, Texas with his incredibly talented wife and spectacularly naughty son.
Hunter Stabler
“My work explores notions of psychedelic awakening, lucidity through paranoia, doomsday fear-mongering, conspiracy theories surrounding the government’s relationship to the occult, and the artist’s and the art audience’s relationship to the political right. Visually the work in conjunction with the exhibition space, present multiple dualisms, inversions and transgressions. The 2D and 3D works are created to be seen from various perspectives- inverted in mirrors or front to back. These visual games also serve to illuminate the esoteric implications of inverting sigils. The formal elements of my work involve a play between the illusion of space, actual 3 dimensional space and the two-dimensionality of paper. In my cut paperworks I use perspectival patterning that creates the illusion of form, flatpatterning, and a physical cast shadow to show the actual space and thinness of the paper. I aim to create pieces that are in conversation with ancient, canonical, modernist, and contemporary ideas of spatiality in art making.
My sculptures are semi functional, made from existing objects. They allude to a narrative or fictional narrative about the psyche of their creator. They are two faced objects of preparedness and paranoia that are also inspired by the readymades of Duchamp and sculptures of Tom Burr.”
Ben Venom“I’m interested in juxtaposing traditional handmade crafts with extreme elements found on the fringes of society. My work can be described as opposing forces colliding at lightening speed. Imagery found in vintage tattoos, the occult, and motorcycle gangs are stitched together with recycled materials using techniques usually relegated to your Grandmothers sewing circle. Serious, yet attempting to take on a B movie Horror film style where ridiculousness becomes genius. The question remains… Can I play with madness?”
Bryan Holland‘s work is primarily painting, with a mix of collage, found art, image transfer techniques, and a variety of other experimentation. His work often incorporates text, patterns, decorative motifs, etc., that when contrasted with animals or people, serves to create a tension both visually and thematically.
Bryan has worked professionally as an artist, a graphic artist, and a college professor. He currently lives and works in Minnesota, and his work has been in numerous exhibitions, from solo to regional and national juried and invitational exhibitions
Denis Randall
“Inspired by re-purposing discarded materials and objects,
my reclaimed wood pieces are an assemblage of naturally eroded
parts of common man-made structures. Crumbling painted benches,
cracked window panes, sun-scorched driftwood, and rusted metal objects are among the many found materials that are given a new life.”
Max Kauffman interprets his work as a connector between all things and eras. Our similarities always outweigh minute differences in our day-to-day lives. Working between loose painterly passages paired with tight purposeful lines Kauffman evokes the segue between waking and dreaming by connecting the two. The work is at once conscious and unconscious: the hustle of urban life and deep woods hermiting, the realms of real and magic, bleeding in and out of each other, both at the same time but also as neither.