By A Thousand Cuts
March 24 ~ May 1st
Artists ~
Jillian Salik presently lives and works in New York City. Currently possessed by the world of corrugated boards, she seeks to create ornate large scale installations that challenge our perception of the otherwise low-brow material. A printmaker and draftslady by trade these elements and mark making techniques often find their way back into her work. When’s she not busy carving cardboard and drawing, she can be found heading up the design/marketing team at TALAS and volunteering with Arts in Bushwick (AiB).
Chelsea Hrynick Browne
Discovered for her unique Kaleidoscope-conjuring creations, artist Chelsea Hrynick Browne has found the ideal outlet to utilize her training in fine art and mathematics. Described as ‘obsessive detailed repetition’, Chelsea hand-cuts paper into unique intricate patterns over and over again until thelayers form a larger abstract ‘painting’. What begins as a precise form evolves into something interpretive, elusive and beautiful. Chelsea’s work can currently be viewed in the Gramercy Lounge Cibar where she created custom murals and a lighting installation.
Her artwork has also been in permanent hospital collections across the country, including The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and The University of Iowa Children’s Hospital.
In January 2016, her work filled Sprint’s Flatiron Art Space curatedby Cheryl McGinnis Projects with a snowflake-inspired exhibit.
Emerson Cooper is quietly at work repairing the universe. No really its true. His story began many years ago after his black cat Roger spoke to him in a dream. Ever since Emerson has seen repair as his mission. Repurposing found images and objects from his flotsam archive he constructs his imaginary lost stories. Forever present are his favorite themes of looming disaster, unspoken injury, survival and transcendence. Emerson believes in everyday heroes, guardian spirits and the enduring after-life. Emerson Cooper works and lives in New York City.
Marcel Lisboa
Graphic designer Marcel Lisboa, living and working in São Paulo/Brazil, uses digital means to create his utterly unique illustrations; all of which expressions of private worlds that reveal a distinct story and invite endless contemplation. Having begun his career working in advertising agencies, Lisboa is well attuned to the pop culture sensitivities of our age. Through digital collage the artist reflects his key inspirations: the Renaissance and the Baroque: an unusual source for an artist working with collage. But by shunning the usual genealogy of the Dadaists, Lisboa creates an unique aesthetic based on stunning draftsmanship, evocative scenography, an ethereal palette, and dramatic chiaroscuro.
Lisboa’s works manage to forge a trajectory from the dominant narratives of the Western imperialist project to an imagined pre-colonial innocence. Despite his taste for the old masters, Lisboa follows in the footsteps of the trailblazing Pop artist Richard Hamilton, whose stunning juxtapositions are rooted in a desire to analyze, deconstruct, and critique the prevailing myths of modern culture. Continually allowing his works to evolve and shift, Lisboa is an artist on the cusp of achieving something truly great. With these fine digital collages the traditions of the early-twentieth century avant-garde and the finely wrought natural filigree of the Baroque are united for the first time.
Caryn Ann Bendrick
My work is a reaction to the slick digital times in which we live. These works are deeply inspired by the cross-country road-trips of my youth, a tactile affinity for paper, and a primal drive to make physical things with my own two hands. They are born from presence, persistence, and patience.
In my practice I create what I call, “tactile meditations” on the dichotomous relationship between destruction and creation. Each piece begins with a spontaneous gesture or pattern that when filtered through repetition and concentricity grows organically into something naturally evocative and formally eternal. With one shape persistently compounded upon, either through the subtractive process of repeated removal in my cut sculptures (like a stream carves a canyon), or the additive of one line after another in my ink drawings (like fault lines forming mountains), I am able to create my own world of imagined topographies.
Bill Barminski
Barminski works in a variety of mediums including painting, sculpture, animation, music and video. His first notoriety came in the early 1980’s as the creator of The Fascist Gun in the West, a satirical comic book Greil Marcus linked to the Situationist International movement in a 1986 essay for Artforum. Barminski started showing his paintings in the mid 1980’s and has had over 20 solo exhibits at various galleries in Los Angeles and NYC. He continues to create and exhibit work although much of his current work is mixed media and sculpture made from his favorite material, cardboard. Starting in the early 1990’s Barminski began exploring the possibilities of digital media and video. in 1999 he collaborated with director Baz Lurhman to create the music video for the Sunscreen Song. In 2007 Barminski teamed up with Chris Louie to form a creative company called Walter Robot. In 2009 their work was included at the Sundance Film Festival and has won several awards including Best Music Video Los Angeles Film Festival 2009. Collaborations with musical artists include: Death Cab For Cutie, Gnarls Barkley, Hodgy Beats, Ben Lovett, Kid Cudi, People in Planes, Rob Thomas and others. Other projects include one of the most expensive Absolut Artist billboards created, restaurant identity design and Billboard designs for AHA. Barminski teaches digital media at UCLA, 1997 – current.
Neil Powell
Neil’s life-long obsession with old books led to his discovery of them as a unique art medium. Most of the books used in his art are damaged, tattered and torn, discarded and banished to the $1 shelf or garage bin. Neil, however, sees these books as little gems. Many have covers that were created with production processes that are no longer in practice. Most carry a heavy patina from all those years passing through multiple owner’s hands. In some ways, Neil sees his art as a way to rescue these books from destruction, giving them a second life in a different context to a new audience. Conceptually, his work explores new social, cultural, and political narratives through themes of relatedness and identity. By juxtaposing the new and the old—new art from old book covers—voices across time speak to one another, thereby opening avenues toward meaning. He encourages the visitor to enter a disparate world of language, typography, and illustration styles that captures the eye and demands it to move back and forth among layers looking for signals, signs and clues. He aims for his art to culminate in a visual treatise on the recycling and renewal of popular culture. Neil lives and works in Brooklyn and The Catskill Mountains.
James Vance is comfortable working in a variety of mediums. His paintings, drawings, and sculpture have been exhibited in New York, Miami, and Asbury Park, and have been featured in Visionaire and other international publications. In addition to working as a gallery director, James has designed theater sets, large-scale set pieces, and exhibitions for fashion and art events, most recently for The Whitney Museum of American Art. James is also known for his dramatically scaled prop and mural work which has appeared in the windows of Barneys New York, Bergdorf Goodman and other stores worldwide.
Julia Ibbini
My work is a process of questioning through which I dissect elements of the sociological and cultural systems around me. I have always been motivated to explore questions of identity – what does identity really mean? How do we construct it? How do we navigate the social and cultural norms to which we are bound? I direct these questions both inwardly, to me personally, and outwardly. I am interested in how, as people, we find our place – how we develop our sense of belonging in a busy, complicated world of rules, contradictions and expectations.
People often seem fascinated by my working practice and it has developed into that something that is quite individual to me as an artist. My work is predominantly made up of line drawings and that I manipulate digitally. Computer aided design is absolutely central to the way I make and develop pieces – I need to alter and modify images in a way that would not be possible by hand. I find pattern and texture fascinating and often spend hours poring over the look and feel of multiple layers of data and then, suddenly, the arrangement will strike me as right and I’ll move on. My current practice involves translating complex drawings into layered laser cut paper pieces and often includes acrylic and mylar.
Each piece begins life as a digital line drawing using a combination of custom developed design software and conventional software such as Adobe Illustrator. The digital drawing stage can take up to three months to complete. Once the drawing is finished it is divided into layers; this stage is where I decide how much depth a piece will have and how a viewer will be able to see the finer detail within it. The layers are then translated into files that a laser machine can read.
I then begin cutting the layers (one at a time) on the laser machine. An individual layer can take up to four hours to cut (it has to be done under constant supervision because of the level of detail, so I spend a lot of my days hanging over a laser machine) and an entire work takes many weeks with up to 60 layers in a single piece.
Matt Crabe’s work creates an original mythology that addresses modern issues. Drawing influences equally from the imagery of multiple religions and Looney Tunes, the work focuses on the balance between conflict and enlightenment, and if there is even a difference between the two. Matt is interested in making the work accessible and does so by making prints, zines, and other hand made affordable items that mimic mass produced materials