Summer’s Ghost August 13 – September 26th, 2016
Artists:
Nanse Kawashima is a Japanese-born artist based in New York. In her collage painting series, Nanse works with printed ephemera from multiple source materials and references, non-specific to a moment and place. Instead, the series of iconographic paintings is reflective of Nanse’s mental landscape, registering her movements from place to place; having grown up as a transplant in El Salvador, Jamaica, Hawaii. Through a process of isolating parts of the subject from their background, the subject is decontextualized. The sum of surreal images depict a deep connection between the universal and subjective, the conscious and unconscious- mental pictures of Kawashima that are magical, haunting and sometimes nostalgic. Through her moving, Nanse was constantly challenged to reflect on the iconographies of different people and places, but also to locate herself within the various environments she found herself in.
Michael Johnson is an artist working & living in Asbury Park. In 2015 he was one of six artists awarded with a show as part of the New Jersey Emerging Artist series at Monmouth Museum. On display there was a cohesive series of paintings based on a grid form. Patience & Sisyphus are a part of that series. His current focus is experimenting with the use of different materials and techniques – ash, chalk, thread, glue – the pursuit is to uncover & create a visual language through the interaction of materials and paint. Having moved through the grid, Ethics is a new work that represents a type of interconnected energy & expression of vitality. Delighted to be a part “Summer’s Ghost” with such a gifted collection of artists and people. We are the dreams of the dead & are all already dreaming.
Gabriela Handal is a Panamanian visual artist currently working and living in New York. Recently graduated from the New York Academy of Art as a draughtsman with a concentration in anatomy. The work, indeed, revolves around the human figure, the great majority of the time around the female body in hopes of understanding and coming to terms with being an adult female human.
“My work is first and foremost about the human body. Afterwards, it ramifies into my personal experience as an adult female and fantasy art, so the images that I make will go from anatomy oriented or a character study, to very personal and visceral.I generally work with drawing, because of it’s enormous portability, versatility and malleability. Drawing is my go-to method, whenever I think of making something, I always think of drawing first.
Lauren Napolitano is a traveling mixed media artist creating anything out of everything.
“My work is about celebrating the handmade and the imperfections that come along with it. I am incredibly influenced by my mother’s Mexican heritage and I lean heavily on these ancestors as I create and gather inspiration. Using symmetry and traditional Mexican craft (tile, textile, wood carving) as my starting point, each line is truly unique, and any flaw is simply showing the beauty of the human hand. I find it important to achieve depth with simple lines and dots, taking something so simple and creating a complex world within. As a woman I love to explore bold lines while adding a clearly feminine mark, inventing delicate pattern work to incorporate a sense of balance through it all.”
Dilek Baykara “The focus of my work lies in the expressions of my subjects. Much of the work stems from traumatic and strange experiences throughout my life. I work with figurative elements in order to express the narratives within my work. The narratives represent different perspectives of my experience being a Turkish-American woman. I am drawn to lines, and find that I can express extravagance and subtleties through the buildup of singular lines throughout a composition.” ~ D.B.
Rose Freymuth-Frazier was born and raised in Nevada City, California – a small gold rush town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
She attended Interlochen Arts Academy, a private boarding arts high school in northern Michigan. Upon graduation she was awarded a scholarship to study theatre at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York City. Her first apprenticeship was for two years under Assael in his New York City studio and her second was with Odd Nerdrum in Norway, at his farm and studio on the North Sea.
References from a broad swath of art history can be found in Freymuth-Frazier’s solitary subjects. Influences range from Balthus’s discomforting depictions of preadolescence, and the queen of Kitsch, Margaret Keane’s “Big Eyed” children and animals, to the heavy chiaroscuro and technical rigor of Caravaggio and Rembrandt. This unique combination of classicism and pulp results in something of a hybrid between Lowbrow esthetic and Old Master technique. Her paintings address universal themes such as child development, sexuality, loss of innocence, consumerism, domestication, gender roles, androgyny and body image in our society today.
Freymuth-Frazier’s work has been exhibited internationally with galleries in Barcelona, Sydney, Amsterdam and across the United States from New York City and Chicago to Seattle and Los Angeles. Her work can be found in private collections internationally, including The Seven Bridges Foundation in Connecticut and the John and Diane Marek Collection in Tennessee. She has received attention and reviews from numerous publications including Playboy Magazine, Ms. Magazine, ArtNews, Hi-Fructose Magazine, Beautiful Bizarre Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Art Papers, American Artist Magazine, and The Huffington Post. She lives and paints in New York City.
Brandon Boyd’s work as a singer, songwriter, both as a solo artist and with his platinum-selling rock band Incubus, is well documented and universally acclaimed. But now his other life’s work — that of a painter — has been garnering increasing attention and devoted audiences of its own.
In his painting and drawings, Boyd reveals a personal, freeform and ambiguous visual style that focuses on magic, serendipity, curiosity and mystery. Describing his art-making process as a kind of “blissful, familiar trance,” Boyd’s works carry both the evidence of the beautiful chaos and the power of revealing the narratives inside of it. His images are constructed by chance through colorful ink spills and the contents of his own travel journals. As songs might come to him in a dream, so he discovers the vibrant, witty, eccentrically classical constellations of shape and circumstance that hide in plain view or emerge from his own quieted mind through another kind of sight.
Boyd has published three books of his visual art: White Fluffy Clouds (2003), From the Murks of the Sultry Abyss (2007), and So the Echo (2013). Among dozens of book signings, group and solo exhibitions, special collaborative projects, and engaged philanthropic arts, Boyd has shown his crisp, expressive paintings, prints, and drawings at cities across the globe in group and solo exhibitions. This includes a collaboration with Tom’s Shoes at Undefeated in Los Angeles, Juxtapoz Magazine’s Anniversary Group Exhibition; special projects at LACMA; Artists for Haiti at Track 16 Gallery; a solo exhibition and mural at Hurley’s )( Space; and participated in gallery exhibitions from West Hollywood to Cologne, San Francisco to Rome — at Skotia Gallery, C.A.V.E. Gallery, Gallery 446, Soze Gallery, Arty Farty, Ono de Arte, and Rossmut Gallery. He has been featured at special projects in Zurich’s GRAFIK 14, the wildly popular ‘Flows to Bay’ exhibition at the Museum of Monterey, Scope Miami (December) and most recently in Amsterdam at Andenken Gallery.
David Bray
“For as long as I can remember. I’ve been surrounded by art and artists.. My late father worked for 30 years at the Royal Academy of Arts in London – so by default I was brought up in this environment of creativity and imagination. We were allowed to wander the galleries before the Royal Academy opened in the morning, so we had all this art to ourselves
The work is all about the line and the human form, keeping it fluid and feminine. Mainly though it is about PLAY, to keep pressing and pushing so I’m not constantly repeating – so my job doesn’t feel like a job……..I usually tend to work with pen/pencil on paper but over recent years i have started experimenting with different mediums. A lot of my most recent work has been large scale pieces on wood, minimum 6ft high. I like the challenge and try and push myself to try new things. Most of these pieces are in private collections but you can currently see 3 of them in Gordon Ramsey’s Union Street Cafe in London.
My work isI very inspired by 40′s and 50′s pin-ups, religion, David Lynch, breathlessness, heels, black magic, not drowning in the sea – all mixed up and presented in ink, paint and wool.”
Steve Mackey
“No information = mystique. That’s definitely part of it, although it does sound a little contrived put like that.
You can have any facts you want, but you’re sworn to secrecy. Only kidding, I just hate those sites where they have a moody photo of the artist with some trenchant quote about their life and art underneath.
I’m 45, married, lots of children, cats, rabbit. I’m also self-taught, so if you’re going to give anything away, let it be that. People love it, it’s democratic.” ~ SM
Mackey currently resides in the U.K.
Hannah Faith Yata was born in 1989 and raised in a small town in Georgia. She grew up with a deep love of nature and animals passed down by the beautiful surroundings in the country and her mother. As a young adult, she studied feminism, psychology, and art in college. Graduating with a BFA in painting from the University of Georgia in 2012 she moved up to New York to focus on her work and how to put her ideas into paintings
In her work, Yata seeks to interweave political ideas, (using nature, women, and feminism almost synonymously), environmental degradation, and themes of moral injustice into increasingly chaotic paintings. She uses masks from a mix of other cultures to speak to the different relationships that native tribes and cultures have with the earth, while giving anthropomorphic qualities and symbolism to the animals to speak their consciousness. The increasing psychedelic features to her work are inspired by beauty and the energy of nature, while communicating the anxiety and tension she feels brewing in the world. These elements are combined many times to celebrate the female form that denies objectification and exploitation of nature and interweaves them into grotesquely beautiful, surreal dreamscapes.
Jean Pierre Arboleda was born in Quito, Ecuador. He grew up with a deep love of animals and nature and loved to draw and paint throughout his childhood. He moved as a young adult to New York City and received his BFA in illustration at the School of Visual Arts and his Masters degree in fine art at the New York Academy. His obsession with animals and nature grew to encompass topics that concerned issues of evolutionary change, environmental toxicity, and war. The very humanoid qualities Jean Pierre gives to his animals challenges the viewer to see the world from animal’s standpoint: in a world without humans, where animals have dominated humans and sport human trinkets and shrunken heads. His subjects mutate and morph, struggle with destruction and chaos, and wrestle with societal issues and re-contextualize them with animals in a critique of humanity and compassion.
Paige Smith has been a professional graphic designer for seven years—working on marketing materials and branding for print and web clients. Her clients include large corporations such as Cisco Systems, MTV, PayPal, and ABC Studios; while smaller boutique clients include Odd Future, Wolf at the Door, Blow Up SF, and Nathan Turner.
Smith is most noted for creating “Urban Geode,” a street art series of sculptures that resemble geodes, made entirely of paper and resin casts. Always interested in geology, Smith started to notice the nooks and crannies in the sides of buildings, walls, and abandoned phone booths within her community of the Historical Arts District (in Los Angeles). Seeing this as an opportunity to create, Smith took street-art to a whole new level. Since beginning the project, she has created large-scale installations for well-known brands such as The Standard, Hollywood, The Viper Room, LALA Gallery, Soho House/Elyse Walker at Coachella, and various projects for LA Canvas.