#bushwickart

May 31 - June 30, 2013

Opening Fri May 31, 7-10pm

Associated is pleased to present an unexpected body of painted and sculpted works by Steven Charles. Differing from his well known visual style, these works consist of a diversity of materials that span synthetic fur, pom poms, corks, food, knives, glitter, and seemingly endless layers of paint. Each piece, regardless of its material or visual content, pushes absurdity - either by way of its obsessive process or simplicity.  “Abstract painting is the most confusing dilemma I have ever encountered,” says Charles. Yet he has always been interested in creating problems; being surprised and confused by the events that unfold while making something are what motivate his dedicated painting practice. In more recent years, he has explored this same interest with materials other than paint, and continues to surprise himself, now with works as unexpected and uncharacteristically Charles as cork paintings, outsider-looking works featuring sunflowers and text, and black and white geometric paintings.

Yet the complexity and level of detail, made obvious in his small works on found wood, exhibit his unique and characteristic process aptly dubbed “targeting” by the artist. In his own words, “This is where a shape is filled in with a smaller shape leaving only the outer edge of the first shape showing. This process is repeated until the amount of shape being covered is reduced to the smallest part possible with the selected brush. Each painting begins to generate a logic unique to it’s own composition. Even though it’s obvious that I am making these paintings, the end results always educates me on what I’m doing. The impetus for this work is my optimism, although what I am optimistic about constantly escapes me.” These works evoke much of his previous, highly labor-intensive works, which at their longest reached 18 feet.

Charles has been an extraordinarily dedicated painter navigating the New York art world since 1996. He was born in 1967 in Birkenhead, England, and received his BFA from the University of Texas and a MFA from Temple University . He has exhibited widely in notable locations such as Marlborough Chelsea (NYC), Marlborough Madrid (Spain), Pierogi (Brooklyn), The Brooklyn Museum, and Galerie Zürcher (Paris), among others. He has received Pollock-Krasner and NYFA grants, and has been living and working in Bushwick, Brooklyn since 2010.

Open hours are Sat & Sun 1-6pm. Please email to confirm>> [email protected]

566 Johnson Avenue (entrance on Stewart), Brooklyn, NY 11237. Jefferson St on the L train.

Associated is pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition:

Steven Charles

May 31 - June 30, 2013

Paisley Kang (b. 1989, Seoul) 

April 27 - May 19, 2013

Steven Charles (b. 1967, Birkenhead, England)

May 31 - June 30, 2013

Thick with Cold
Monica Haak, Matthew Shelley, Aaron Williams
March 22 - April 13, 2014
Opening Saturday, March 22, 7-10pm

“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the   sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.”  - Immanuel Kant                                                                                 

Although we are increasingly removed from the landscape, both physically and psychosocially, the role it continues to play is central to our identity as living beings. Monica Haak, Aaron Williams, and Matthew Shelly explore the broad theme of “The Landscape” in a progressive distortion between actual depiction, fragmentation, and abstraction of ubiquitous imagery. By employing various technologies that mediate our experience with our surroundings, each artist depicts their experience of the world around them as a form of documentation, nostalgia, awe, escapism, and even satire.  

Haak describes her paintings as “manifestations of the mundane beauty of the overgrown outskirts of the city and the specific solitude they provide.” She creates scenes that might serve as places of quiet refuge, where time both stands stoically still yet seems to be receding beyond the viewers vision. “These pockets of nature are bordered by and defined against their urban surroundings but are peacefully abandoned.” She depicts these places where, despite a stoic stillness, one can sense the light and atmosphere constantly shifting.  For her, the images act as a refuge where time slows down enough to absorb the richness of subtlety in her environment.

Shelley pieces together the landscape using found photography gathered from books on environmental science, travel, and the American wilderness. Building on chance associations and formal connections, he develops a scenario that is a combination of his experience with the materials, the assemblage, and the landscape itself. His use of representational imagery of expansive landscapes paired with geometric color fields and sharp edges form invented realities, alluding to worlds of fiction. The interaction between the materials and subject matter and how they oppose one another, in regard to scale, is largely present in Shelley’s work.

Working in several different mediums, Williams’ work is guided largely by materials and their inherent qualities and utility, often using common elements like commercial posters and raw construction materials. He combines these concrete objects with more rarified ideas and strategies of fine art, questioning our received notions of traditional art making processes as well as the relationship between personal and broadly disseminated imagery. For this body of work, photographs of the sky were taken outside his studio and near the studios of DeKooning and Jackson Pollock in eastern Long Island, NY. Using the standard dimensions of typical portraiture (24 x 18 inches), he aims to reshape the common idea of space, implying a human portrayal. By bringing the color to the surface and creating opaque blocks of blue form, he makes photographs that operate alternately as space and solid, while also being tacit portraits of the studio process.

Monica Haak was born in Chicago, IL in 1983. She studied fine art and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Shelley received his BFA from the University of Oregon and his MFA from American University, D.C, and currently lives and works in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Williams received his BFA from the Maine College of art and his MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. He has shown extensively in the United States. He currently lives and works in Queens, NY.

Monica Haak,“Albion II,” 2010, Oil on linen, 12 x 12 inches

Please join Associated on Sunday January 5 for a closing reception. UPDATE: Due to the snow storm, Tom Warren is unable to make it to New York for the closing and to take portraits. We will still be hosting the closing reception from 1-6pm, please stop by if you haven’t yet seen the show!

A Little More to the Left

+ Tom Warren Pop-up Portrait Studio

December 14 - January 5, 2014

Opening Saturday December 14, 7-10pm

Painting by Rachel Pontius

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Associated is pleased to announce a group show concerning notions in contemporary portraiture. Please join us on Saturday, December 14 from 7-10pm as we celebrate the opening of A Little More to the Left, featuring works by Solito Jibaro, Rachel Pontious, and Tom Warren.

As narcissism in our culture becomes ever more pervasive, as evidenced by the ubiquity and popularity of the “selfie”, the portrait in turn becomes something worth reflecting upon. Rather than a contrived homage to oneself, the portrait is instead a dialogue, the projection of an emotion about someone else. Perhaps a commission or a tribute to a loved one, the portrait has the power to reinterpret reality, making the subject more flattering or reviled, while inscribing a sense of emotion and memory into the image.  In A Little More To The Left, Associated has mad a selection of three artists working through contemporary issues in portraiture.

Solito Jibaro collages images of people in his life along with cryptic visual signifiers found online and in vintage magazines to create paintings that are simultaneously abstract and photorealistic. By blending the two he is able to create a narrative in the works, while also developing a sense a character in the portraits’ subject.

Rachel Pontious is similarly interested in creating an emotional context in her portraits, in that she is exploring “personal and propositional knowledge through storytelling, allusions, and experimentation.” And yet her family portraits, often obscured or bisected images painted from family photos, are a dialogue between her family and herself, between nature and nurture. She explains that, “By referencing family photographs for my paintings, and then manipulating them, I am creating a self-portrait that delves into the idea of what makes them—their insecurities, neuroses, physical attributes, personality traits—me.”

Tom Warren on the other hand is not a painter but a photographer. He’s been capturing portraits of people from all walks of life in New York since 1981 and will be showcasing a broad range of his portraits from over the years. Additionally, he will have a pop-up studio set up during the opening on December 14th at Associated to take portraits for just $100 right in time for the holidays.

Transitions v.1 (Like an Indefinite State)
Nov. 16 - Dec 1, 2013
Opening: Saturday Nov. 16, 7-10pm

Diane DiMassa

Associated is pleased to announce the first of a series of group shows evoking the theme of transition. Please join us on Saturday, November 16 from 7-10pm as we celebrate the opening of Transitions v.1 (Like an Indefinite State), featuring works by Michael Alongi, Diane DiMassa, Peter Hoffmeister, Shinto Imai, Robert Nava, Elizabeth Riley, Cecilia Salama, and Mika Yokobori.

 From the start of life, we begin to die; Transition between parent and child, or one force to another (Shinto Imai), a blue tarp as a metaphorical dividing line between self and other (Elizabeth Riley). By spending time with them and taking pictures, I feel that I’ve been able to participate in something meaningful – a relationship with each – which is something that can’t be overlooked (Michael Alongi). I could not see the image on this, and carefully washed the mud off, to have a portrait emerge… (Diane DiMassa). I choose to use biomorphic images as a metaphor for social hierarchy, as well as human cells, body parts, or organs as for an individual or a collective functionality within an organism or culture (Mika Yokobori). The fluidity of borders which change according to government policy and conflict, but which can also provide a people with sovereignty (Peter Hoffmeister) is a narrative of the integration of the body and an individual’s psychological states with the city (Elizabeth Riley). In the process of streaming ideas and imagination onto canvas or paper, I become an observer and a single component of my own social environment (Mika Yokobori). The words transcend into the mind, hopefully to a somewhat familiar place of an emotional loopty loop that can occur during a tear-jerking argument (Robert Nava). It definitely begs for an archeological explanation, as it is a sort of enigmatic object that feels like something you can’t quite identify (Peter Hoffmeister)… A mold that has tiny nodules which create a sort of binary-code onto the iridescent latex when it dries (Cecilia Salama). Finally, the text piece, I feel, is left for the mind to handle, in the flow of a circular conversation (Robert Nava).

Open hours: Saturdays & Sundays, 1-6pm and by appt. Email to confirm.

You Are My Sunshine

September 21 - October 13, 2013

Opening Saturday, September 21 7-10pm

An exhibition of artists’ plants and plant-based art from the Brooklyn art scene and beyond.