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Brand New Gallery presents the group show New Vibrations, a selection of works from artists hailing from the United States.
The artists in the show, combine traditional and unconventional mediums in their works, exploring and re examining painting’s vocabulary, opening up subjective narratives within material and process driven abstraction. In a continuous overlapping of languages and redefining the concept of form they challenge painterly conventions and focus their attention on a process of discovering, and investigating the confines between material and image by means of a phenomenological approach.
Nicholas Pilato’s work is marked by constant flux, as it oscillates between creation and destruction. By utilizing concrete, and with references to the natural and the human, his work invokes aspects of sedimentation, erosion as well as industrial decay. Often starting with a found object and covering it with stretched canvas, Jennifer Boysen paintings are sculptures as the sculptures are paintings by both the manipulation of form and application of materials. Through paint overlays, scraping and scratching, a pictorial image is at once obstructed and a deep, richly atmospheric surface emerges. Evan Nesbit pieces together material knowledge with lived experience to open up subjective narratives within process and material based abstractions. Painting on the opposite side of his burlap canvases than the one facing outward, the contradictory effect on the colors, muted bolds and bright pastels create a striking effect along with the irregular surface makes for a sculptural layering effect and physicality that entices the viewer closer. Frequently using clothes as a material in her work, Donna Huanca is a multi-disciplinary artist mixing performance, installation, painting andsound exploring themes of diversity and hybridity in our culture today. The work presented was part of the piece Psychotria Elata 2014. Named after a species of plant that can make you hallucinate if consumed, the installation combined two and three-dimensional works creating a surreal and unique experience. Kadar Brock brings a discordant combination of techniques, mediums and tools in clashing tension. and blurs the line between painting and sculpture. He creates his own “ecosystem” where works are scraped and sanded, paint is collected in chips or vacuumed as dust and reworked into the lifecycle of his pieces. Originally derived from a past memory and his birthplace where quilting is the most popular form of craft making, Graham Wilson’s quilt paintings combine life experiences as well as ideas, metaphors and narratives. Gloomy Sunday, originally known as the “Hungarian Suicide Song” were a set of lyrics about the despair caused by war, and ending in a quiet prayer about the people’s sins. Hand sewn and highly orchestrated, the quilt was mostly done from his bed, at a time of grave health and anguish. In this format the work acquires an intrinsic quality and a life of its own, containing a past, a present, and possible future. Working primarily with mixed media on canvas, Jeff Zilm deconstructs technology—from the Stone Age to the Information Age—and the act of painting itself. He works in series, this time focusing on film. Made from 16mm prints by way of a process that at once removes the image and optical sound track from celluloid and mixes them into an inky liquid, these monochromatic film paintings are a concept driven project cognizant of both process and materiality. The very word Vibration is defined in physics as the oscillating, reciprocating, or other periodic motion, of a rigid or elastic body or medium forced from a position or state of equilibrium. These works do just that as they vibrate before us to ultimately find their state of balance due to the equal action of opposing forces.