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Exhibition Press Release #1:

Color Cathedral
Jack-Arthur Wood & Roberta Gentry
My Pet Ram

It’s hard not to become fixated on the minuscule details and the specific minutiae of daily life. Rarely do we step back and take in the entire experience. Head down, pushing ahead, to-do list in hand, we often can’t see the forest for the trees (to quote the old adage). It is supremely important that we take time to disconnect from the demands of work, life, and the constant news cycle to fully appreciate the depth and richness of existence. Jack-Arthur Wood and Roberta Gentry both thrive on the inability to bring order to chaos. Their work asks us to unfocus our eyes and let our minds wander. In doing so we can appreciate new sensations and find inspiration in imperfection. Digging through the layers of their poignant constructions allows us to make sense of time, vision, and experience as we happen upon forgotten memories and sparkling catalysts that can irrevocably alter our perception.

The jumble of humanity on the city’s measured framework, the potent geometry of exotic foliage, and the melding of the urban skyline with the sprawling landscape are all readily accessible within the works of Color Cathedral. Thinking about symmetry and the underlying structures of visual lives, Wood and Gentry question the self-imposed order we bring to a world filled with competing stimuli. Building upon the grid, whether that be Gentry’s underdrawing or Wood’s use of painted fabric, each artist asks us to take a moment to extract ourselves from the promise of organization and give into a more fulfilling experience. By harnessing the orderly structure and bending it to their whim, they create a connection between mathematical perfection and pure abstraction.

Jack-Arthur Wood constructs immersive architecture that hovers between a feverish collage of painted canvas and an optically dense construction of shapes, seasons, and moods. Cut fabric compilations, colored in gradients of acrylic, grow into abstract complexes of shapes that mimic natural formations and the ever-growing expanse of the urban environment. Casting glances toward New York’s famous monuments as well as ethereal atmospheric effects, Wood’s paintings share a kinship with the oeuvre of artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, whose flower studies and skyscrapers created a diametric opposition of subjects while continuing to investigate the lived experience of American life. Works like Color Cathedral (Land Lattice) marry romantic visions of open skies, red suns, and greenery with the intricate construction of scaffolding or the lead outlines of stained glass. Embodying the same fervor as Charles Demuth’s I Saw the Figure Five in Gold or the overwhelming urban space of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Wood’s paintings are infused with the electric energy of cities and the sublime thrill of wild nature.

Roberta Gentry’s diaphanous compositions exist somewhere between botanical illustrations and faded illuminations from some indecipherable sutra. Building each form from multiple translucent layers, she dispatches with any sense of illusionary depth or overt representation and instead clings to a central ‘spine’ from which all else blooms. Like thriving snake plants or dead-end arterials, twisting lines in works like Dormant and Double cross into neighboring fields, creating visible intersections where two expressions occupy one space. Equally influenced by centuries-old religious artworks, architectural elements, and biological formations, there is a certain quiet reverence in Gentry’s paintings that asks for a more sustained awareness of time and its passing. While more graphic at first glance, closer inspection reveals the time and care of the artist’s brush as she applies layer upon layer, resulting in a testament to patience and artistic labor.

Embracing symmetry as the through bridge between natural and manmade aspects, both artists in Color Cathedral beckon to the human need for an innate semblance of balance. We see it in nature and strive for it in life. The bilateral symmetry of leaves and our own human bodies offers repetition that is never perfect but superficially similar. Rather than push toward mechanical perfection, works like Wood’s Atoning for Tonnage or Gentry’s imposing Pomegranate are more Rorschach blots than kaleidoscopic duplicates, their mirrored halves diverging and changing only under careful observation. With this in mind, we are called to acknowledge and highlight the imperfections in our orderly systems. We take the time to tease out slight differences, think about wabi-sabi and the beauty of transience, and purposefully deviate from the path to better appreciate the harmony between nature and our human world. All of these elements serve to lift us out of the everyday and restore some small spark of light in a world grown dim. 

Exhibition Press Release #2:

“Remember That You Are Looking and Tell Us What You See: Amanda Marrè Brown & Japeth Mennes in Framework at My Pet Ram”
By Graham W. Bell

How do we experience the world? What does the daily life of an earthling hinge upon? We create systems of support and structures to rely on that help to guide our understanding. In Framework, Amanda Marrè Brown and Japeth Mennes offer excerpts from their visual experiences in the form of frozen moments from a living city. In depicting doors, windows, and other entry points, they place focus on the interplay between these realworld frames and the shape of the canvas itself. With a graphic sharpness that verges on the digital, both painters navigate through a familiar landscape that nonetheless appears alien. Formulating conversations about interior spaces and their exterior façades, paintings like Mennes’ Window Shade (2022) and Marrè Brown’s Lume (2022) tease the viewer with a hint of hypothetical spaces just out of sight.

Confronted with the closed shutter, the entrance to a solid void of color, one feels a thrill of anticipation, of curiosity. There is a duality present in both of the painters’ work: they simultaneously invite and remain obscure as one is offered an opening yet stymied in an attempt to enter. Both Mennes and Marré Brown draw from their everyday experience. Drifting through the city on the way to work, the store, or coming home at night, they glimpse snippets of the world. Held in their minds or in the photo album on their phone, each advertisement, accoutrement, and archway becomes the source of new meditations. How do we parse this busy existence if not by finding touchstones and wayfinders throughout our everyday?

In the past, Mennes has taken imagery from signage around Brooklyn and Queens as his subject. Translating the simplified insignia for laundromats and window repairs shops into compositions in vivid matte, he plucks them from their everyday obscurity and demands a reconsideration. In this exhibition, the sources become murky. Are the windows and shutters and blinds culled from two-dimensional vinyl, or are they stylized versions of real-world objects that have passed into a sort of graphic limbo courtesy of the painter’s brush? The glass in pieces like Triple Pane (2022) utilize the double stroke as a means of suggesting transparency when, in fact, they are quite the opposite. Creating a visual iconography based on colloquial advertising practices, Mennes urges a reinvestigation of universal symbols.

Marrè Brown depicts the sense of disconnect from the day-to-day that she experiences from prolonged observation. A fleeting moment where the light and shadow meet in perfect harmony, these instances lift one out of the mundane and into a momentary reverie. She notes, “My intention is to lure the viewer into a perceptual encounter in which visual sensations give way to an experience of looking that is felt throughout the body.” Using precise gradients and vibrant opaque colors, she establishes a visual push and pull that holds the viewer between illusionary depth and flatness. In works like Lunette (2021), abstract forms flit between two dimensions and the infinite blue of a James Turrell skyspace. Marrè Brown harnesses this interstitial area to ask questions about vision and the dialogue between painted and physical space.

The paintings in Framework exist in the real world; their filtered depictions of the everyday connect directly to a lived experience. There is a one-to-one correlation between Mennes’ shutters, Marrè Brown’s arches, and the human body. As we find ourselves in their presence, the mind wanders to our own traversal of the city. If memory is but a string of images that stick in our head, how do we share those images and possibly hope to impart some of their worth onto others? By bringing focus to the unglamorous, the commonplace, the routine, these painters speak to a wide audience in a collective tongue. The window is closed, the view is obscured, but the invitation is open.