Home Alone - Exhibtion of Selected Young Artists

A new series of 3 exhibitions of painting and sculpture by young selected artists begins June 7th in our Upstairs Gallery. Curated by Alex Sewell, the first of these is entitled, Home Alone.
 

The opening reception will be June 7th from 12-4. Exhibition will be open weekends until July 5th.

Home Alone  is a visual arts exhibition consisting of paintings by six artists working and living in the greater New York Area. The exhibition would be an exploration of the concept of being “ alone, together “, a contemporary term used to describe the alienation and feeling of
otherness in an increasingly polarized and overstimulated society. Through an investigation on the decline of social capital and the inner mechanisms of community, the exhibition will attempt to bring a feeling to it’s prospective audience of mutual understanding of exclusion. Self imposed isolation will be on display in literal and illusory manner within the work, bringing the viewer to hopefully feel an availability in negotiating with the exhibition itself.

An Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture by Paul Gagner, Jenny Drewitt, Rosie Lopeman, Brandon Elijah Johnson, Jonathan Ryan & Joseph Noderer.

Paul Gagner is painter and sculptor who depicts the humorous and preposterous in otherwise ordinary objects and situations. Gagner frequently employs self-portraiture as a vehicle to search for a deeper understanding of our foibles. His works are absurd self-contained moments that also hint at the limits of the painting and sculpture’s surface.

He holds a B.F.A from the School of Visual Arts and an M.F.A. from the City University of New York at Brooklyn College. Gagner’s works have been exhibited nationally and internationally. He’s been featured in Hyperallergic, Art21 magazine, New American Paintings, Baltimore City Paper, and featured on the cover and interviewed for the print magazine, Art Maze Magazine.

Joseph Noderer was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1978. He received his BFA from Tyler School of Art in 2001 and his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. Since then he has been showing his paintings around the country in group and solo settings. His work is included in various collections and publications, including the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas and The Oxford American.

Noderer’s paintings, often remembered combinations of sites found in and around his neighborhood and greater environs, are imbued with both feelings of wonder and bleakness. His portraits of natural, urban and human subjects are intuitively crafted, through idiosyncratic color and composition often resulting in ordinary yet dreamlike spaces.

Aptly characterized as “like…the Caspar David Friedrich of the back yard” some years ago, Noderer’s work seems an extension of (and conversation with) the “tradition”as it is related to expressing Noderer’s paintings have been observed as having “Symbolist impulses entwined with American Regionalism…”

Born in 1992 in Seattle, Washington, Brandon Elijah Johnson lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. As we step into Johnson's world, somewhere between imagination and reality, we become a part of
his visual diary. A collector of images, from photographs found on the internet to snapshots taken with his phone, Johnson reinterprets familiar ordinary scenes in his paintings and drawings, perhaps
in an attempt to freeze a moment in time. He takes reference images from his direct environment and intentionally - or not - offers a representative picture of today’s world. His vivid compositions draw from pop culture, embrace pastiche, and remain attached to the here and now. As part of a generation willingly returning to figurative painting, Johnson moves away from pure representation, at times infusing a touch of playfulness, and distancing himself from painterly conventions. Between fiction and documentary reality, Johnson’s works reveal a part of our collective memory.

Jonathan Ryan was born in Buffalo, NY in 1989, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He received his masters from the Tyler School of Art in 2014 and has exhibited worldwide, in Andre Festa Fine Art in Rome, Italy, and Gerhod Hofland in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He has received the Woodmere Endowment Fund Memorial Prize in Philadelphia, PA and was invited to residency at the Vermont Studio Center.
 

Jenny Drewitt (born 1987, Edinburgh, Scotland) studied at the Leith School of Art and holds a BFA from the Edinburgh College of Art and her MFA from the New York Studio School. She has exhibited at Treasure Town in Brooklyn, NY, and held residency at Noire in Torino, Italy. She has shown Blue Mountain in Manhattan and White Space in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is  currently living and working in Kent, NY.
 

Rosie Lopeman is an artist working in Brooklyn. Lopeman’s work centers around perception and individuation. She has a certificate in painting from the New York Studio School and a B.A. in painting from Bard College. Her first solo exhibit, Expire Inspire, was in 2017 at John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY. Her second solo show, a project titled The Shape I’m In took place at GRIDSPACE in Brooklyn, during which Lopeman worked on site in the gallery over a period of three months, creating an evolving installation. Lopeman has curated several exhibits in artist-run and DIY spaces in Brooklyn, including an immersive exhibit entitled First I was Afraid I was Petrified… at Treasure Town, Brooklyn. The show included 5 distinct installations and two evenings of performances. She works out of her home studio in Brooklyn and teaches painting at the New York Studio School as well as privately.