The exhibition explores natural forms and the ways they are abstracted in nearly 60 small-scale, intimate drawings, paintings, and sculptures. Artists include Chris Arabadjis, Nancy Blum, Abby Goldstein, Jessica Deane Rosner, Katia Santibañez, Denise Sfraga, Sarah Walker, Marian Williams, and Laura Sharp Wilson.
Chris Arabadjis creates rule-based drawings using ballpoint pen, made largely during his daily two-hour subway commute. The works reflect his range of interest in natural systems such as mycelium networks, tessellations of tree rings, irregular rock formations, and whirlpools in bodies of water. Pulsating with an inner, organic energy, Nancy Blum’s fanciful and inventive colored pencil drawings evoke sea creatures, botanical shapes, and microscopic imagery, captured in movement and growth. Also included are stylized butterfly sculptures cast in China clay, with markings transformed into geometric patterns reminiscent of Islamic tile work. Abby Goldstein’s densely patterned paintings of biomorphic shapes, clusters of tiny marks and intertwining linear elements, are inspired by her wanderings through the urban environment, walks in the wilderness, as well as music and dance. Created intuitively and with a reduced palette, her rhythmic compositions evoke both a twilight otherworldliness and a rejuvenating energy. Jessica Deane Rosner has long explored the contrast of freehand drawing versus the use of templates and tools in her intimate and detailed geometric abstractions. In recent years she has incorporated leaf imagery into her compositions as a way to expand the work both intellectually and emotionally; the leaves are “a small, essential part of, and connection to, the natural world.” Katia Santibañez’s obsession with spirals, based on observations of natural forms such as snail shells and spiderwebs, began in 2012 after spending four months on an island in the south of France. For the artist, the spiral is an exploration of the dualities of control and freedom, positivity and negativity, hope and despair. In their implication of endless movement, they are also an expression of renewal, desire, and joy. Denise Sfraga’s vividly colored and stylized botanical environments pay homage to the history of horticultural illustrators and pioneers of flora photography, while reflecting her own captivation with the inherent mystery of plants. For Sfraga, “my work attempts to pull back the curtain of a quiet, contemplative garden and reveal a more sinister, devious and cunning reality lingering just below the surface.” For the past few years Sarah Walker has been gathering fallen leaves during walks in the city and countryside. Drawing in colored pencil, the artist transforms the brown, desiccated, and decaying shapes into imaginatively patterned and multi-colored small universes that are poignant in their isolation. Marian Williams’ layered ink drawings are created slowly and methodically, using ballpoint pen on ledger paper. The isolated, close-up frontality of her floral and botanic imagery suggests the fecundity and intensity of the natural world. Laura Sharp Wilson began to make botanical-based paintings after reading Bill McKibben’s seminal 1989 book, The End of Nature. Combined with references to the decorative arts, stylized botanical imagery is transformed into symbols of class and social stratification, while also serving as a reminder of the constant threat of environmental destruction and the potential for renewal and regrowth.
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