 |
 |
 |
 |
   |
|||||||
 |
 |
||||||||||
 |
GONORTH is a gallery located in Beacon, NY. Greg Slick, Karlos Carcamo, and I are the Directors and co-owners. It's great to be in business with artists, as we each bring a unique curatorial process and personal vision to the gallery. We split the year up between us, rotating months, as our tastes differ, and in doing so have gained reknown as one of the edgier, more progressive galleries in the Hudson River Valley. Below you'll find info on the show I'm curating in July, a solo show of the work of Michael X. Rose entitled Resurrection Insurrection, or the Son of Morpheus, along with some images from Evolve Dissolve, a group show I curated last December:
ABSTRACT ENDEAVORS
GONORTH FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
RESURRECTION INSURRECTION
GONORTH FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE “Resurrection Insurrection” or Son of Morpheus
Michael X. Rose, self-professed painter of Doom, Horror, Chaos & Doubt, is the kind of foreword-thinking throwback whose work is destined to excite anyone interested in art that bridges the detail-attentive, mythological richness of Gothic Romanticism with the pop theatricality of outsider-inspired folk art. Rose’s work delights in the bizarre, mining historical documents, classical art, crime nonfiction, and tales of the fabulous without prejudice, in order to provide his apocalyptic signature to works that interweave complex themes while entertaining us with a late-night seventies Creature Feature sort of fun. As a whole, this solo show provides the unique visual experience of having a phantasmal history of the Hudson River Valley forced into synergy with such an unlikely occasion as the Egyptian gods Osiris and Anubis battling Killer Robots in what appears to be a space-time portal linking backwoods Appalachia to the Valley of the Gods. Here Lazarus is resurrected as the Mummy, a gold-leafed reliquary and various altarpieces depict the martyrdoms of a host of saints in ample grotesquerie, and truncated versions of famous battles, man vs man as well as man vs giant squid, are again re-imagined, occasionally with renegade bikers and zombie stand-ins, for our delight. The work of Michael X. Rose also rewards viewers whose excavating tendencies dig deeper, as they are chock full of hidden gems. A seemingly insignificant darkened alleyway mural reveals an homage to Il Tintoretto’s “Christ before Pilate,” a biker’s tattoo exacts the mirror image of one donned by rocker Jimmy Hendrix, and the Sanskrit symbols writ above a door offer an unheeded warning. Though the Outsider Art effect is most prevalent, Rose’s grab-bag of influences range from the mythological musings of Nicolas Poussin and the Pre-Raphaelites to the symbolism of Gustave Moreau to the Gothic Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich and Horace Walpole. High and Low seem paltry barometers for Rose’s work, with its sweeping imaginative gestures. Instead one might imagine Rose charting a new mythology as it rises from the cultural debris, one just as likely to evoke the son of Morpheus, god of dreams, as the son of Godzilla. Directly descended from the last pirate publicly hung in Charleston, South Carolina, Michael X. Rose lives in Bruynswick, Ulster County, NY, where he maintains an art studio in a 17th century farmhouse with his wife, Kristina, and their three children. Gallery hours: 12 - 6 PM Saturday and Sunday, and by appointment.
EVOLVE DISSOLVE
GONORTH FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE “Evolve Dissolve” December 8 – December 30, 2007
The work of Aaron Sing Fox examines the nature of fabrication. Representation is a process, which Fox renders in painstaking detail. Be it the construction of a building or the casual growth of trees, Fox leaves up the scaffolding, inviting us to view the architecture of content. His art is a testament to the ongoing, mutable, raw quality of life. Upon viewing Julie Anne Mann’s Mortifera series, each fashioned from the bones of various animals, one immediately wonders, ‘Evolution or genetic breeding? Unearthed fossils or a sign of things to come?’ Bewildering as they are elegant, Mann’s specimens actuate the tension between artifice and reality. The figures in Sarah Moran’s work develops as we do, intimately, over time, in layers, evoking personality, consciousness, and selfhood as constructs of the biological and/or artistic form. Anne Polashenski’s work investigates psychological issues of control, power, and entrapment, as with Japanese Interior Obliteration—a piece as luxurious as it is haunting—where an idiosyncratic dress pattern takes a viral turn, generating a dreamlike virtual space beyond the sleeping figure it engulfs as it threatens to move beyond the paper. The utterly engaging “visual diaries” of Edina S. apply painted fragments of memory and narrative to concrete and resin figurative sculptures as a means of conveying emotional states. At first glimpse, Stacy Seiler’s silhouette images of industrial landscapes appear to be the work of a seasoned B&W photographer. Yet closer inspection reveals tiny black flecks peppering the white spaces. With lines and edges so carefully exacted, these meditative pieces enliven the defunct structures while approaching a kind of charcoal precisionism.
GO NORTH: A Space for Contemprary Art is located in Beacon, New York. GO NORTH is part of Hudson River’s vibrant art scene, which includes such notable venues as the Dia:Beacon, Storm King Art Center, and Van Brunt Gallery.
| ABSTRACT ENDEAVORS Anne Beck
Aaron Sing Fox
RESURRECTION INSURRECTION
EVOLVE DISSOLVE
Front View
Inside (above), Anne Polashenski (to the left)
Aaron Sing Fox
Sarah Moran
Julie Anne Mann
Edina S.
Stacy Seiler |
|||||||||
| |||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
|||||||||
 |
|||||||||||
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
