|
Simon Draper, Stevan Jennis, And Molly Rausch in Show at Van Brunt Gallery
Simon Draper, Stevan Jennis, Molly Rausch and Simon Draper, who are showing their recent work at Van Brunt Gallery in Beacon from March 3rd to April 2nd, all bring an element of humor to their art. The three artists also share a use of humble materials, most noticeably wood. Humility and humor are first cousins after all. Humor is always saying we are not as grand as we sometimes pretend to be, with the emphasis on we... the artist is included. Unlike irony, which mostly laughs at the ignorance of others, humor shares the joke: we're all lost together and we probably shouldn't take ourselves too seriously.
Simon Draper's work embodies a great joie de vivre. Draper, who lives in Cold Spring, mostly works with wood, often found or given to him by friends, and in the current show, recycled from the artist's earlier work. The idea of recycling extends beyond the materials to Draper's conception of the creative process itself, the reuse, reconsideration and recontextualization of previous works and ideas. Do artists make the same work over and over again, reworking and refining and learning through the process?
The work in the current show, which Draper calls "Backyard Bop, chops, crops and collaborations" is dedicated to the artist's late father "whose passions were community, gardening and the many forms of music." Perhaps through repurposing elements from past art works, Draper is creating a metaphor for re-examining his personal history, including his relationship with his father. In any case, the resulting art bristles with good humor and positive energy. It seems that the making of something new from something old has been for the artist a kind of joyful redemption.
Stevan Jennis is a veteran of the art world, his work having been shown widely in New York galleries and such places as the Metropolitan Museum, The Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art and the Albright- Knox Gallery. Jennis has several different bodies of work, all of which are rooted in folk art and images from popular culture. In this exhibition, he will be showing new examples of his paint-by-number collages and his sculptures.
The paint-by-number collages are made by cutting amateur paint-by-number paintings, collected from flea markets and antique stores, into one-inch squares and then recombining these into the finished works. The result is elegant fun, with visual puns and unexpected and revealing juxtapositions of form and content. Jennis' sculptures often deal with everyday objects, usually rendered in a semi-cartoon style. One piece in this show is a jet plane modeled and painted as a young boy might see it, but angled in its' flight by an adult's sense of potential disaster. Typically of Jennis' work, the double entendre is humorous and poignant at the same time.
Molly Rausch is a very talented young painter who has a Masters Degree in Fine Arts from SUNY New Paltz. Like Jennis and Draper she has shown at Van Brunt Gallery before and like the others she has an immediately recognizable style.
Rausch's recent paintings continue where her last show at Van Brunt Gallery left off. She off-handedly describes her work as "big goofy (stuff) on plywood" and says her themes remain "sex, death and painting." As a point of departure, one can view her paintings as deadpan humor with a slightly dark tinge. The materials are simple, as are the images... a house, a chair, a tenement building... rendered in a deceptively straightforward manner and often balanced against a single line of text culled from the artist's personal experience.
The artists' reception for this show, which will be open to the public, is on Saturday, March 3rd from 6-9pm.
Van Brunt Gallery is located at 460 Main Street, Beacon. The gallery hours are Thursday through Monday, 11am-6pm. For further information call: 845-838-2995 or e-mail:
info@vanbruntgallery.com
|
