Thursday, June 20, 2013

New Wine Bottle @ Fleisher/Ollman

Current Installation
June 13th - August 30th, 2013

New Wine New Bottle

Kate Abercrombie
Anthony Campuzano
Chris Corales
The Dufala Brothers
Jennifer Levonian
Isaac Tin Wei Lin
Tristin Lowe
Mark Mahosky
Dan Murphy
Nick Paparone
Paul Swenbeck

Fleisher/Ollman’s second exhibition in its recently- opened Arch Street location showcases new work by a selection of gallery artists. While the exhibition highlights a wide range of distinct practices, when seen collectively surprising resonances and inter-relationships come forward, putting into relief ideas such as the urban landscape, mythologies of popular culture, art and narrative, contemporary abstraction, and the primordial.

The Dufala Brothers and Dan Murphy explore what we might call the urban forlorn, looking to the postindustrial landscape of Philadelphia for inspiration. The Dufala Brothers engage ideas of consumption, re-purposing, and use-value, particularly evident in their sculpture and drawing, while Murphy trains his camera lens on both the intentional and accidental manner in which urban environments offer themselves to be read.

How popular culture is received and digested informs the practices of Nick Paparone and Anthony Campuzano—Paparone’s sculputures play with the manner in which goods are branded for different types of consumers, while Campuzano’s drawings revel in the idiosyncrasies of how we transform and personalize the messages of the mass media. Like Campuzano, Jennifer Levonian is attuned to how narratives form our identities. Working in cut-paper animation, Levonian engages with everyday life by focusing on events that often go unnoticed, transforming them into humorously bizarre narratives.

Isaac Tin Wei Lin, Kate Abercrombie, Mark Mahosky, and Chris Corales each have their own particular take on abstraction, but none are standard-bearers for abstraction with a capital “A.” Lin investigates the realm where representation and buzzing abstraction meet using invented calligraphic scripts and colorful patterns. Mark Mahosky presents a group of striped, abstract paintings on panel and newspaper. Their raw imprecision serves as a foil to Abercrombie and Lin’s more exacting methods. Chris Corales’ collages upend our usual assumptions about the medium as a more-is-more strategy by creating minimal works from a variety of scavenged papers that underline a kinship with abstract painting.

Tristin Lowe and Paul Swenbeck share a mutual interest in the primordial, myth, and the occult. In this exhibition, Swenbeck showcases new sculptures that combine his signature ceramics with wire and magnet spine-like forms that suggest animal/plant hybrids. Lowe has long pursued a certain life-giving rationale in his art making, breathing life into mythological and cartoonish inflatable sculptures. In New Wine New Bottle, Lowe examines the origins of life itself with a neon comet. Once considered heresy, scientists are now embracing the idea that life on earth originated from organic molecules inside a comet’s icy core which were released into Earth’s primordial seas billions of years ago upon impact with our planet.

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