Greene Contemporary announces the second of three summer group shows. Outside the Box will feature the work of nine artists and will open on Friday July 6th with a preview from 6 to 9 PM. The exhibition will continue Saturday July 7th through 4 PM Friday July 27, 2007. Greene Contemporary is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 to 6 PM.
Outside the Box: NY and CA will introduce the work of Kevin Cyr (Brooklyn), Carol Es (Los Angeles), Charles Linder (San Francisco), Billy Maker (Brooklyn), Hiroyuki Nakamura (Brooklyn), Megan Saperstein (San Francisco), Jose Sarinana (Los Angeles), Elyce Semenec (Brooklyn) and Christopher Skura (New York).
Kevin Cyr paints small realistic works in oil on plywood. His work has a bold graphic quality as he combines the appearance of different styles of painting including graffiti and airbrush on his chosen subject matter of trucks and vans. Although very much of the moment Cyr's work is nostalgic for aspects of the past that provided shared experiences such as drive-in movies and road trips in vans.
Kevin Cyr was born in Edmunston, Canada. His received his BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. His work has been exhibited in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania in the United States as well as Sydney, Australia. Cyr says that in a culture that is permeated by consumerism and easily lured by the appeal of status enhancing symbols he finds beauty in derelict cars and unkempt buildings." He paints with "devoted attention to every imperfection and sign of age."
www.kevincyr.net
Carol Es' series of "Blogger Killings" works on paper take a comic and dark view of the current phenomenon of bloggers. Es is a versatile artist who draws and paints as well as producing hand-made books. All her work is informed by her life - past and present and particularly her relationships with family and others. Through her work that is humorous and hopeful she works through situations that might be painful or unpleasant.
Carol Es is a self-taught artist and native Los Angelina born in 1968 to a middle class Jewish mother, and a working class father with Pennsylvania Dutch, Mennonite roots. Her dichotomous, artistic nature formed early at age six, drawing cartoons underneath tables in bowling alleys. Shy and reclusive, she spent most of her time alone while her family relocated more than 15 times between Pennsylvania, California, and Florida - all before her tenth birthday. As a result, she attended school infrequently and wound up leaving home at age 14 to fend for herself.
Es worked as a pattern cutter in the apparel industry between the ages of 12 and 25 along side her brother and father, during which time she also established herself as a musician while writing and painting. She formulating a clientele by distributing her hand-made zines and built a collector base throughout her career as a musician. After more than 15 years as a drummer, Es set aside playing professionally in order to concentrate more privately on her art. She has since become a prolific and dedicated visual artist.
Now residing in the Los Angeles harbor area, Es has come to express herself wholly in her art after surviving an abusive childhood, neglect, and disability. She has used past experience as the fuel for subject matter, transforming a broken past into a positive and hopeful present and future. Much of her work includes paper collage, garment patterns, handmade books, pins and thread, and written prose. These are personal experiences laid bare and forged directly into the work, making each piece powerful and tangible as personal therapy. Viewers can sense a distinct honesty in her work, and dark, childlike humor.
Es' work has shown across the US and is steadily gaining recognition. Her paintings and artist books are included in numerous private and public collections including the Getty Museum, UCLA Special Collections, and the Jaffe Collection at Florida Atlantic University. Her work has exhibited at The Riverside Art Museum, Torrance Art Museum, Santa Monica Museum of Art. the Craft & Folk Art Museum and the Zimmer Children's Museum. She is also a recipient of The Artists' Resource for Completion Grant from the Durfee Foundation and The Artist's Fellowship in New York. She currently shows with Koelsch Gallery in Houston, TX and George Billis Gallery in Culver City, CA.
www.esart.com
Charles Linder has an interest in many subjects including cars, guns and hunting. He likes paint and intense saturated color. His two and three dimensional work questions what is American art and what is an American cowboy (and we are not talking about the ones who wear boots and ride horses.) His work wrestles with the formal issues of art making and in particular space and the displacement of objects either literally and/or by their transformation. (He moved a bullet ridden Mustang (car) from the desert and powder coated it with white paint.)
Charles Linder was born in 1967. He attended Santa Monica College where he studied Art History and German. He received his BFA in sculpture and video from the San Francisco Art Institute. He received his MFA in the New Genres Program at University of California at Berkeley. He has won numerous awards including: Murphy Cadogan Award 1997, UC Berkeley Marian Hahn Simpson Fellowship in Art History, UC Berkeley 1996 Eisner Award 1996, UC Berkeley Sobel Award, SF Art Institute, 1989. Linder was the founder and Director of refuaslon from 1990 until 1999. He is currently the Director of LincRealArt that he co-founded in 2000.
www.cashcowboy.com
Billy Maker is a sculptor who uses balsa wood, paint and materials such as gold thread and artificial grass to make tiny objects and installations. Often his constructions cantilever off the wall. Projecting ourselves onto or into his vignettes we wrestle with issues of scale. His work investigates and questions the physical environment we build for ourselves and the psychological impact that dimension has on our sense of being.
Billy Maker lives and works in Brooklyn. He received his BFA from the University of South Carolina. He studied in University of Georgia's program in Cortona, Italy. His work has been included in solo and group shows in New York and South Carolina.
www.billymaker.com
Hiroyuki Nakamura has a fascination with frontier culture especially cowboys and the American West. He paints the figure nude and often headless. Sometimes his figures are hermaphrodites. Whether alone or in groups Nakamura isolates his figures in vast spaces. Often the space is not defined by a horizon line and the viewer is left to fill in the details with imagination. His titles add an important dimension to his visual narrative and function to either focus or distract attention from the subject of his work.
Hiroyuki Nakamura was born in Japan in 1977 and lives in Brooklyn, New York. He received his BS in Photography from Drexel University in Philadelphia and his MFA in photography, video and related media from the School of Visual Arts in New York. His work has been included in numerous group and solo exhibitions in New Jersey, New York and Philadelphia in the United States as well as in shows in Iceland and Mexico. Nakamura says he is interested "in provoking a cynical and ironic simplicity that emerges in rather complex and unreal circumstances." He claims his work is "an uncanny documentation of human burdens and discomforts."
www.neoimages.net
Megan Saperstein is an abstract painter who in the work for this exhibition uses acrylic paint on unprimed plywood. Her colors can be dense or diaphanous. She places them one shape of color over another to create layered compositions that define a sense of crowded but airy space. Saperstein's larger body of work encompasses a wide range of materials, approaches and processes in her paintings, drawings, sculptural objects and community projects.
She responds strongly to the idea of an object having had a previous purpose and being transformed in its new role. Often there are elements of walnut inks, pencil, crayon and collage in her work. She fluctuates between the figurative and the abstract. She says she is also inspired by: "shadows, the phenomenon of communication, social disorder, perceived realities, animals, cultural absurdity, molecular composition and science in general."
Saperstein graduated with a BFA from the Maryland Institute of Arts in 1992. She has lived in San Francisco since 1994 where she is an Art Instructor and the Volunteer Coordinator at Creativity Explored, a studio and gallery for adult artists with developmental disabilities. She has exhibited her work throughout California and Florida as well as in Chicago and Berlin.
Jose Sarinana uses conventional materials like acrylic paint in unconventional ways.
He says his work is concerned with "finding and expanding the infinite, absurd, marvelous and overlooked in the everyday…" He likes to allow "the work to present itself in an entertaining, seductive or deceptively plain fashion." Sarinana doesn't "hold any material and its use in any sacred or traditional way." The result is that his work sparks the imagination and engenders conversation.
Jose Sarinana was born in Durango, Mexico in 1976. He received his BFA in 1999 from the University of Southern California and his MFA in 2004 from the San Francisco Art Institute. In the summer of 2006 he was a recipient of a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture fellowship. He is currently living in Los Angeles where he says he "is always improving on his mustard recipe." He says his work is concerned with "finding and expanding the infinite, absurd, marvelous and overlooked in the everyday…" He likes to allow "the work to present itself in an entertaining, seductive or deceptively plain fashion." Sarinana doesn't "hold any material and its use in any sacred or traditional way." The result is that his work sparks the imagination and engenders conversation.
Elyce Semenec works with performance, media and new technology to produce videos, installations and work for the web. Semenec instinctively utilizes her keen sense of humor while interacting with the public. Her film based work comments on the nature of social interaction and the dynamics of seeing and doing. She likes to work outside of the traditional venues for art and prefers urban settings. Semenec documents her ideas on paper and in film. In past work she has made drawings with a crayon secured to the seat of a bicycle where the crayon made contact with the paper as she rode a prescribed distance. Her work has been seen internationally in screenings and performances including venues in Canada, England, Germany, Japan, United States and Switzerland. Semenec received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
www.trampoline.org.uk
Christopher Skura envisions a complex and densely layered universe of hard edge "life" forms coexisting on the cusp of the planet as he draws on paper with colored pencils. The surface of Skura's work is densely packed with visual information. He creates a cosmic sense of space with the color and point of his pencil. Various elements of his compositions can be isolated and yet everything connects to something else.
Christopher Skura received his BFA in Painting and a Certificate for Independent Study
in Sculpture from Ringling School of Art and Design and an Associates degree in Liberal Arts from New York University. In recent years, Skura's drawings have been exhibited in New York City at Sikema Jenkins Gallery, K.S. Art; Jeff Bailey Gallery; I-20 Gallery; Cynthia Broan Gallery, New York University/ East 80 Gallery; Salmagundi Club and Thread Waxing Space, as well as the Aron Packer Gallery in Chicago, Rocket Projects, and the Dorsch Gallery in Miami and Whitney Artworks in Portland.
Skura has lived and worked in New York City since 1995 and resides in Chelsea with his wife, ceramic artist Julie Knight. He maintains a studio in Soho. Skura has helped coordinate and sometimes collaborated on installation projects with artists as diverse as Maya Lin, Claes Oldenburg, Matthew Barney, Laurie Anderson, Cindy Sherman, Bill Viola, Nancy Burson, and Paul Kos. He was a Production Manager at the Guggenheim Museum for three years and Chief Preparator at New York University's Grey Art Gallery for seven years. He is currently an assistant conservator to master paintings conservator Dr. Charles Von-Nostitz in Manhattan.
Well known in Florida, he was selected for inclusion in the first "Featuring Florida" exhibition series at the Ringling Museum of Art in 1993 and was included in other shows around the state at the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Daytona Beach, the Vero Beach Center for the Arts, twice at the Fine Arts Museum at Florida State University in Tallahassee and the St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts in 2004. Skura's work is included in the collections of the Museum of Arts and Sciences, Daytona; The Box Art Museum, Sweden; the personal collection of Lynn Gumpert, Peter Read and over one hundred other private collections throughout Canada, New York, Florida and the United States.
www.christopherskura.com