On view May 14 - 24
Opening Reception Wednesday, May 14, from 5:00–8:00 pm
"There is a sly gamesmanship in the work of Jordan Albaugh,who estranges the pseudo-familiar by running it through operations of his own design: algorithmic, aesthetic, intimate. He’s hacked bodies and landscapes from the cozy corners of video games, cracking the images along new coordinates and editing them into hypnotic loops. If nature was once a subject in art for contemplation or meditation, on Albaugh’s watch time goes ouroboric (better yet, ouro-botic), giving an unending performance of finitude. His drawings and collages are executed with a similar wit and sleight of hand — hear here also, slight of hand — reminding us that disappearing acts can only happen when we’re not looking." -Jennifer Krasinski
"By contrast, there is a deathliness stowed inside the salvaged objects and images in Nathaniel Axel’s work that offers a kind of spectral encounter in which a viewer sees things. If one erases a palimpsest to write on it again, Axel instead allows the precedent materials to visibly haunt his present creations. Antiquated books become sites for laser etchings; pictures are produced from collaged shards collected from territories at once foreign and familiar. As with any ghost story, technology plays its part; whether via different languages or digital processes, Axel fuses and confuses his work’s transmission and reception, requiring that viewers remain ever alert to the rise and fall of its frequencies." -Jennifer Krasinski
"Lauren Klenow’s contemplative and complex sculptures take shape in the spaces between the natural, the manufactured and the designed worlds. Klenow seems to compress entire landscapes into deceptively simple forms, which she creates out of cement, paper, charcoal, coal, and other earthy materials. Solid and possessed of inarguable gravity, her elegant geometries carve out a presence that seems also to suggest an absence of some kind — but what would these works memorialize, or purport to preserve? What needs remembering? Klenow allows this tension to charge her work without overriding its underlying lyricism, one that returns the viewer to the uncommon topographies and evocative geologies of the artist’s own making." -Jennifer Krasinski
"Megha Mattoo paints with an intelligent, expressive hand that calls forth the forces that simmer beneath the surface of her subjects: sensuality, sexuality, reverie, and desire. For the women who populate Mattoo’s worlds, intimacy lays claim to an authority over the self and, at times, over an unseen other. With delicacy and violence, grace and urgency, Mattoo asserts a place for her charged narratives inside certain hallowed traditions in painting. Working with egg tempera, for example, she infuses her renderings of skin, eyes, hair and light with distinct symbolic vibrations. Mattoo’s is a richly layered visual language — radiant and resonant — that opens and articulates a new sacred space for the as-yet-untold stories of her women."-Jennifer Krasinski