April 21 - May 31, 2024
David Schell - Open | Patricia Zarate - Dyads | Sally Paul - Honey Trap | Bernie Kaminski - Books
OPENING RECEPTION - Sunday, April 21, 1-4pm
WAITING ROOM
David Schell - Open
I think of these recent works as being open to possibilities rather than limited by definitions. It’s an idea that is so specific to what I’m making when I’m in the studio, and it’s also a nice way of approaching each day when I wake up. The paintings have a lot of sculptural qualities to them, and the sculpture-paintings are really just paintings with bases - several are even designed to be hung on a wall if someone preferred them there. I like the way the openings and edges do very different things depending on the context they’re in. It’s like they’re trying to relate to the world.
I’ve been interested in the space around something for a long time, and this work is also really about that. It has so much to do with what’s not there, and how the remaining form interacts with absence. That nothing part is important. Like an unspoken word or the loss of a loved one, it has an impact on the something part, on what’s remaining. In many ways the open spaces change the way I approach the paint, leaving me to think about the form in front of me in a whole new way.
David Schell is a painter and homme au foyer working in Portland, Oregon. He received an MFA from American University and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His recent paintings are about openness and how form relates to absence. He is also a co-author of The Semi-Finalist, a painting focused blog featuring interviews by Schell and columns by Benjamin Terrell. Other recent shows include: Vessels at One Wall Gallery (Eugene, Oregon, 2024); Casual Plans at Augen Gallery (Portland, Oregon, 2023); Conditional at 57W57ARTS (NYC, 2022); and Current Surroundings at WSU Vancouver (Vancouver, Washington, 2022); intimate, intimate at Augen Gallery (2021); The Reductive Non-Objective Project (Sydney, Australia, 2019).
AL’S OFFICE
Patricia Zarate - Dyads
I am interested in exploring the perception of color and light through simple abstract shapes. My ideas evolve through sensory observations, memory, nature, and art. I use minimalist and conceptual approaches such as pairing, seriality, pattern, repetition, and uniformity. The diptychs in The Story of [color] investigate the relationship between two colors through overlapping diamond shapes.
Patricia Zarate is a visual artist whose work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally. She was awarded a fellowship at Bau Institute artist residency, Otranto, Italy in 2013 and she was the recipient of an individual artist support grant from the Queens Council on the Arts in 2004. Her work has been reviewed in BmoreArt, Artnexus, Art News, Newsday, and the Philadelphia Weekly. In 2013, Patricia co-founded Key Projects: an art space, devoted to creating dialogue and community with artists and the public through group exhibitions. She received a MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Born in Cali, Colombia, she currently lives and works in New York City.
MELANIE’S OFFICE
Sally Paul - Honey Trap
I make object-like paintings depicting lively grids that are an unlikely marriage between geometric abstraction and craft. I’m inspired by female driven textile art of the past 200 years as well as exploring a non-traditional approach to painting, pushing against the limits of the medium.
Made from acrylic, acrylic peels and painting medium on wood panel, the work evokes toothsome textiles with a focus on texture, finish, color interactions, simple geometric compositions and framing devices. Paint is poured and squeezed rather than dabbed and brushed. Wavering pressure, errant air bubbles, and subtle movements of the body are all captured and encapsulated in the paint, creating clues pointing the viewer to the artist’s hand and process. I’m drawn to both high and low contrast, bright and muted colors, matte and glossy surfaces, organization amongst variation, one activating the other. I hope to imbue these works with meaning, mystery and a relationship to the past and the future, ultimately allowing viewers to make their own connections through inferences from the colors combinations, patterns and forms that take shape.
Sally Paul (b.1974 Philadelphia, PA) is an artist, educator and curator based in Kansas City, MO. Paul has exhibited at Shelter, Essex Flowers, My Pet Ram, 247365, and The Arsenal Gallery in New York City and at the MdW Art Fair in Chicago, The EKRU Project, and Holsum Gallery in Kansas City. As a Museum Educator, she has taught at the Museum of Modern Art, The American Folk Art Museum, International Center of Photography, and The Bronx Museum. She is the co-founder of Troost Gardens, an artist-run gallery located in Kansas City, MO. Paul received a BFA from Pratt Institute and MA in Art Education from New York University. Sally Paul is a current visual art resident at the Charlotte Street Foundation.
SHELF
Bernie Kaminski - Books
I work with paper mache and I enjoy finding new and interesting ways to use the medium. I’ll look at a toothpaste tube or a pair of shoes or a stack of paperbacks and then spend days thinking about how to construct them. I obsess over the subjects and have various ideas about why I chose them, but it’s mostly a form of escapism.
Bernie Kaminski started making paper mache sculptures after his daughter brought home a paper mache seahorse she’d made in grade school. The piece inspired him to create paper mache versions of everyday objects in his apartment. His first solo exhibition was held at New York’s Turn Gallery in 2022. He lives and works in New York City.
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