October 26 - December 12, 2025
Brad Melamed - (still) Curious (yellow) | Laura Chasman - The morning staff meeting, 1977-78 | Alex Stolyarov - On Love and Density of Gray | J.P. Harvey - Meanwhile at the Institute for Applied Nonsense | Oli Watt - More Decoys
OPENING RECEPTION, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2025, 1-4pm
WAITING ROOM
Brad Melamed - (still) Curious (yellow)
In the Waiting Room, Brad Melamed, will be exhibiting, (still) Curious (yellow), a recent series of paintings on paper. The series incorporates recurring themes in the artist’s work including pattern, repetition, gesture, process and the grid. Encoded in these vibrational fields is the quantum principle that each part is equal and essential to the whole, and paradoxically, the whole is of infinite variations. In this notion, the rotated and mirrored components are understood to be both quantum and democratic.
Each work in the series is constructed by the following set of rules:
Each painting is composed of nine 8” x 6” units.
All marks are made with a 2” house painters brush.
The palette is limited to white, black and yellow.
Each stroke is a gradation from black to yellow to white.
The ground is an arrangement of light yellow and light grey
The end of each stroke must go off the page or be concealed by another stroke.
Brad Melamed lives and works in New York City. He grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and received a BFA from the University of Michigan ’76. He has shown at Artists Space, the Drawing Center, the New Museum of Contemporary Art and had solo exhibitions at East Village gallery Piezo Electric. Presently he assists in managing the art and archive of the estate of artists Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian Buczak, as well as being artist-in-residence at the townhouse of the estate.
AL’S OFFICE
Laura Chasman - The morning staff meeting, 1977-78
Portraiture has always been at the heart of my work.
In the late '70s I was hired to be the art therapist on an inpatient psychiatric unit in Boston. This was a world that was unfamiliar to me, but one that I would come to know over the course of the next 4 years. When I learned that I had been accepted to a graduate school program and would be leaving in a year, the idea came to me to capture my experience. The morning staff meeting brought everyone together - the chief of psychiatry, psychiatric residents, social workers, nurses, and students. And so, discretely, ( my drawing paper was sized to fit neatly inside my 4.5" x 6" appointment book ) I sketched the portraits of the staff. In the evenings, I developed my sketches, painting with gouache. I am excited to be showing some of these small works at 57w57 Arts in NYC.
Laura Chasman grew up in Brooklyn, NY. She is a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University, and Smith College School of Social Work. After living most of her adult life in the Boston area with her artist husband and their son, she and her husband now reside in Florence, MA. Chasman has been exhibiting her work in galleries and institutions for close to 50 years. Awards and honors include: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s Maud Morgan Prize and solo exhibition; recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council, New England Foundation for the Arts Grant in Painting; an Artist Resource Trust recipient; a Boston Artadia finalist. Her portraits have been included in exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery. Chasman’s work has been included in art fairs. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Smith College Museum of Art, New Britain Museum of American Art, Fidelity Investments, Simmons College, Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Boston Public Library. Currently, her solo exhibition "Here Today, Gone Tomorrow" is on view at the Brattleboro Museum of Art.
AL’S OFFICE
Alex Stolyarov - On Love and Density of Gray
I basically paint feelings, the invisible mental states, and I need to give them form. Inner world is much stronger than the world of appearances, it dominates one’s existence. So, painting becomes a necessity, a road to inner peace.
Alex Stolyarov was born in the former Soviet Union and grew up in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Went to school at the Art Institute of Chicago. Lives and works in New York.
MELANIE’S OFFICE
J.P. Harvey - Meanwhile at the Institute for Applied Nonsense
last one left one, mom’s clear abilities reverberate chief status of considerable magnitude, a shirt stained with krylon residue
fruits from charred images are hanging as paintings, the room’s so calm, light is light and the floor feels soft, talk / speech almost broken in pieces each time, arms falling
what’s that sound, brain’s a system of chewy chunks on a plate, slow curveball carved wood, green is a fraction of the sky,
meanwhile at the Institute for Applied Nonsense...
J.P. Harvey was born in 1984 in Quebec City, Canada. He still lives there with his spouse and son.
SHELF
Oli Watt - More Decoys
For two years, beginning in 2020, I worked on a series of 101 non-functional decoy forms, inspired by Chicago artist Roger Brown’s collection of duck decoys. I collected local wood from downed trees, found objects and, occasionally, purchased materials, to create a family of water fowl decoys. Working with ideas of attraction (a decoy’s function) and distraction (creating useless objects during a pandemic lockdown), I allowed the materials to dictate the forms and the processes used. Some decoys involved long, laborious manipulation of materials, such as wood carving or repetitive drilling, nailing, and gluing. Others were finished within minutes. Some were highly planned, while others were improvised. Ranging from the elegant to the abject, each completed decoy presented me with ideas and challenges that led to the next. Overall, 101 Decoys is an exercise in understanding, utilizing, and undermining repetition as a process and a tool.
Oli Watt lives and works in Chicago. He is an associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he teaches printmaking. Oli’s artwork has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York; the International Center of Graphic Art, Slovenia; Walpodenakademie Mainz, Germany; La Band Art Gallery, Los Angeles, and Rocket Gallery, London. His work has appeared in Art on Paper, Art US, the New Art Examiner and Village Voice. He runs a project space called “free range” in Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood.
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