Place and Wonder presents five American artists whose work considers what we know and cannot entirely know about locations - whether real spaces or mental ones- through depictions and transcriptions of landscape, delight, humor, memory, and narrative.
If the lurid world known as 'The Upside-Down' from Netflix's Stranger Things had contemporary art situated somewhere within it, New York artist Barbara Friedman's mood-enhanced paintings of Pinocchio and Gumby as giants invading dystopian suburban spaces might be just the thing. With an oddly satisfying neon-to-smoky palette, Friedman conjures a hyperbolic gloaming with cinematic intensity. David Skinner's paintings are similarly situated in an atmosphere of isolation and ambiguous states of being. He remixes references to folklore, frontiers, masculinity, longing, and technological evolution with collage-like fields of painterly color and intuitive scrawls intersecting with rendered figures and landscape elements.
Only recently painting in North Carolina after living and working in Michigan and Chicago, Selene Plum describes her elegant, reductive oil and encaustic paintings as "the bone structure of this landscape and everything beneath it." Her ongoing series Moon Mudras considers the earth, stars, and moon painted responsively onto weathered wood substrates often salvaged from local tobacco barns. North Carolina artist Melanie Norris' airy, light-filled paintings in water media evoke a heady, buzzing summertime. Enchanted with repetition of form and color found in the stripes of drive-by tent revivals on the side of the road or clothing swinging on a line to dry, Norris contemplates the inhabited spaces of her everyday life with a confident, joyful hand.
Brooklyn artist Barry Hazard's self-titled 'sculpture paintings' feature spectacular vistas of glaciers, canyons, meadows and waterfalls scaled to hobby-size. Spilling out of their frames and projecting into three-dimensional space, Hazard's playful, deceptively lighthearted, paint-encrusted scenes form a dioramic notational catalog of the natural world and humanity's relationship to it. Suggested narratives touching on art history and our collective love of wide-open spaces compel the viewer into a childlike and wonder-filled state of seeing.
The heady present moments and hits of nostalgia laced throughout Place and Wonder invite an immersive state of abandon, like a series of bedtime stories and lullabies strung together and dreaming out loud.
