New exhibitions

Dates: June 10 to July 30, 2016

Opening: Friday, June 10 from 6-9 pm

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LMAKgallery is pleased to present Papered Stories. The exhibition brings together 14 artists dealing with paper; Jane Benson, William Binnie, Nayda Collazo-Llorens, Matthew Craven, Nate Ethier, Gonzalo Fuenmayor, Jeff Grant, David Kramer, Russell Nachman, Ken Nintzel, Erika Ranee, Aiden Simon, Pär Strömberg, and Martha Tuttle, which opens on Friday, June 10 and will be on view until July 30th.

In Papered Stories fourteen artists take a look at how work on paper can be interpreted. Each artist uses paper differently: as material, as bearer, as medium – creating a dialogue amongst the works. Akin to conversations, the works start to inform one another which results in engaging surprises.

During the duration of the show Ken Nintzel will perform selections from his paper and object theater work “Frances Faye’s Folk Song Sing-A-Long”. Performances will take place on two weekends in June: on the 18th/19th and also on the 25th/26th.

Jane Benson expands upon the themes of division and connection. The lalala landscape drawings, featured here, render of a single musical note in long graphite rows, creating shifting horizons as the viewer reads the somber melody.  In their singularity the limited tonal range of the drawings reflects on the experience of exile and separation.

William Binnie was born in Dallas and currently works in Massachusetts.  His work explores the nihilism and reactionary violence that rest uncomfortably below the surface of mainstream American culture. His juxtapositions with idyllic images of North America casts doubt on the myth of American innocence while holding tight to the hope that it might still be true.

Nayda Collazo-Llorens is a visual artist engaged in an interdisciplinary practice incorporating multiple mediums and strategies. Through her practice, she examines the way in which we perceive and process information, dealing with concepts of navigation, language and hyper-connectivity.

New York-based Matthew Craven‘s works are preoccupied first with process, repetition, and the discernment of patterns and series. In his re-use of textbooks from the 1960’s through the 1990’s, many of which are filled with misinformation and ideologically-inflected language, however the work confronts and questions this history and those who set it as truth.

Drawing on traditions of twentieth century formalism and hard-edge abstraction, Nate Ethier‘s flamboyant geometric abstractions celebrate both the bucolic and the post-industrial world. The exchange of interchangeable modular structures through synchronicity and symmetry is the bedrock of the work, while rock and roll, the rolling surf, and poetry whisper in the background.

Colombian-born Gonzalo Fuenmayor looks to Latin American art history to comment on contemporary international politics. Utilizing a symbolic language, Fuenmayor expresses it with detailed Rococo inspired charcoal drawings of iconic imagery of palm trees and bananas in unexpected settings. Indirectly criticizing the right-wing military regimes that were funded by the international community and still bear their influence and the after-effects of the Monroe Doctrine.

Jeff Grant deals with ambiguities and over-determinations inherent in or applied to familiar images

and forms. His work is characterized by exaggerated assertions and subtle contradictions. The

specificity of the image and its identifiable qualities are manipulated and disregarded creating an

elusive instability while also existing as precisely defined drawing.

David Kramer pulls from that formative decade, re-crafting its lifestyle advertisements and distinctive interior design into paintings, drawings, and installations both nostalgic and ironic. He overlays what he calls “one-liners” onto his images and objects, revealing the falsity of the idealized vision they present and the disillusionment of adulthood. Narrative has always been a crucial ingredient to his work, whether it comes through his own words and text; or is provided by the viewer while interacting with his furniture and installations.

Russell Nachman’s, a Colorado native living in New York, work takes up themes of madness, unlikely kinship and rock ‘n’ roll.Drawing upon the reactions utopias explored in Black Metal and post-Vietnam War-era biker culture, as well as late-18th century German Romantic literature, with its focus away from Enlightenment-era rationalism, its embrace of the individual, and its fascination with heightened states of experience.

Ken Nintzel‘s works are an extension of and informed by avant-garde theater and performance based works. Featuring paper theater and an assortment of mechanical devises, Nintzel uncovers not just a third dimension in paper but also its performative capabilities.

His piece “Frances Faye’s Folk Song Sing-A-Long” will present a series of short paper and object theater works that will occur repeatedly between 2-4 PM on Saturdays/Sundays, June 18-19 and 25-26. This project is generously supported by a grant from the Jim Henson Foundation.

Erika Ranee‘s work reflects on the fleeting instance where nature and city grit collide allowing for an exploration and complexity of building an image. There is the push and pull in the act of painting that anticipates the desired reveal: a dance between control and chance.

Aiden Simon is interested in the negotiation of play and the disruption of stable subject positions. In his drawings the segments of the figure create lone moments that intervene a direct portraiture but force the viewer to question narrative construction; solely depend on a line dissecting its negative space.

Pär Strömberg is influenced by the landscapes of his native Sweden as well as the tradition of German and Russian Symbolism, creating a dialogue of depictions of solitary individuals confronting landscapes both beautiful and fearsome. Strömberg’s watercolors abound in austere, sub-arctic landscapes, shadowy figures, and the quietude of post-apocalyptic ruin. Aware of the affective power of images, however, Strömberg’s work refuses “to tip over into a quasi-religious overindulgence or turn into a blank projection surface for nationalistic ideas.”

Martha Tuttle uses tactile processes to mediate between intention and happenstance.  Weavings engaged with so deeply by the hands that the fabric begins to rupture as it is becoming made, layers of paper becoming so thin they record every touch.  Through the activity of their making, the works exist as moments in time preserved in the frailty of their material.

Detail view of Pär Strömberg Psalms of the Black Light II, 2015 Watercolor on paper, 12 x 9 inches

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For more information or press inquiries, please contact Bart Keijsers Koning at Bart@lmakgallery.com

or call 212 255 9707.

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298 Grand Street New York NY 10002

Bart@LMAKgallery.com

Louky@LMAKgallery.com

T: 212 255 9707

298 Grand Street

New York NY 10002

212 255 9707

info@lmakgallery.com

www.lmakgallery.com