Fresh Blood

About

PROTO GOMEZ proudly presents FRESH BLOOD, a look at eight artists, Clint Bargers, Deric Carner, Mark Dineen, Jon Duff, Loren Erdrich, Jennifer Lothrigel, Julie Nagle, and Matt Sears, whose innovative practices and idiomatic perspectives offer intriguing new positions from which to engage with emerging and mid-career contemporary art. Incorporating a diverse range of materials and disciplines, the works in FRESH BLOOD emblematize notions of vitality with regard to the varied approaches employed in their creation. With clearly individual concerns in both subject matter and handling, the artists’ sensibilities here do overlap on a few key themes, including a focus on the body and issues of corporeality, mortality, beauty, emotional topography and the esoteric.

Deric Carner (New York, NY) offers sculptures that reference both the body and biomorphic abstraction, playfully inhabiting the worlds of sexuality, formalism, and fetish. Loren Erdrich (New York, NY) employs the figure as subject through an innovative working process, wherein unbound pigments and dyes, in a water-based field, produce a fusion between body and ground, intention and chance. Also typifying inventive methodologies, artist and designer Mark Dineen (Fort Collins, CO) produces multivalent work at the intersections of craft, technology, artifact, and anthropology. While also interested in physical artifacts, Clint Bargers (Dallas, TX) foregrounds objects of various American subcultures within his sculptural practice, highlighting the influence and allure of communal totem and sign. The worlds of personal ritual, science, and mythology commingle in the work of Julie Nagle (New York, NY and Jersey City, NJ), whose offerings highlight the mutuality of the natural and fantastical planes. The merging of aim and intuition in Jennifer Lothrigel’s (Lafayette, CA) paintings solidify notions of the emotive, the spiritual and the recondite. Matt Sears (New York, NY) straddles the arenas of sculpture and photography in his works, with a decided emphasis on time, mortality and place. Through dense, all-over compositions and humorous, postapocalyptic scenes, Jon Duff’s (New York, NY) paintings and sculptures offer an uncommon glimpse into the personal and psychological strains beneath the morass of the modern day to day.

FRESH BLOOD, as a show, sets an intentional focus on artists that are new to the gallery, either in terms of our grateful awareness of them or in terms of a new working relationship, though we may have long followed their creative endeavors. These artists offer original perspectives and a renewed verve to PROTO GOMEZ programming, which serves as a fitting close to the gallery’s inaugural year. We are proud to have them. We entreat gallery visitors to use the artworks on display as an entry point through which to explore more deeply the broad, exciting and diverse range of handiworks from each of these exceptional artists. We hope that the viewer will, as did we, find optimism in the high caliber of this work, a renewed confidence in the importance and impact of the creative gesture, and a sanguine expectation of more good things to come.