Future Perfect

About

FUTURE PERFECT features transcendental works that function as portals to unimagined and surprising new realities. This exhibition features the subtly painted abstractions of Jenny Kemp,  otherworldly graphite drawings by Charles Sommer and the refined yet bold oils by Katie Neece.

Jenny Kemp’s paintings focus on line and pattern and its ability to embody conduits for trains of thought. Creating rhythmic spaces where compositions begin with a revelatory moment and grow into a reactionary process in which linear marks thread, converse and evolve into teeming forms. Housed within evocative shapes that reference personal events and musings, these become visual manifestations of discovery, habitude, and navigation.

Charles Sommer’s work is an investigation into an alternate universe and world of his own. Using drawing as departure point, he invents his own cosmology, abstracted from science fiction, unexplained phenomena, queerness, masculinity, as well as architecture and the history of abstract art. The work often obsessive in regards to control and compositional balance, often utilizes a set of rules and rigid visual vocabulary. The work connects disparate elements and ideas about space and how it can be depicted, shifting between representational and queer coded abstraction. Sommer is  interested in the intersections between physical and psychological spaces while primarily focusing on the use of landscapes in order to solicit otherworldly associations.

Polishing and embossing the paper with a mechanical graphite pencil and powdered graphite allows Sommer to explore the material for its inherent matte and reflective qualities. Thinking of his drawings as autonomous objects rather than images, allowing the work to exist not just as representations of a world but rather the world itself.

Using traditional oil painting techniques that rely on nuanced physical touch and demanding skill, Katie Neece’s work incorporates imagery from computer graphics software programs and related digital ephemera. She creates an artificial pictorial space using gradients, drop shadows, and flat areas to construct an illusionistic environment within the conventions of the screen and digital manifestations of space. Choosing to paint the digital constructions draws attention to both advancements in technology and the advancements in the historical trajectory of painting.

She uses the pictorial language of geometric abstraction among the early 20th century European avant-garde, while simultaneously focusing on 90’s American mall aesthetic, pop culture and design aesthetic. She incorporates and uses these forms as a reference to an inherent optimism in a utopian future that has continually failed to materialize. This re-contextualization is an attempt to illustrate that the past continually reminds us of the future’s failure in the form of haunting.