Unreality Bomb

About

“Unreality Bomb “ is a term first coined by Roger White in a seminal book on contemporary art titled The Contemporaries. White used this term to characterize a painting that had pieces deliberately removed from it, as a stylistic choice. White’s statement describes the work chosen for this exhibition; work that has an unseen layer removed from it by artificial and fictional means, to create an impression of space. 

With Unreality Bomb the painter/curator Alex Sewell presents a survey of painting and sculpture that concerns itself with the combination of abstract and figurative expression. The work is influenced by the artists’ emotions and results in self-revealing images, creating impressions of a vulnerable sincerity. 

Eric Ashcraft paints careful arrangements of mundane objects connected together, balancing on or hanging from each other, against monochrome backgrounds, producing an unsettling effect. Many of these images pass on the artist’s anxieties, as in his “Still Life with Brain”. 

Dan Fig uses geometric patterns that are suddenly interrupted with concrete scenes from a personal narrative told through a series of superimposed images. The location and time of the image remain unknown, but it seems clear that the story told through the work is an intimate one. 

The fragmented or exaggerated self-portraits by Paul Gagner are instilled with a comical sense of unease. They give a window into the artist’s daily experience with a refreshing lack of complacency. 

Maggie Goldstone’s paintings depict tender scenes of bathing and self-care, as well as memories with specific people or animals that are named in the painting’s titles. The bold, often uniformly colored yet richly textured backgrounds create an impression of intimacy within the paintings, bringing forward subject, and facilitating the viewer’s empathy with the depicted human or animal. 

In his videos, Jake Brush uses identifiable objects (strawberries, houses, body parts, 

picket fences) that overlap, slide, or crowd the screen, creating comical, whimsical, and 

sometimes grotesque associations of ideas. 

Duy Hoàng’s lyrical plant-based installations, using transparent plastic sheets and cups, spike the viewer’s curiosity – one inevitably wants to know more about the secrets held by these small containers. 

Like organisms in their own right, Jessica Tawczynski’s paintings seems to draw on the residual information of an ever-developing landscape. Painted planes juxtapose suggesting a much larger world that stretches beyond the painting.