January 4 – February 9, 2013
Allyn Gallup Contemporary, Sarasota, FL
Allyn Gallup Contemporary Art gallery presents “Town and Country,” January 4-February 9, 2013. The exhibit features paintings by Brooklyn-based artists Jackie Battenfield and Deborah Brown. A reception, with artists, is February 1, 6-8 p.m. The artists will offer remarks about themselves and their works and take questions from the audience. For more information about this exhibit, call 941-366-2454 or visit www.allyngallup.com. The gallery is at 1288 N. Palm Ave., in Sarasota.
In her series, “The Bushwick Paintings,” Deborah Brown explores the urban beauty of Bushwick, Brooklyn. “This odd landscape possesses a simultaneous allure and menace that I take as the starting point for my paintings,” says the artist. “Based on what I see, I invent architectural amalgams in which natural forms and man-made structures are woven together in a visual hodge-podge both comical and poignant. I juxtapose candy-colored skies, ghostly out-of-focus imagery, and dark silhouettes. I use inviting, painterly surfaces to depict car salvage lots, forbidding wires, satellite dishes, and video surveillance cameras.” Brown says that her aim is to “represent the social, ecological, and economic collisions at the level of the street. In this sense my work has a political intention: to provoke thought about what is taking place. I invite the viewer to enter an urban dystopia where familiar elements in unfamiliar combinations create a luscious unease.”
Jackie Battenfield works with watery pigments to “coax pools of paint into translucent veils of color. Anchoring these ephemeral elements are gestural marks, stripes and blocks of color. For the last decade I have focused on the fluidity of water and the natural gestures of plants and trees alongside abstract brush strokes and poured layers of paint.” In her paintings on Mylar for this exhibit, Battenfield images come from her photographs of trees, which she meticulously draws onto translucent drafting film. She then mixes two pigments to an ink-like consistency and shapes each element from a puddle of paint on the film’s nonabsorbent surface. “As this mixture dries, pigments reassert themselves, separating and forming unexpected and distinctive abstract patterns,” she says. “Color is an exploration of relationships between pigments, often arrived at after hundreds of studies. Form is dematerialized and re-assembled as a means of exploring color and the aliveness of a natural gesture made of repeated yet individual shapes. It recreates for me the original intimacy of the experience of looking.”
1288 North Palm Avenue, Sarasota, FL
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