AUG
Working Bodies
Jeff Repko
These abstract mechanisms are surrogates for figures and for the ways body and identity are inseparable, even when they feel at odds. Made of specialized parts capable of broad and specific tasks, they carry the implication of function. But by obscuring utility, that function retreats. Without assignment, the purpose becomes simply to exist. The work occupies the space between labor and play as they both align with a restless motion. Through digital and analog processes, precisely fabricated components combine with the slower rhythmic labors of woodwork, sewing, and crocheting. Vibrant color and surface queer these mechanical references, stretching across genders and identities, becoming bodily. The paintings flatten this vocabulary into blueprints, catching machines mid-action, freed from gravity and wear. These mechanisms require care and are destined to deteriorate. Like bodies, they rely on others to broaden their possibilities. This fragility and need for connection celebrates existence instead of progress and the completion of a task.
And
SILENCE. silent
Paul F. Yount
SILENCE. silent depicts a silent introspective journey into the chaos and the confusion of the current social, sexual, psychological and political climate that is at odds with the humanity in our culture. Yount, a two-time New York City’ s Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant Recipient, paints the human condition and the metaphysical aspects of our origins, time, space, and where we are going in the future. The essence of our existence and how we treat one another and our behavior is the general concept that envelopes two subcategories. One is of an epic global proportion of humanity’ s history and how this repeats the atrocities and perpetuates the indoctrination of the mind and soul and a secondary stage with a personal domestic perspective of being a universal poetic visual artist and how this affects his perspective of the family relationships of power dynamics and his perspective of gender structures and interactions.
August 17 through September 30
Reception: Thursday, August 27 at 5:00 PM ALEXANDER BREST GALLERY
SEPT