Marisa Sage
Since 2007

Discussions (1) Opportunities (0) Events (25) Jobs (0)
EVENT

Nicole Stager: Synaesthesia


Dates:
Fri Oct 10, 2008 00:00 - Sun Sep 28, 2008

Location:
United States of America

Nicole Stager: Synaesthesia
October 10th - November 2nd, 2008

Opening Reception: Friday October 10th 6-10pm
Artist’s Dinner: October 17th 8pm - RSVP Required


Like the Spice is pleased to present Synaesthesia: Nicole Stager, an exhibition of the artist’s gloriously colorful abstract photograms.

Taking literally the meaning of photography, drawing with light, Stager makes her elegant works in the darkroom, drawing some with handheld light sources, others use found objects as three dimensional negatives.

Emotionally evocative yet inherently mysterious, Stager’s work sits at the crossroads of several different artistic practices. In a process that combines the specificity of the photograph as document with the aesthetic history of abstract painting through the performative manipulation of light and color in real time, Stager induces a kind of trans-media synthesis rarely seen in work that is so simple in its beauty. Time, color, shape and line are all uniquely presented in Stager’s work.

Some of the first photographic images, photograms are cameraless images that have a far more poetic relationship to their subjects than traditional photography. In fact, the works in this exhibition have far more to do with the interaction of light, shadow and chemistry than with the objects that produced them. The resulting images become open to interpretation and conjecture. The uncertainty about true sources allows for a work that may remind one viewer of a childhood memory, another of a song from last summer, and another of the smell of burning leaves. Are the colored circles in a given work burns? Drops of blood? Streetlamps? They could be any of the above, or none.

Born in 1978 Wellsboro, PA, Nicole Stager holds a BS and MEd in Art Education and a BFA in Graphic Design and Photography from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. She is currently completing her MFA in New Media from the Transart Instituta at Danube University in Krems Austria. She has been showing her work for the past five years in New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, and California including solo shows at Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York and Gallery 908 in Reading, Pennsylvania. Her work has been featured in Harper’s and Art Review Magazine. Stager has been teaching photography since 2002 and was recently awarded a Fullbright Teacher Exchange Scholarship which she will complete this winter at Brizham College in Brizham, England. This is her first solo show at Like the Spice Gallery.

Like the Spice Gallery
224 Roebling Street
Brooklyn, New York 11211
www.likethespice.com
718.388.5388
Mon. Wed. - Sat. 12-8:00 Sun. 12-7:00


EVENT

Force Against Force: Eric LoPresti


Dates:
Fri May 16, 2008 00:00 - Sat Apr 19, 2008

Force Against Force: Eric LoPresti
May 16th - June 8th 2008
Opening Reception Friday May 16th 6:30-10:00pm
Gallery Hours - Wed-Sat, Mon 12-8pm - Sun 12-7pm - Closed Tuesdays

Like The Spice is proud to present Force Against Force featuring Eric LoPresti’s eloquent diptychs composed of photorealistic renderings and airbrushed gradients. Each binary pairing, executed in either graphite or oil and acrylic, alludes to uncontrollable forces and the universality of conflict and catastrophic loss. The precisely realized images of destruction, danger and chaos on one panel are set against the contemplative psychological space of color field painting, thereby combining two schools of painting historically seen as antagonistic to each other.

Based on dramatic and sometimes harrowing photographs of contemporary battlegrounds in Iraq and the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as sites of danger and turmoil --- shark infested waters, melting icebergs and refugee camps --- these paintings and drawings express the inadequacy of human perception to grasp the vast, shapeless complexities of powerful forces.

Opposing each landscape is an abstract gradient, where multiple colors or tones fade into one another in atmospheric, emotionally charged fields. With no indication of scale and lacking any solid form, the gradients provide open space into which the viewer can project their reactions and emotions.

About the diptychs, “I think of them as visual equations, where the resulting experience is very different than the sum of the parts. Each side transforms the other by its proximity,” says Eric.

Born in 1971, Eric LoPresti grew up in the remote desert of southeastern Washington State. He received his BA in Cognitive Science from the University of Rochester in 1993, and his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2002. His work has been exhibited internationally, including solo shows at Jan Larson Fine Art and Miami University. He is the recipient of the Louis J. Kuriansky Foundation Award and the 2005 Miami Young Painters, William and Dorothy Yeck Purchase Award. This will be his first solo show at Like the Spice.


EVENT

There There: Ross Racine and Peter Feigenbaum


Dates:
Thu Mar 20, 2008 00:00 - Thu Mar 20, 2008

There There: Ross Racine and Peter Feigenbaum
April 11th - May 11th 2008
Opening Reception Friday April 11th 6:30-10:00pm
[IMG]http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c331/marisais/waste-management-business.jpg[/IMG]
Ross Racine and Peter Feigenbaum bring their architectural fantasies to life in this boundary-teasing show. Using the built environment as a takeoff point for exploration, the works in this exhibition straddle the line between representation and invention.

Feigenbaum presents environmental photographs of model city blocks as well as a site-specific installation built in the gallery. These cityscapes, both remembered and imagined, use the language of rooftop water tanks, 25-foot-wide five-story walkups, Italianate cornices, ancient brick facades painted Pepto-Bismol pink, roll-up store-front grates, parapet graffiti, and garish plastic storefront awnings that we instantly recognize as New York. Not models of actual neighborhoods these places are 3D redeployments of the cinematic New Yorks of “The French Connection” and 80’s graffiti flicks, the digital New Yorks of Sim City and Grand Theft Auto spliced with the artist’s memories of the city’s fringes as seen from the Bruckner Expressway as a child. As familiar as they are unfamiliar these New York remixes act as a kind of New York experience generator.

Ross Racine’s drawings/plans for exurban developments are similarly invented. Racine imagines McMansion communities as strange hives plunked into post-agrarian wastelands. Seen from the air the communities are built into graphic forms, taking the shapes of spirals, explosions and clouds that mirror the strange psychology of modular communities. Hand drawn directly by computer these drawings are in no part photographic but through digital processes become photographically convincing. They are at once allegories and plans. Racine is concerned with drawing, photography and importantly the new field of imaging. Like satellite scans from a Google Earth that’s almost-but-not-quite our Earth, they combine the eeriness of a Twilight Zone episode with a satire of our simultaneous desires for community, togetherness, privacy and property.

Peter Feigenbaum was born in Cambridge, MA in 1984. He graduated from Yale University in 2006 with BA in Architecture. He works for the architecture firm Arquitectonica, doing drafting, illustration and 3D modeling. Photographs of his models of invented outer-borough neighborhoods attracted internet attention leading to publication in the British architectural magazine, Icon. This is Peter’s first major New York exhibition.

Born in Montreal, Quebec, Ross Racine received his BFA from the Université du Québec à Montréal, his MFA from Concordia University and a graduate diploma in computer science one year later. He has shown extensively across the US and Canada. He currently lives and works in New York.


EVENT

FLIP


Dates:
Fri Feb 08, 2008 00:00 - Sat Dec 29, 2007

Like the Spice is pleased to present the work of two artists working with ambiguity. Rachel Beach creates wall-mounted sculptures that burst the boundaries between real and illusory visual perception. Nora Herting’s flocked photographs rest in the space between truth and fiction, celebration and expose. Any attempt to resolve the contradictions in these artist’s work rests on shaky ground.

We take in an overload of sensory information and process most of it automatically, we rely on neurological and linguistic shortcuts for almost everything. Enter the finely crafted work of Rachel Beach with its shortcut short circuitry tripping up our tidy perception. Each of her sculpture/paintings is designed to collide our visual perception of three-dimensional form with our perception of the illusory space created by the pieces’ painted and veneered skins. These visual acrobatics are more than Jedi mind tricks though. The perceptual flip-flops these works create sensitize us to our flawed biological circuitry; we know our brain is being hacked but remain powerless to see what is right in front of us. Usually we rely on the logic of “seeing is believing” but when viewing Rachel Beach’s work we can do neither.

Nora Herting’s Spirit series is also premised upon a meticulously controlled presentation of space but the performative space is transformed into social allegory. Based on photographs taken during cheerleading competitions, these works conflate distinctions between documentary and fantasy, public and private space as well as the viewer and creator. These photographs are unmanipulated documents of the performers they depict; each tableau was created in real time as part of a routine. Removing the backgrounds and therefore the context both introduces ambiguity and an extreme focus on the cheerleaders themselves. The girl’s expressions of fierce determination and practiced smiles become archetypical. Placed in front of colorfully flocked backgrounds patterned with hybrid cheerleading-floral motifs the subjects become stand-ins for their competitive, athletic and stage-managed worlds. These photographs straddle the genres of sports documentary and social portraiture. Both staged and candid, real and constructed the cheerleaders are both specimens from another world and symbols of it simultaneously.

Born in Canada in 1975, Rachel Beach received her BFA from NSCAD University in 1998 and her MFA from Yale University in 2001. Rachel has shown her work across both the USA and Canada. She is a past recipient of the Ontario Arts Council Exhibition Grant and the Canada Council for the Arts Production Grant and was a 2007 nominee for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Emerging Artist Grants. In the past, Like the Spice presented Rachel’s work as part of Deer Art: Animal Imagery in Contemporary Art and was pleased to represent her work at the Fountain Miami Fair in December 2007.

Nora Herting received her BFA from the University of New Mexico in 1999 and her MFA from Ohio State University in 2005. Nora has showed her photographs, installations and performance works across the country and internationally. She was an artist in residence at the McColl Center for the Visual Arts and was a winner of the Vermont Studio Artist Scholarship both in 2007. This is Nora’s first show at Like the Spice.


EVENT

Deer Art: Animal Imagery in Contemporary Art


Dates:
Sat Dec 15, 2007 00:00 - Fri Dec 14, 2007

Deer Art: Animal Imagery in Contemporary Art
December 15th - January 11th 2008
Opening Saturday December 15th 6:30-10:00pm

You’re trapped like a deer in the headlights…you can’t run from the upcoming show at Like the Spice.
We hope it don’t run you down.

Images of animals have been increasingly prevalent in contemporary art recently…you can't spit at an art fair without hitting two deer, a bear and probably a sasquatch. Exploring the urgency animal representations have had recently, this show includes works that explore several different aspects of the relationship between animals and culture.

In some works animals stand in for people, they are vulnerable or ferocious in ways that reveal more about the human condition than about the animals themselves. This is the Disney approach, where animals are used to illuminate character types and traits. An owl becomes a wise old man and a fox is always the trickster. Other works use animal imagery for its psychological associations: totemic symbols for forces of nature, threatening or shamanistic, these animals confront us with their unpredictability and archetypical wildness. The unsettling sight of eels crawling over each other. The horror of confronting a predator in the wilderness. This psychological take is complimented by an approach that recognizes our tenuous and mediated contemporary relationship with nature as commodity, test subject, lifestyle accessory and fashion trope. The first dogs in space. The kitten as makeout voyeur. These ideas of course inform and resist each other and some works borrow aspects of each mode.

In the fable of the Scorpion and the Frog, animals cannot help but be what they are...this show asks whether people are any different or whether animals are really that transparent.

This show includes works by Undine Brod, Thomas Clark, Seth Cohen, Cair Crawford, Ondine Wolfe Crispin, Allison Edge, Brendan Fernandes, Abby Goodman, Jason Head, Amy Hill, Tatiana Kronberg, Max Liboiron, Eric LoPresti, Johnna MacArthur, Philip Simmons, Steven Tabbutt, Grace Teng and Chadwick Whitehead.

With a special closing performance Friday January 11th 2008, 7:30-10:00pm by Castle Critters.