Adjacent to Life

July 5 - August 7, 2020

Using a set of watercolors she made herself, Marisa Malone utilizes the rigors of the recent New York City stay-at-home order to further her practice while striving to make sense of the singular experience of quarantine. 

Malone states:

“These paintings emerged during three months of lockdown. One a day, eighty-six in total, they became a foundational part of tracking the long, blurring days spent at home. Providing routine, focus and a lens to view familiar surroundings anew, everyday objects and scenery became central figures. Their unrefined and imperfect nature offer an intimate and tender quality and suggest having less to do with outcome and more with process. 

February 15 – March 19, 2020

Peter Stankiewicz’s work presents visual art as a musical metaphor and the painted object as a contemplative realm.

Comprised of paint airbrushed onto plastic surfaces, these newest paintings further the artist’s exploration of color harmonies and color contrasts  - and the moods each suggests. The works’ intimate scale invites inspection, offering the viewer a prospective field for the exercise of imagination.

The matte finish seems to draw the light (and, with it, the viewer’s eye) into the material, rather than keeping attention at the surface. Stankiewicz states that he prefers to use an airbrush “for the effects it can create: soft, diffuse or faded atmospheres and layers of color - and for the absence of any immediate trace of the human hand.”

While evidence of the painter’s hand may be veiled, the works convey an appearance of being acted upon by outside forces - such as weathering, oxidation and wear. This situates each work in a world whose aspect we are left to determine by the recording of its effects.

As images, the paintings depict the artist’s own foray into the same field for the exercise of imagination that he extends to the viewer. For Stankiewicz, this is a field of visual reward and particularities. He states: “I like dark colors, earth tones, the colors of rainy days, twilight, and the light before dawn. I like the colors of bricks, stones and wood, the various colors of the bark of the plane trees in the city, the colors of rusted steel.”

January 14 – February 14, 2020

Eugênio Marino’s work, while embracing a healthy dose of cartoon art and pop culture, and exhibiting a studied interrogation of the usual suspects of European and American modernist schools, tells stories that are wholly and exuberantly his own.

Whether fleshing out themes of heroes and villains (replete with hi-tech gadgetry) or depicting recurring scenes from his Utopia (simply known as Love World) - where cats are central figures alongside other animals and imagined figures and landscapes - Eugênio strives, on a daily basis, to realize his visions through an ever-evolving sense of beauty and humor.

This fantastic serial high-stakes pictorial narrative is paralleled by the artist’s pursuit and commitment towards a more refined technical command as he pens a bold line wrought with conviction and seemingly equal parts care and panache. 

December 6 – January 13, 2020

New Yorker, Nathan Stapley, a lead artist for Double Fine Productions, makes his sixth annual appearance at Adjacent To Life. In this collection of en plein air gouaches, the artist continues to document East Village and Greenpoint activity and vantages. 

Employing an attuned sensitivity to light and its effects, Stapley creates both a portrait of the neighborhoods’ familiar locales and that of a painter dedicatedly refining his capacity in the service of perceptual delectation and accuracy.

November 5 – December 6, 2019

With these newest works, Angela Lau pays tribute to the passions of the coterie of beings with whom she shares her apartment and life.

A lifelong New Yorker, Lau was born and raised in Lower Manhattan and workis as an illustrator after having graduated from The School Of Visual Arts. She currently resides in the East Village amongst plants and with her two cats and the grumpy elderly dog of her studio mate/partner.

The artist states: “The Things They Love is an ode to the creatures we love and their relationship to the common things we use everyday.” 

September 29 – October 25, 2019

These drawings represent captured moments of reflection by a 32 year-old man in the midst of his workday.

Drawn in brief instances of downtime, they verify that even while one labors there can appear interludes ripe for contemplation, delight and bemusement.

Stealthily preserved by admiring co-workers, these drawings weren’t created with an eye toward public display. Void of presumption, they exist as intimate documents of a life being lived and are a reminder that at every stage in every supply chain is a person like this particular 32 year-old man who is similarly investing their one life’s energy in the next step of the process.

August 22 - September 29, 2019

Whether depicting her friends or passersby, Alexandra Peace scribbles her way to an image with frantic affection. When drawing strangers, she enjoys the opportunity to “create intimacy out of a moment without familiarity” – her work permits a similar intimacy to its viewers. Her loose, somewhat turbulent process is readily legible, inviting us to participate in the vicarious pleasure of each scratch, stroke and squiggle. Peace views her work as practice of “reining in chaos,” creating portraits and scenes that are at once tenderly messy and masterfully precise.

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Sarah Hombach’s work seeks to represent the way a body might be experienced from its inside. The anatomical impossibilities in her figures – and the equally impossible worlds these figures populate – continue this project of portraying things psychically “inside out.” Informed by her dreams and daily settings, Hombach uses painting as a means of furnishing her own interior life; she externalizes her emotions and circumstances by giving them an architecture, curtains, garnishes, weather. She combines these with swooshes of the fantastic in faith that viewers may cobble together her personal iconography, as well as lift her little oft-gawky figures to the level of heroes.

July 12 – August 16, 2019

The Walk consists of 47 oil landscape paintings produced by Ray Sumser in his studio in Larkspur, California in 2018. Painted together in bursts, these pieces are wholly informed by the hills of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Mount Tamalpais State Park. The Walk is an ecstatic experiential account of the bountiful California landscape.

Perspective changes constantly. A landscape appears one way and is altogether different in closer relief. Never static, it moves with color and emotion, light and rhythm. The landscape accommodates and shapes the imagination with an abundance of information all pointing to beauty.

June 8 – July 11, 2019

Documentary filmmaker Alejandro Cortes’ new series of photographs emerge from a recent shaman-assisted pilgrimage to Peru. Shot on 35mm film, the resultant body of work stands as a love letter to our planet and the people whose lives are dedicated to its protection.

Cortes states:

"My artistic career is fueled by a constant need to understand and explore the human condition through my lens. For this series, I embarked on a journey through Peru, looking to connect with Pachamama (Mother Nature) and the Inka culture. In the process, I met a shaman named Kucho, whom I followed on a mystical journey to the Apu Machu Picchu. During this experience, I was reminded that wisdom hides in nature, and beauty in simplicity. I invite you to reflect on this as you look around.”

Alejandro Cortes is a filmmaker from Mexico. He was recognized by the American Society of Cinematographers as the 2018 ASC Haskell Wexler Heritage Award recipient for his cinematography in the short documentary Adrift. His work has been featured in American Cinematographer magazine.

May 3 - June 7, 2019

These collages are selections from Daniel De Raey’s ongoing series, The Spanish Papers.

The work finds its originating moment when the artist was unexpectedly delivered to the Romanesque galleries of the Museu Nacional D’Art De Catalunya. In the presence of Medieval masterpieces drawn from chapels throughout the Catalonian countyside he became rapt. It wasn’t the religious intent, formal composition or representational sophistication that held his fascination, rather it was the details – small passages and chips of paint, minute confluences of color and texture. He spent an afternoon fully absorbed, taking hundreds of photos of such details.

It was an event that had no precedent in De Raey’s experience and one that would not be repeated until years later when he finally revisited the images from that singular afternoon and began to make collages from the resultant prints.

As he constructed the collages he was astonished to realize it was impossible to make a mistake in terms of color composition. Color-wise any component from any photograph could compellingly co-exist with any other. Again he was rapt.

This prompts the tantalizing question: What is the through-line connecting the Romanesque artists, De Raey’s transfixed afternoon in Barcelona, and the present collages?

After long contemplation the artist concluded that it is the experience of awe. Because De Raey wasn’t invested in the cultural content or stylistic intent of the art objects - but instead focused on the hand of its makers and the wear of the world upon the works - he tapped into the unfiltered earnest reveries of the original craftspeople. Thereby unwittingly verifying that awe is tangible and transmittable across the centuries.

A long time resident of the East Village, Daniel De Raey is a photographer, mixed media collage artist and an active member of The Art Students League of New York. A work from The Spanish Papers was awarded best in show at the League's 2018 Concours show.  Another work from the series earned the artist a 2018 merit scholarship at the League.

                                                                                      - Mark Roth

March 30 – May 3, 2019

“Buildings say so much about ourselves. I love walking through cities and unearthing people’s stories through the textures and layers of life etched on a faded facade.  My process begins with a long meandering walk in search of interesting moments where color, pattern and chance combine.  Once found, I enjoy manipulating each image to fold space upon itself until the essence of the place is emphasized.  The moment when a hard surface becomes malleable is truly satisfying.”

“In this collection I have tried to strike a balance between recognizable environments and fractal-like abstractions of urban life.  As a native New Yorker, most of these images are drawn from my walks around NYC, but I have included a few works from further afield.  No matter where you are from or where you live, I hope these images help you to find balance in the chaos, embrace the random, and encourage you to take a good long walk.”

                                                                             - Lauren Kushnick

February 25 – March 29, 2019

“I seek to capture the essence of nature, its atmosphere and forms, its clock and the order of things.”

The encaustic paintings of Johanna Okovic Goodman’s Order of Things series represent a concluding synthesis of the fascinations and concerns of her long career. Compelled by the essential nature of human touch, she arrived at the wax medium for its capacity to memorialize the transience of touch by retaining the mark of its maker.

For Okovic Goodman, this abiding advocacy of the primacy of touch extends to the magnificence of the natural world and its inhabitants. In this formulation our respective life experiences might be thought of as having been molded by the touch of the world.

An inveterate traveler, Johanna threw herself into the world as a means to tutor her senses – often seeking vast, open landscapes. A formative instance was her tenure living with the Zayanes, a Berber population living in Morocco. There she learned that art is a way of life and came to feel at home with their architectural forms and the desert expanse.

A unification of open space and architectural forms situated in a manner that creates a language that “speaks to the essence of touch” defines the Order of Things series.

Johanna Okovic Goodman passed away in 2017. Born in Pittsburg, she eventually relocated to the desert of the American Southwest. She attended The Carnegie Institute of Art and received a BFA from Moore College of Art. Her greatest acclaim came through her sculpture, most notably her signature chairs which were created in the form of famous people. This culminated in a commission from the Tyson Foods family for a chair sculpture of President Bill Clinton that currently resides in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.

January 19 – February 24, 2019

With respectively well-developed practices of illustration and animation, Angela Lau and Mark Minnig challenge and amuse one another in this series of freewheeling collaborative gameplay. Fun, surreal and gently profound, the evolving process operates as a strategy to reinvigorate their disciplines and to celebrate the residents and tenor of their Chinatown and East Village neighborhoods.  

The artists put it this way:

“This collaborative work started organically with drawing on each other’s work with the idea of finishing one another’s sentences. It became a fun and loose way to practice thoughtful but also thoughtless drawing. It is similar to the drawing exercise of the Exquisite Corpse, where one artist draws a component of a body and hands it blindly to the next. The result, especially when artists have different styles and abilities, vary from humorous, beautiful and abstract to just plain grotesque.”

December 8 – January 18, 2019

Nathan Stapley, a lead artist for Double Fine Productions, makes his fifth appearance at Adjacent To Life. In this newest cycle of gouaches, the artist continues to document scenes of his daily routine in the East Village and Greenpoint. Employing a honed sensitivity to light and its effects, Stapley creates a narrative portrait of not just favored locales, but the biography of his eye’s perceptual enchantment.

November 3 - December 7, 2018

With these works Portland-based Michaela Coffield furthers her ongoing collaboration with the sun, producing an intuitively-coherent narrative series of cyanotypes that verify the pursuit of delight is no trivial matter and that the imagination is an evolving habitable realm.

As she puts it:

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September 28 – November 2, 2018

Belarus-born, New York-based street and documentary photographer, Olga Ginzburg captures the uncanny in the unremarkable and the majesty of the quotidian.

Empathically intimate, Ginzburg’s images aren’t voyeuristic glimpses, rather one notes the ease of the photographer within the environment and the natural rapport she has with the subjects. This is a function born not only of Olga’s innate predilection, but also the particularities of her formal concerns and personal narrative.

While fully welcoming of technical advancements, Ginzburg particularly enjoys shooting in film for its dialogue with the medium’s history and a film camera’s ability to cast her in a more “meditative” state while working.  

This component of valuing tradition – a confidence that precedent can sustain - is paralleled in her own biography, where after years of living in Manhattan and working and studying abroad, circumstance redelivered her to the South Shore Staten Island neighborhood of her formative years. Her immersive reacquaintance with the streets, people and landscape of her youth is the subject of this exhibit.

With this body of work the photographer also demonstrates another more abstract kind of homecoming: that of letting her originating artistic inspirations inhabit and flourish within her imagination.  

In an interview with the online photography magazine of the land & us, Olga describes the initial sensation of the emergence of her artistic interiority this way: “Without realizing it, I started to look at the world differently. I became more curious and observant. I walked around imbued with Kertész’s lyricism, Brassaï’s misty romanticism, Winogrand’s bravado and sense of the absurd, [Boris] Mikhailov’s irony, [Milton] Rogovin’s humanity, Frank’s unsentimental poetry etc.”

In her mature work these exemplars - coupled with the persisting thrill of their discovery - are sustained as components of an integrated point of view – a neighborhood unto itself. In acceptance, Ginzburg’s work confirms that fidelity to one’s nature and loves can yield a singular vision under surprising circumstances, including that of an unanticipated adult return to one’s teenage home.

August 26 - September 28, 2018

A writer, Sarah Hombach has recently plunged into painting as a means to explore arenas of experience where the insufficiency of words can be glaring. Compelled by the language of gesture, the figures that populate Sarah’s work represent “a means of embodying a certain feeling or interpersonal phenomena.” Because they are depicted from an emotional standpoint, representing “how the body is experienced from the inside,” the figures are liberated to inhabit impossible anatomies and express themselves in potentially fantastic gestures. Influenced by Medieval art and its emphasis on frontality, Hombach explores awkwardness and the inability of people to occupy the idealized position many painters put them in. This concern arises out of the experience of her particular body and perceived sense of strangeness. In this way her painting practice functions as a tool of self-acceptance for herself and the viewer, proffering the vision of “a joyful exalted awkward person.”

Artist Alexis Ayala’s paintings are respectfully informed by the values of graffiti that inspired him during his formative years growing up on the West Coast. Lex’s aesthetic is grounded in a love for streetwear and fashion along with his Mexican heritage. Ayala’s studio practice is one of developing intimately meaningful iconography that is resonant to streetwear’s strategy of reshuffling cultural signifiers. These new works represent a straddling between typography and easel painting’s concerns, stretching to embrace inclusion of brushy gesture and depictions of illusionistic depth. Hands, apples, eyes, cigarettes and letters comprise an expanding universe and grammar of the artist’s narrative. By bridging graphic portrayal and painterly expression, the work fuses the dual strains of typography and Abstract Expressionism – doing so with a bit of sign painter’s labor thrown in to acknowledge and embody the virtue of craft.

Mark Roth’s newest paintings find inspiration in the cryptozoological artifact of blobsquatches – a blobsquatch being the indeterminate blob in a photograph that a keen-eyed observer ascertains is a visual capture of Sasquatch. Generally they take the form of forest views with a circle drawing one’s attention to the purported creature. Roth States:

“I find the resilience of Bigfoot to be compelling. I believe it speaks to the persistent yearning to see primordial nature staring back at us in a form analogous to our own. I love the thought of a person scouring photographs to verify that the world still contains the unknown awaiting discovery. It’s the yearning of blobsquatches that I find so moving. For me this is encapsulated not so much in the blurry purported Sasquatch but in the encircling line drawing attention to the creature. The circle is the essential component of the blobsquatch for it represents the culmination of careful scrutiny and an urgency to share the benefits of passionate looking. So, with this as inspiration, I dedicated myself to the search for evidence of Sasquatch in the paintings of The Met.”

Included here are faithfully replicated passages from Dosso Dossi and Balthus that incontrovertibly capture a Sasquatch “tree peak” and a striding Squatch in a posture akin to that of frame 352 in the famous Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film of 1967. The encircling line repeats so that the composition assumes a target shape, utilizing the notion that the bullseye represents an apogee of yearning - in this case to strike a connection with primordial painters in the wilderness of art and its making.