Hope Springs Eternal

With the change of seasons afoot, the trees in blossom and flowers blooming, we have curated a show of works that relate to the possibilities of Spring. The season has long offered artists a bounty of inspiration with the brightening colors and new life around every corner, and each of the five artists have captured some of this feeling in their own way through painting, mixed media, and sculpture.

Antoinette Wysocki

Antoinette Wysocki's abstract images are a result of her direct and conscious engagement with the organic processes of her mixed media technique. By not trying to control every element of the painting process, but instead allowing the materials (acrylic, ink, charcoal, pencil, gauche, watercolor, and linen) to play with one another, she obtains unexpected and visually stimulating results. From the broad gestural strokes that Wysocki uses to begin her work, during a phase of action painting, to stages of control where she pulls at the abstract imagery and elaborates upon it with details and text, the materiality of the work is always present. The viewer is confronted with this balance of organic and regimented processes through their perception of the imagery; wrestling with their understanding of abstract and detail, signs and signifiers, and subjectivity.

Byung Jin Kim is best known for his creative and positive steel sculptures. This exhibition features two of his newest series of work. The Double Drawings, are made of painted steel backing plates with wire floral arrangements extending from them. These colorful pieces are painted with a matte high performance automotive paint and shift dynamically with the light as the shadows cast move with the light source. Also featured is his large Hope sculpture which delicately balances the letters atop one another. A master welder, each letter sits on a single weld nearly indistinguisable to the eye and creates a stunning sculpture with a wonderful and important message.

Hamilton Aguiar strives to paint serene images that can be peacefully enjoyed and also draw the viewer's attention to the beauty of natural landscapes. Aguiar's unique process involves applying oil paint expressively to a panel, often covered with a thin layer of reflective silver, copper or gold leaf, and finishes his work with a thick layer of resin. The resulting paintings are rich in color and depth, and depict landscapes that are both tranquil and powerful.

Matthew Langley's work demonstrates the power of gestural abstract painting through a practice of expressive brushstrokes, careful composition, and a deep understanding of color. His early paintings are constructed from individual abstractions that come together to form a larger grid. In these, the subtleties of the colors and strokes blend together to create both a distinct play between each of the smaller internal paintings and an overarching unity when viewed as a whole.

This idea of layers of viewing and meaning, where distance and space inform one another, carries over into his latest series of work. Beginning in the winter of 2014, born out of what the artist deems a "snow day", Langley began a daily practice of quick, small paintings that broke the structures of his earlier practice while maintaining its core elements. What resulted was a smoothing out of the lines of the grid and a transition into the large, undulating color fields of his current work. Broken by thin, vertical streaks and transitions in hue and saturation, this work escapes rigidity, representation, and mechanical perfection in favor of an unobtrusive human touch through rough edges and visible brushstrokes. In the end, space and time are compressed on the plane of the image, allowing the work to unfold slowly in front of the viewer, and the only hints towards the artists personal connection to the work are given by his carefully crafted titles or, "shorthanded poetry."

Yuki Matsueda's practice was born of a happy accident. Inspired by his love of eggs and the force that they hold within them, his first work Super Egg in 2007 broke the plane of his traditionally two dimensional work and represented the infinite energy of the egg escaping its shell. Since then, Matsueda has been making tongue in cheek works that showcase his subject's escape from two-dimensionality.

His practice involves making backing prints, which he learned to do as a child in his parents print shop, and then drawing the object out of its static world through a complex process involving PET casting and shaping. In the finished product, the traditionally limited image has new life, humor, and perspective breathed into it.

This series, Be Ready to Run!, draws inspiration from the iconic pop art soup cans by Warhol and imbues them with a humorous twist by Matsueda. The cans in this work, powered by the all powerful egg, have escaped their labels, which are masterfully screenprinted in an homage to their art historical reference, with the egg inside peaking out from behind the lid.