EXPANDED VOCABULARIES | EAST & WEST GALLERIES
NOVEMBER 1 - NOVEMBER 30, 2019
Using the animal form as a stand-in for humans, my work focuses on the relationships and connections that we humans have with each other and the world around us. By translating the imagery as if interpreting a dream, the forms take on a lighthearted and surreal air, obscuring a darker or more complicated reality underneath.
In the conscious realm, animals are more naturally themselves than humans. Being uninhibited by the pressures of the human psyche they show everything on the surface without awareness or doubt. I find it interesting then, to use their likeness to examine various moments of the human condition.
By conflating animals with humans I find I am more easily able to use their anthropomorphism to investigate ideas of identity, domesticity and gender roles. Just as our subconscious uses more comforting images to speak to us through dreams, I too find comfort in speaking through the animal lense.
JESSICA FALLIS
EXPANDED VOCABULARIES | EAST & WEST GALLERIES
NOVEMBER 1 - NOVEMBER 30, 2019
These works are imagined water forms, constructed through the build up of layers and the application of rules. They reimagine seascapes as liminal spaces, as places void of external environmental factors, such as sky and sand, and are a minimalistic approach to the landscape. Through them, I investigate ideas of balance, dreams, memory, and the tension between stillness and movement.
A commonality amongst these works is the use of layering, whether through the build-up of multiple drawings as in the case of the vellum drawings, or in the layering of rules, as in the single circle drawings. The layers become a metaphor for time, memory, emotion, and dreams through the sense of distance and space created within each piece. The vellum acts as a veil or fog between the layers, softening the lines to create a sense of depth, or of various currents moving together. The use of the circle within these pieces symbolizes the idea of wholeness, or of the cyclical movement central to life and ever present in the motions of water.
In this way, I see these pieces as a reflection of my own internal tides and emotions. These suspended places are stillness within movement, an attempt to organize nature in order to make sense of my own internal changes and tensions. With them I hope to find stillness and a moment of calm within a constantly changing world.
AARON M. FLYNN
EXPANDED VOCABULARIES | EAST & WEST GALLERIES
NOVEMBER 1 - NOVEMBER 30, 2019
My work creates a space and opens a dialogue around materials and convention while exploring the landscapes of composition and color. I govern components, whether bought or found, to facilitate ideas of composition, color, light, movement, time, and even sound. My work also extends itself into areas of content that I had previously not considered: importance resulting from highly representational materials; duration of the work; the context of the work; the scale; and finally, formal assets that complete and engage the compositions. My latest body of work is exploring color through reflection.
The source of my work is categorically rooted in two disciplines, installation and painting. In the realm of installation, it’s the materials, such as items I purchase from dollar stores or home improvement stores which play a large role in my compositions. Concept and color are also significant in my work. My global objective is not to formulate a new methodology; rather it’s to take preexisting materials and modify them in such a way that new dialogues are initiated. I want my viewers to see techniques as well as methods that call into question established and predictable practices, so that they are touched, moved and inspired by what they see.
KARL GOULET
EXPANDED VOCABULARIES | EAST & WEST GALLERIES
NOVEMBER 1 - NOVEMBER 30, 2019
This series is an abstract and dramatic representation of the human body; analyzing the physical mentalities and vulnerabilities associated with skin, flesh and obesity. The flesh-like surfaces are created with aged parchment paper, recycled fabrics and paint that are then forcefully stuffed and stretched into a gluttonous size. Many of the pieces have an emphasis on texture and line formed with strategic pleating that evokes a sense of age fold and wrinkles. These intimate proportions fetishize the body allowing the work to take on a physical and ephemeral life of its own.
KERI HALLORAN
EXPANDED VOCABULARIES | EAST & WEST GALLERIES
NOVEMBER 1 - NOVEMBER 30, 2019
I bet burning alive would be beautiful.
Reality is an image of perception that we create to feel a sense of wholeness. It is comfortable to have something that seems tangible. For example, most of society perceives a photograph as “real”, to hold that moment in time over and over again. Regardless it is still completely abstracted from reality; no longer in those brief milliseconds. Within this series, I aim to push the boundaries of what an image can be by combining different printing methods and sculptural elements; expanding off of a photograph always being an abstract object.
These images are dedicated to the idea that we live in our own realities. Realities that are shaped by perception and emotional reaction to it. Self awareness can be achieved by compromising those perceptions and emotions. Fighting to compromise will create the opposite. Visually, I aim to push the viewer towards reality as a perception. That life and reality are just an interplay of emotions and sensations, like colors and textures.
NICOLE HAYNES
EXPANDED VOCABULARIES | EAST & WEST GALLERIES
NOVEMBER 1 - NOVEMBER 30, 2019
Trepidation: The feeling or fear of agitation that something may happen.
These pictures were taken before a dramatic change within my life. The sporadic blurriness throughout the photographs, represents the difficulty that arises internally during a metamorphic time. Separately, they express a sudden sense of anxiety, nerves, confusion and fun. But together, each photograph shares its own silent peace.
SYDNEY MORRIS
EXPANDED VOCABULARIES | EAST & WEST GALLERIES
NOVEMBER 1 - NOVEMBER 30, 2019
In an increasingly digital world, I crave analog. I long for the days spent fumbling in the dark, not knowing what time it is. Hands soaking in a water bath rinsing freshly exposed prints, and that deep smell of fixer that always seems to stick to everything. My process is technical, confusing, yet simple; to challenge the medium, to blur the lines, to break the rules.
I work in a cameraless medium, creating something from nothing, yet somehow still within the realm of photography. It’s my goal to push the boundaries to a point of abstraction that even the medium is questioned. Working primarily in alternative process, I am specifically interested in using photographic chemistry as a medium to “paint” on light sensitive darkroom paper. This process is highly technical, as the chemistry goes on white until it fully develops. I utilize a variety of different photographic development processes to achieve different color combinations. To create these works one must give in to the chaotic nature of process, to surrender to it.
RACHEL MCNAMARA
EXPANDED VOCABULARIES | EAST & WEST GALLERIES
NOVEMBER 1 - NOVEMBER 30, 2019
Grass is green and flowers are sweet berries are too, some that we eat.
TARA NUGENT
EXPANDED VOCABULARIES | EAST & WEST GALLERIES
NOVEMBER 1 - NOVEMBER 30, 2019
He said he’d come back But he never did”
This serious of photographs focuses on the theme of abandonment, or “Lost Love.”
Things left behind, beautiful, but maybe never to be seen again
I have always found beauty in the abandoned, as have you
Because all we know
Is to try and make sense of what we see and feel, and turn it into something to hold on to
Or to forget
Everything or anyone that has felt abandoned can relate
Even if it’s just a memory, it’s worth something
The moments encountered
To some people may seem ugly, but to others
These moments are as fragile and precious as the silence that surrounds us
Lost Love
ROSE ORELUP
EXPANDED VOCABULARIES | EAST & WEST GALLERIES
NOVEMBER 1 - NOVEMBER 30, 2019
As an emerging artist of multiple disciplines, I focus on creating awareness for sustainability not only through my life practices but in my physical work. Fashion has been an important inspiration with my latest body of labor, as it is something that affects everyone from different demographics, locations and beliefs. I source my materials ethically and resourcefully, including recycling and re-purposing plastic waste, and up-cycled fabrics. As a sustainable designer, my goal is to create wearable art, that changes perceptions of ethical fashion and the definition of art.
AMY OZGA
EXPANDED VOCABULARIES | EAST & WEST GALLERIES
NOVEMBER 1 - NOVEMBER 30, 2019
Last year, my grandmother passed away right before Christmas. She had been suffering from dementia for years at this point, and her passing was slow and tough to get through for my family. After her passing, I inherited a lot of beautiful photographs and furniture from her home. My grandmother is featured in three of the pieces in this exhibition at different stages in her life- vacationing in the 60s, hugging my grandfather in a blurry photo, and sitting on a yellow couch next to my mom. At first, I was creating work with my grandmother as the subject just as a way to memorialize her life.
But as I flipped through hundreds of family photos, I found that the images I gravitated towards weren’t the posed photographs that documented what we thought were important life events- such as weddings and birthdays. Instead, I found the most interesting and joyful photos were the blurry ones that displayed a life lived: catching bugs with dad, riding a canoe in the grass with my sister, wearing underwear on my head when I’m five. My work has always celebrated a preciousness in what most call mundane, but going through these photographs has further emphasized this mentality. The images displayed in my handmade photo album show a life lived. The events we think might be the most significant aren’t what makes us who we are. It is the small, out of focus moments that happen in between these milestones that mold us and make us the happiest.
MADELINE STENSON
EXPANDED VOCABULARIES | EAST & WEST GALLERIES
NOVEMBER 1 - NOVEMBER 30, 2019
In this series, I draw primarily with marker, pen, gel pen, colored pencil, and ink wash on paper. I create textures using layers of line and color, and explore vivid color palettes in surreal, expressive portraiture. Last year, I started to combine my style of portrait drawing, intense repetitive lines, and use of color in my work. I am attempting to visually organize my feelings of anxiety, fear, stress, depression, freedom, and femininity through making these obsessively detailed and emotional drawings. I am fascinated by surreal/vaguely feminine portraits, and recognize that they are inadvertently a reflection of my inner self. I have always drawn andro-feminine figures and faces that I believe are subconsciously what I wish I could personally project.