Opening Reception: Saturday December 9, 2006, 8 to 10 pm.
All works in this exhibition are for sale and all proceeds go directly to support Second Gallery and participating artists.
Second Gallery is pleased to present Wilderland, The Second Gallery Drawing Exhibition, featuring works by Shaun Kessler, Evan Quigley, Eric Shaw, Jonah Stern, Anna Trzaska, Brian Willmont, and Zoë Wright. Second Gallery generally specializes in the exhibition of installation, sculpture, and video work, but this winter Second Gallery will be exhibiting the works on paper of these seven adroit emerging artists.
Though each artist in Wilderland explores his or her own set of themes and questions, the works in this show are united by a shared sense of openness to possibility, fantasy, and imagination. The drawings in this exhibition tend to alter everyday objects and traditional characters through unexpected imaginative juxtapositions and the introduction of surprising and strange elements. Some of the works in the show are playful and cartoonish in style, while others are ripe with a sense of disconnection and loss. All, however, reside in the freely associative realm of the fantastical, through their strange and wonderful logics, these works invite the viewer into the wilderland.
The artists in Wilderland hail from across the US and Canada. Brian Willmont (www.brianwillmont.com) is a Boston based artist who has exhibited most notably at the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts earlier in 2006. He is also the co-creator of Apenest, a new bookzine featuring art and writing from artists and critics in Boston and surrounding areas. Willmont's delicate drawings and paintings often involve the juxtaposition of architectural spaces with natural and imaginary environments. Eric Shaw, (www. Ericshawdesign.com) also based in Boston, features his psychedelic and often grotesque illustrations on apparel that is carried at a number of venues around Boston including Bodega. Additionally in Boston, Anna Trzaska ( www.annatrzaska.com) creates enchanting and landscape-esque compositions that are rich in color and texture. Based in Toronto, Evan Quigley's ( www.evanquigley.com) drawn and painted compositions investigate our relationships with everyday objects and spaces in a way that is both playful and discontinuitously dissonant. Quigley has exhibited widely throughout Canada and the USA. Jonah Stern, based in Brooklyn, creates cartoonish and juvenile depictions of creatures and anthropomorphized objects that explore issues of masculinity and nostalgia. Brooklyn based artist Shaun Kessler ( www.shaunkessler.com) contributes to this exhibition a series of collages that reference and build on the historical aesthetic of psychedelia and the visual manifestations of fantasy novels, games, and culture. Zoë Wright, based is Portland, Oregon, contributes a series of drawings that ingeniously explore the relationships between everyday objects and figures, the force of mark making and image creation, and memory.
Wilderland, The Second Gallery Drawing Exhibition. December 9 - January 7. Opening Reception Saturday December 9th, 8 to 10 pm. Shaun Kessler, Evan Quigley, Eric Shaw, Jonah Stern, Anna Trzaska, Brian Willmont, and Zoë Wright. All works for sale; all proceeds to support the gallery and the artists
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