Group Exhibition and Celebration of Official Launch of Flat Files Program
“Selections from the Flat Files Program:
Patricia Fabricant, Friedman-Havens, Sabrina Marques, Cheryl Molnar, Julianne Nash
and Jung Eun Park”
Image: Jung Eun Park, Moving House with Dying Plants, 2018, 15 x 15 inches, pencil, thread, watercolor, coffee on Korean paper.
September 14-October 6, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, September 14, 6-9 pm
Curated by Fay Ku
Areté Venue and Gallery celebrates the official launch of its Flat Files program and the new season with a group exhibition of selected artists Patricia Fabricant, Friedman-Havens, Sabrina Marques, Cheryl Molnar, Julianne Nash and Jung Eun Park. This eclectic group of emerging and mid-career artists, abstract and representational, nevertheless share strong graphic sensibility and distinctive palette. This exhibition includes consigned works from Areté’s flat files as well as additional works beyond the program’s parameters in terms of scale and media.
Patricia Fabricant describes her work as meditations on color, line and space. A versatile artist, her work ranges from representational to the abstract, but always consistent is her strong color and design sense in her vigorous negotiations between the gestural and patterning.
The collaborative duo of Friedman-Havens (David Friedman and Matti Havens) produces works as battlefields in which dueling aesthetics and core practices (Havens is a predominantly a video artist while Friedman’s paintings and drawings emphasize materiality and physicality) result in experimentation with process and materials, building and destroying, ultimately create surfaces of anarchic pleasure.
Whimsy and humor are weaponized to triumph over painful experiences and of “not something once known and then lost, but something–someplace–that may never be known and can therefore only be found in the imagination.” Sabrina Marques creates narratives populated by fantastic creatures, their innocent appearance and clean lines belie darker aspects of human experience.
Julianne Nash and Cheryl Molnar both begin with photography, and then manipulating images to create fantastical objects (as in Nash’s photographs) or collaged with other materials to create impossible landscapes (Molnar). Using algorithms to digitally distort images, Nash’s photographs are metaphor for vision as well as homage to loss and memory. Molnar’s fictional landscapes are inspired by places where she has been but by exaggerating and juxtaposing the architectural and environmental elements, she shines a spotlight on human activities’ effect on the environment as well tracing memory of place.
Jung Eun Park’s works on paper are economic yet poetic; she has developed an idiosyncratic personal iconography expressing the yearning for connection and the home. Using sewing as well as graphite and water-based medium on thin off-white Korean, her works on paper take on its depicted objects depicted anthropomorphic, and appeal to touch as much as sight.
For more information on the Flat Files Program, please visit here or contact gallery@aretevenue.com. Gallery hours by appointment only.
