“The Universe, How Vast, How Small”

A group exhibition featuring six artists from Areté Venue and Gallery Flat File Program: Caroline Blum, Paula Cahill, Goldie Gross, Jeong Hur, Joe Piscopia and Katrina Slavik. Curated by Fay Ku.

April 19-May 12, 2019

Opening reception Friday, April 19, 6-9pm

How do we recreate the universe within ourselves? What are its building blocks? “The Universe, How Vast, How Small” group exhibition brings together six artists from Areté Venue and Gallery’s Flat File Program whose intimate works on paper, paintings and photographs construct worlds in microcosm, their small scale concentrating largeness of vision, like light intensifying as its focus narrows to a laser beam.

Caroline Blum’s two paintings resemble the hypnotic abstract designs found in Paleolithic cave paintings. Both Seed Book and Winter’s End were inspired by works of art themselves (Musa Mayer’s Night Studio and George Braques, respectively); Blum’s seed-like marks are alphabetic, her own composed sentences, testament to the germinative powers of art.

Paula Cahill’s Current I and Current II are kinesthetic charts, the translation of ephemeral phenomenon onto a two-dimensional surface. Cahill’s works on paper are lyrical attempts to penetrate the inscrutable logic underlying the movements of the nature.

Goldie Gross’s Dingle, Ireland is romantic, harkens to an earlier era, of traditions long disappeared. The uninhabited rural landscape, the watercolor media and even the scale seems to belong to another era. It seems to belong altogether to another era, where the travel, history, and experience can be literally held in the palm of one’s hand.

Jeong Hur’s photographs of celestial bodies are representatives of the non anthropomorphic view of the universe. There is nothing familiar or comforting with this view of the universe. Mysterious, pitiless, Hur’s Boston to NYC 8-2 fills the viewer with cosmological, primal awe.

So meticulously, compulsively crafted, Joe Piscopia’s works seems to erase the human hand. And yet, his work is the recording of an intensely personal inner process, intuitively built, to express the fleeting emotional states of the artist.

Katrina Slavik’s whimsical, mytho-historic worlds are constructed landscapes that slip between different times and dichotomy, her “landscape pieces explore themes of displacement, migration, and co- habitation between people, animals, and plants.”

These six artists attempt to transcend history or time, and limits of personal knowledge, and created intimate-scaled works that capture the grandiose.

“The Universe, How Vast, How Small” will be on view April 19-May 12, 2019. Opening reception will be Friday, April 19, 2019, 6-9pm. Areté is participating in Greenpoint Gallery Night; please RSVP (https://www.facebook.com/events/1221942091304430/) via FaceBook Event page.

 The Flat Files Program Series: Cheryl Molnar Solo Exhibition

The Architecture of Memory
Cheryl Molnar Solo Exhibition
Jan 27-Feb 22, 2019

Opening Reception: Sunday, January 27 3-5 pm
Areté Venue and Gallery is pleased to announce our second exhibition from our Flat File Program featuring local Greenpoint artist Cheryl Molnar.  This is Molnar’s first solo exhibition with Areté.

What at first appears to be an intricate painting but upon close examination slowly reveals itself to be finely cut slivers of paper and wood veneer, hand painted and then laboriously collaged together to create fields of grass, multifaceted rocky cliffs or lush botanical growth.  The architectural structures often incised directly onto wood panels and inserted into these wild landscapes.  In Molnar’s most recent body of work, she continues to construct her paintings with an engineer’s sensibility and rigor, but the architectural structures come from the world of leisure and recreation—and of memory.  The structures and patterns seem borrowed from an earlier generation, and yet also inspired by autobiography.  Her paintings collapse both geography and time.

The artist’s process begins with documentation: Molnar photographs locations newly traveled and well-known and loved.  These photographs that then selected, digitally stitched together, combining landscapes with structures from various “memories.” This is the way we experience memories: we confuse the place and time, the structures bleed together, places patched together in our minds the way Molnar collages photographs, like concretized memories.  These are the improbable landscapes of our memory, given physical shape.

On view for “The Architecture of Memory” will be recent collaged paintings on panel as well as small-scale editioned work that reveal much of the early stages of her process, much like “sketches” but done through photographs and digital manipulation.  Opens Sunday, January 27 with a reception from 3-5pm and on view through February 22, 2019, by appointment only.

About the Artist
Cheryl Molnar’s work has been exhibited nationally, including solo exhibitions at Smack Mellon in New York, The University of Arizona, The Islip Art Museum on Long Island and the General Electric Headquarters in CT. She recently completed a permanent ceramic tile instillation for PS19Q in Queens, a commission from Percent for Art and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Currently a member artist at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, her other art residencies include the Winter Workspace program at Wave Hill, Smack Mellon, Weir Farm Art Center and Cooper Union. Cheryl received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Pratt Institute.She is a longtime resident of Greenpoint, Brooklyn where she resides with her husband, baby daughter and infamous cat.

#thearchitectureofmemory
@arete_brooklyn

Group Exhibition and Celebration of Official Launch of Flat Files Program

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.

Nick Yulman

“Selected Works for Musical Robots"

Oct 20th - Nov 2nd

Closing concert on Oct 27th @ 4pm and 7pm with guest musicians/instrument makers.

Presented in conjunction with Atlas Obscura

Nick Yulman works with sound and interactive media in a variety of contexts including installation art, audio storytelling, and music. He has been building and composing music for robotic instruments for more than a decade. He’s brought his immersive “song installations” to venues around the world including Paris’s Palais de Tokyo, Warsaw’s Ujazdowski Castle, and an abandoned paint factory in Queens. He studied interactive media at NYU’s ITP program and has taught classes there on Automata. Additional information at http://www.nysoundworks.org