MOVING PICTURES
Opening Reception: Friday July 13, 2007, 6 – 10pm Exhibition continues through August 18, 2007
TROY HAGENBART and MIKE NORDSTROMGARDENfresh brings the East Coast to Chicago with Moving Pictures, an exciting summer exhibit featuring artists Troy Hagenbart and Mike Nordstrom.Troy Hagenbart’s intimate paintings pursue a strange balance between fact and fiction. Rooted in historical context and inspired by the material world around us, Hagenbart obscures and alters the familiar. Buildings break down into abstract geometry, figures are rendered faceless, and everyday actions become haunting partial narratives. With a heavy hand, Hagenbart lays down misty strokes and chapped textures. Warm mid-tone color sharply contrasts with selective highlights to shift perceptions of foreground and background. His richly layered works blur the recognizable, challenging first impressions of the imagery. Hagenbart’s deceptively simple works raise questions about the illusions of painting versus the reality of our surroundings.Troy Hagenbart earned an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art in 2007. While in Boston, he participated in several group exhibitions, acted as an assistant to MassArt’s Expression of Hope project, and created art to raise awareness about Gaucher’s disease. Hagenbart currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.Mutating mice, headless guitarists, and shrinking beauties delight the eye in Mike Nordstrom’s multi-media works. Whether illustrated or animated, his characters constantly shift through time, redefining space and creating a competitive dynamic between predator and prey. With surreal storytelling and intricate imagery, Nordstrom forges a link between fine and commercial art; his works are intended for the masses but meticulously rendered. His penchant for detail borders on the obsessive-compulsive – spots and swirls, zig zags and curly cues, fireworks and hundreds of tiny stars carve shape and define shadow. These complex patterns are juxtaposed with spare backgrounds and bold blocks of color to create labor-intensive artwork with the universal appeal of Saturday morning cartoons.Mike Nordstrom graduated with a 2005 BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. During his Illustration studies, he spent one year refining his style at Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland. Having shown in Edinburgh, Philadelphia, and the Chicago area, Nordstrom has also created animations for Acme Filmworks, Optic Sugar, and Soup 2 Nuts. His recent work includes projects for United Airlines, Discovery Channel, and PBS. A young professional animator for Soup 2 Nuts in Boston, Nordstrom is currently proposing his original programs to Cartoon Network.
SOOT COVERED REVERIE
David Lowman, Aaron Nather, Michael Pajon.
Project Space: PST “Osculum Infame.”
Opening reception Friday June 1st, 2007, 6 – 10pm.
Exhibition continues through 7th July, 2007.
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GARDENfresh is pleased to present David Lowman, Aaron Nather and Michael Pajon three artists whose otherworldly spirit images tread a winding path through torment and joy, despair and love, the cherished and the abject.
David Lowman's recent work highlights perceived natures of god and self. “God’s First Blowjob” served as the gateway to the series, as did prevailing themes of grappling with ultimate power, personal dualities, the life force of sexuality, and humanized imagery of god. Aaron Nather’s current work shows an awkward beauty lurking beneath the surface of beings who struggle with elemental forces in their dreams and nightmares. Their faces express the bittersweet wonder of being alive and wide-awake in a savage, alien, and sadly beautiful universe. Michael deploys a range of images from The Standard American collages that merely hint at the dark side of glossy Americana to the series of Narrative Works. Rural mythic landscapes that display a humanity deprived of inhibition, lawless and chaotic. In these scenes, mobs of frightened angry people mete out violence on solitary victims alone in the woods.
Project Space: PST “Osculum Infame.”
“Osculum Infame” invites questions as to the darker mechanics of the creative imagination, its role in the achievement of “justified true belief,” and the necessity of duplicity for self-knowledge. It’s in these subjects that we find the answer to the age-old question: “On what do our lives depend?” - PST is an acronym for post/send/tell, the most common forms of communication in massively multiplayer online gaming environments. PST makes art of and about role-playing and video games.
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