Partial.Download
Jessica Langley, Eric Johnson, & Lisa Van Hise
Opening Reception:Friday, March 3rd, 2017
6-9pm
On-view through March 31st, 2017
Jessica Langley will be exhibiting original artwork, with Starlight artists, Eric Johnson and Lisa Van Hise.
In this body of work titled, “Partial.download,” Jessica Langley presents nine pieces which contain a fluidity between hand made and digitally printed processes. A constant in Langley’s work is the tension between abstraction and representation and the analogous dichotomy of objective and subjective perspectives. These images are borrowed, cut up, disjointed, and abstracted, consistently observing and denying the proposition within the work. Various methods of brushwork simultaneously obscure, erase, and reveal the hand in contrast to the digital or photographic image.
These small works exist simultaneous to her studio activities, where she works with large scale print/drawing installation, fresco, and animation. Her work is the focus of an investigation into navigating landscape and image through a screen-based world.
According to Starlight Studio’s curator, Kyle Butler, “Stemming from a sort of jaded cartography, Jessica Langley's work slackly disassociates landscape from its representation, anatomy from physiology. At different points in her work, that landscape and body have been literal, where she picks apart apart depictions of folkloric landscape, the American West, suspected locales of a missing plane and other sites. Elsewhere in her work, that fractured perspective is turned inward toward process. Painterly effects are documented and reconstituted, the offshoots substituted for the originals and broadly collaged. The work on exhibition at Starlight is of this latter process, where Langley builds new compositions from recorded marks and washes.
“Much of Eric Johnson's creative history has entailed depicting himself as notable characters of fantasy or esteem (from Minnie Mouse to president). However, he has at times veered from this starstruck self portraiture toward scenes and places. Most recently he has been creating abstract, emotional landscapes in glaring color and rough form.
“Lisa Van Hise keeps to a simple geometric language: circles and squares arrayed and arranged like hors d'oeuvres on a platter or the remnants of a sparsely used junk drawer. There is an organization to it that seems considered, but not overbearing. Shapes are filled with marker fields and washes that breach their contours here and there. The palette is intense, but the thin application places the work somewhere between Johnson's heavier, more saturated forms and Langley's leached, topographic washes.”
The event is free and open to the public.
Jessica Langley (b. 1981, USA) is a multimedia artist based in NYC/Berlin. She has exhibited her work internationally, and has been an artist-in-residence in numerous programs including Skaftfell Center of Visual Art in Iceland, Askeaton Contemporary Art in Ireland, the SPACES World Artist Program in Cleveland, and the Digital Painting Atelier at OCAD-U in Toronto. She was a recipient of the J. William Fulbright Scholarship for research in Iceland, and earned her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2008. She is founding director of the Stephen and George Laundry Line, a site for public art in Ridgewood, Queens.
