PAST:
Organized by Peter Brock
The Limited Sphere
January 30–March 12, 2016
321 Gallery is pleased to present The Limited Sphere, a group show organized by Peter Brock, featuring work by Aurora Andrews, Aileen Murphy, Barbara Ess, Christopher Rey Pérez, Dmitri Hertz, Gertrude Mertens, Tashawn Davis, and Peter Brock.
“This show arises from a fascination with edges, boundaries, horizons and limits. I have chosen these artists and their work because they offer the opportunity to explore these concepts, and because they constitute a mapping of my sphere as an artist. This project has come to include several of my peers, my deceased great grandmother, a former teacher, and an artist whom I tutored during his high school years. The resulting installation proposes an axis upon which these works, and their authors, might exist in relation to each other as well as an imagined continuity of cyclical influence.”
The exhibition is accompanied by an untitled collaborative publication featuring a long-form poem by Christopher Rey Pérez and images by Barbara Ess.
Aurora Andrews grew up in Tucson and lives in Brooklyn. She has an MFA in painting from Bard College.
Aileen Murphy (b. Ireland, 1984) makes figurative paintings that occupy a psychic space. She is currently based in Frankfurt, Germany, where she is attending the Staedelschule Art Academy.
Barbara Ess was born in Brooklyn, NY and studied English literature and philosophy at the University of Michigan. Most of her art life has been involved in making photographs which, along with short films, video works, and music projects, have been exhibited widely in the U.S. and Europe. She is Associate Professor of Photography at Bard College in Annandale, New York and on the faculty of the Bard MFA program.
Christopher Rey Pérez is a poet writing from a matrix of opaque folklore, violence, and language. His publications include On the Heels of Our Enemies (98Editions, Beirut), 427-375 (LIKE Editorial, Mexico City), and Regeneración, which is forthcoming for a project in Cyprus. His first full-length book received the Madeleine P. Plonsker Prize from &Now Books and is slated to appear in late 2016. Currently he writes for Intelligentsia Gallery in Beijing and co-edits a nomadic riso publication of the Americas, called Dolce Stil Criollo. He is a graduate of the Bard MFA program and current faculty member of Bard’s Language and Thinking program.
Dmitri Hertz (b. Los Angeles, 1986) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received his MFA from Bard College (2014) and has exhibited at Night Gallery, LA; Murray Guy, NY; Rachel Uffner Gallery, NY, Marian Boesky Gallery, NY and Cleopatra's, Brooklyn. Dmitri Hertz's work draws parallels between the fragility of our natural world, and the fragility of the semiotic structures we create to help us understand that world.
Gertrude Mertens was born in New York City in 1905 and lived in Locust NJ before moving to Vermont in 1953. She started painting with friends in Woodstock, VT in the 1980’s and had her first and only solo show at a gallery in Lebanon, New Hampshire just a few months before her death in 1993. Most of her watercolors are rural scenes of Vermont and Monhegan Island, Maine.
Tashawn Davis (AKA “Whaffles) is an illustration major at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC and a graduate of the Edward R. Murrow High School. He grew up in Red Hook, Brooklyn and on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Davis began his own clothing brand based around the theme of waffles at a young age; he loves to sit in his room, listen to vinyl records and create surreal paintings of his dream world, where the message of the paintings is masked by confusing figures and objects. His love for cartoons, nature, and breakfast foods have shaped his personality and style of art.
Peter Brock (b. 1986, Washington DC) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He has an MFA in painting from Bard College and recently exhibited at _2B (Madrid, Spain), Federico Vavasori (Milan, Italy), American Contemporary (New York, NY), and Black and White Gallery (Brooklyn, NY). Brock organizes shows at The Fort, a project space he runs from his apartment.