173:Exteroception

Exteroception: exploring the influences and possibilities of abstraction with works by: Eve Aschheim, Brianna Bass, James O. Clark, Aristotle Forrester, Ivelisse Jiménez, Tom McGlynn, Cordy Ryman, Edra Soto, and Emanuel Torres

July 9 – August 1, 2024

Artists Reception, July 10, 2024 from 6-8PM

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (New York, NY) LatchKey Gallery is pleased to present Exteroception, an intergenerational exhibition which explores the influences and possibilities of abstraction. On view from July 9 - August 1, 2024 at LatchKey Gallery, located at 173 Henry Street, New York, NY 10002. Exteroception includes works by Eve Aschheim, Brianna Bass, James O. Clark, Aristotle Forrester, Ivelisse Jiménez, Tom McGlynn, Cordy Ryman, Edra Soto, and Emanuel Torres. A reception for the artists will take place on Wednesday, July 10, 2024 from 6:00-8:00 PM.  

Exteroception is a visual journey that guides the viewer along the process of taking reality and turning it into something fantastical. This exhibition strives to unite the artist with form, from defined blocks to freeform lines; creating a visual dialogue that represents the perpetually changing perspectives regarding the practice of abstract art.

Ideas of distortion manifest in new ways while the static of abstraction blurs in and out with the works of Tom McGlynn, and Aristotle Forrester each of whom approach the investigation of color theory in a different way.

Tom McGlynn’s minimalist forms aim to extract the elements that exist in our environment by exhaling them into succinct conversations on the canvas. McGlynn’s paintings contemplate the work of the other artists and reduce the conversations of color into the simplest form. 

Aristotle Forrester’s work is equally conversational with almost frenetic reactions which communicate gesture and movement. Forrester’s pieces are free and emotional, the paintings are infused with abstract lines, brought forward with multiple layers of colors. There is a contrast with McGlynn’s work, a crash, where colors collide and sit together to present a discourse about language and representation. The shared language is apparent despite the work being visually distinct. Each artist’s palette, through expert combinations of color and shape, coalesce the works in this exhibition. 

Artists, Cordy Ryman’s and Ivelisse Jiménez’s works sit in a dialogue with each other and react by celebrating the separation between shapes; breathing and contracting new ideas of communicating distance while also examining deconstruction and form. Jiménez masterfully layers and connects; stimulating visuals which rendezvous on the wall while Ryman’s installation forms an orbit of individual pieces converging to form a whole. The relation to the space where the work is shown is an integral part of the process for both artists who embrace the materiality of a room becoming an essential part of viewing their creations.

Light proves that the realm of the visible does not suffice in explaining the totality of experience: through the works of Brianna Bass, Emanuel Torres and James O. Clark, light deposits free floating colors and planes that our minds insist are real.  

The paintings by Brianna Bass emulate light through the optical mixture of color, by using interwoven triads in closely packed lines, separations dissolve and colors mix as they enter the eye in an alchemical formation of light. Shadows are composed of color, in flight from one essence to another. The poetry of shadows is like that of twilight, a deepening space that crackles with untethered information. They live in concert, with light surging forward to offer its own scintillation and cacophony. Together they begin to define forms of a fleeting, ever changing color theory.

Emmanuel Torres’ paintings speak and interact with the viewer. The cool shades that grace the canvas are in a dialogue with the warm hues. No one form outdoes the other with their communication in the paint. The various colors and shapes offer a dialectic as a representation of the experience. The lines in the work emanate light enhancing the individual forms and creating a luminescence upon the canvas.

James Clark’s sculpture fluoresces from within to expose and display a spectrum of colors. The metal form of the piece becomes the canvas for the light. These works are restricted by the tangible constrains of the material yet radiate upon the surrounding space to create a visual display. Clark’s inspiration of what is visible in our daily life and surroundings is incorporated amongst an amalgamation of materials to create a representation. Painterly aspects throughout the tubing of Clark’s sculpture cohere with the colors and gestural style of Torres’ painting. Each artist executes their vision differently though their works communicate a similar story of environment. The viewer is taken on a visual voyage of the nature of color by the expressions of these artists through color theory, form, line and light.

Eve Aschheim’s and Edra Soto’s emphasis of line and structure to distort and occupy space is evident in their works. Aschheim’s paintings resist the identifiable and reconstructs them in collections of minimalist lines and illusory imagery. She reconfigures various forces—both visible and invisible—that constantly impact and structure daily life, from the trajectory of thinking and the stillness of air to the effect of gravity, and the way the chaotic, but logical, geometry of the city precariously frames our experience of space. Aschheim subtly reforms, rather than depicts, to make a visual experience that cannot be corralled by memory. 

Through architectural intervention and social practice, the work of Edra Soto approach’s themes of civic and social actions to inspire conversations about history, diasporic identity, and constructed social orders. Her practice of using rejas, patterned screens ubiquitous in post-war Puerto Rican architecture, result in minimalistic, three-dimensional works that illustrate the complex relationship between historical memory and community involvement which prompt the viewer to assess the meaning of an object and the significance of its placement.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Eve Aschheim is an abstract painter and draftsperson who seeks to create dynamic structures that exist between categories of thought. Her interests include implied motion, and states in the midst of change. Along with her resistance to making a nameable image, she also attempts to make a memorable visual experience that cannot be corralled by memory.

The exhibition “From Gericault to Rockburne, Selections from The Michael and Juliette Rubenstein Gift” (MET Breuer, 2020) included three Aschheim works. In fall 2021 Galerie Inga Kondeyne, Berlin held an exhibition of Aschheim’s work. Recent solo exhibitions include Sarah Lawrence College (2019), “T” Space, Rhinebeck, NY (2017), and Lori Bookstein Fine Art, NYC (2016).

Aschheim has received grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, NEA, NYFA, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and Pollock-Krasner Foundations, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Selected public collections include the Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Kupferstichkabinet, Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; New-York Historical Society, New York; Morgan Library and Museum, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Aschheim holds a BA from U.C. Berkeley and an MFA from U.C. Davis. She was born in NYC, where she currently lives and works.

Brianna Bass’s compositions are a visual dance for the eye, a dynamic interplay of gradient colors and numerical formulas, used in conjunction with the color wheel to create illusions of movement and expanding space. Her paintings explore the limits of color theory, utilizing colors as codifiable units within an image to forge a relationship between optical and linguistic realms. Brianna's constantly evolving visual games invite viewers to hover at the boundary between art and science, showcasing the beauty and complexity of natural patterns. In contrast to the flatness common in geometric painting, she relies on shadows, warbling edges, and visual noise to interrupt and expand perception, creating an environment wherein the observer can forge a synesthetic experience.

Brianna Bass (b. 1990) earned her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2022, and BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2013. She has presented in lectures with Missouri State University, Pratt Institute, and Yale University. She has exhibited work nationally and internationally at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (NY), Latchkey Gallery (NY), The Green Family Foundation (TX), Noh-Art in Naples, Italy, and Tree Art Museum in Beijing, China. Private and public collections include, Morgan Stanley Art Collection and The Green Family Collection.

James O. Clark (b. 1948) is an artist currently residing in Brooklyn, New York. Although he does charcoal drawing and prints, Clark is primarily known for his metamodernist, experimental sculptures. For forty years, he has consistently pushed the limits of the medium with his use of recycled and discarded materials, specifically fiber-optic cables and fluorescent lights. With these light-friendly materials, the viewer enters a darkened gallery space containing neon light tubes or metal sheets activated by motion detectors that hang from the ceiling or combine tangentially towards the floor. Investigating the connection between luminosity and his art, Clark explores his sculptural search with light: “In my creative adventure, I am captivated with the magic of light’s dialogue with form. Light takes a mysterious journey when it’s illuminating, composing, defining, reflecting, refracting, bending, teasing the volume and mass. Light has a poetic conversation with materials that creates a meaningful symbiotic relationship.” 

Clark graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1974 from Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. Since 1978, Clark has participated in a variety of solo and group exhibitions at institutions such as the Morris Museum, New Jersey; Sideshow Gallery, Chicago, Illinois; and the New Museum, Studio 18 Gallery, and the Islip Art Museum, all in New York; among others. The artist has also received numerous awards and honorariums, twice from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and twice from the National Endowment of the Arts. Clark served as a fellow for the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and twice secured a grant with the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. He is a member of the American Abstract Artists and was nominated for Who’s Who in America in 2004 by Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum.

Aristotle Forrester (B. 1993 Chicago, IL) is a black painter and printmaker, originally from the South Side of Chicago and currently based in New York. He received his Bachelor of Fine Art degree from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2016, and his Master of Fine Art from Columbia University, New York. Forrester is a Neiman Fellow

Recent exhibitions include, such venues as Thierry Goldberg (New York), Frederic Snitzer (Miami), Storage Gallery (New York), M Fine Arts Galerie (Boston), the Inside Out Museum (Beijing), the Obama Foundation Democracy Forum (New York). His work can be found in the permanent collection of Harvard University (Boston) in 2022.

Ivelisse Jiménez’s (b. 1966 S.J., Puerto Rico) installations and assemblages present visual propositions regarding change and the construction of meaning in dialogue with the inhabited space. Her work has been exhibited in the United States, Europe, The Americas and Puerto Rico at museums, galleries, biennials, art fairs and other institutions. She has been part of the Museo del Barrio Biennale NYC, Prague Biennale, Cuenca Biennale and ARCO project rooms in Spain, among others. Awards include The Joan Mitchell Award for Painters and Sculptors and The Adolf Gottlieb Foundation Grant. Collections include Museo del Barrio NYC, Bronx Museum NY and Museo de Puerto Rico, San Juan where she is exhibiting her work currently.

Jiménez has a BA in Humanities from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras and MFA in Studio Arts from New York University. After living and working in NY for 20 years, she now has her residence and studio in Puerto Rico.

Tom McGlynn is an artist, writer, and independent curator based in the NYC area. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Cooper- Hewitt National Design Museum of the Smithsonian. He is an editor at large at The Brooklyn Rail where he has contributed articles and criticism since 2012.
His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Cooper- Hewitt National Design Museum of the Smithsonian, among other national and international institutional collections.

Cordy Ryman is an abstract artist who fuses painting and sculpture using humble materials, most often acrylic paint and wood. He’s known for large-scale, site-specific installations that can be broken down into smaller components and stand-alone pieces. Ryman’s works are often responsive, reacting to their environments, their own layered histories and to one another. He maintains a prolific resourceful playfulness in his practice, with an evolving vocabulary of form and color that informs the freshness of his work. Playful and unpretentious, he mines the rawness of his materials, elevating the imperfect with an approach that is physical, elegant and mysterious.

Ryman has been included in exhibitions at the Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; The Barbara Walters Gallery, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY; Bronx River Arts Center, Bronx, NY; Columbus College of Art & Design, Columbus, OH; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; Esbjerg Museum of Modern Art, Esbjerg, Denmark; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT; University of Springfield Illinois Galleries, Springfield, IL; and Visual Arts Center, Summit, NJ. In 2006, Ryman was the recipient of the Helen Foster Barnett Prize from the National Academy Museum. In 2013, he installed a large-scale public commission at Michigan State University, and in 2014 he received a Percent for Art Public commission by the NYC Department of Education which was permanently installed at PS. 11 Kathryn Phelan Elementary School in Queens, NY in July 2017. Ryman’s work was the subject of a year-long solo exhibition, Free Fall, curated by Thomas Micchelli, at Tower 49 Gallery, New York, NY. A catalogue including new scholarship by critic and poet John Yau, an interview with the artist by art critic Jill Conner, and photographs by Jeffrey Sturges, was published to accompany the show. In 2021, the architect Morris Adjmi installed a site-specific installation of Ryman’s works in his New York headquarters.

The artist’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, BOMB Magazine, and Time Out NY, among others. Ryman’s work is held in collections worldwide, including Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Microsoft Art Collection; Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, KS; Raussmüller Collection, Basel, Switzerland; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; and The Speyer Family Collection. Ryman received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts and lives and works in New York, NY.

Puerto Rican-born, Edra Soto is an interdisciplinary artist and co-director of the outdoor project space The Franklin. Her recent projects, which are motivated by civic and social actions, prompt viewers to reconsider cross-cultural dynamics, the legacy of colonialism, and personal responsibility. Recent venues presenting Soto’s work include Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art's satellite, The Momentary (Arkansas); Albright-Knox Northland (New York); Chicago Cultural Center (Illinois); Smart Museum (Illinois); the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Illinois) and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, (Illinois). In 2019, Soto completed the public art commission titled Screenhouse on view at the Millennium Park, Boeing Gallery North through April 2022. Soto has attended residency programs at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Maine), the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency (Florida), Beta-Local (Puerto Rico), Headlands Center for the Arts, (California), Project Row Houses (Texas) and Art Omi (New York) among others. Soto was awarded the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship in 2016, the Illinois Arts Council Agency Fellowship in 2019, the inaugural Foundwork Artist Prize in 2019 and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painting and Sculpture Grant in 2020 among others. Between 2019-2020 Soto’s work was included in three exhibitions supported by the MacArthur Foundation’s International Connections Fund: Repatriation at Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Cross Currents at the Smart Museum in Chicago, and Close to There in Salvador, Brazil. Soto is a lecturer for the Contemporary Practices Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from which she received an MFA. She holds a BFA degree from Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico.

Emanuel Torres (Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico, 1988) creates abstract paintings of fragmented bodies liberating from the experiences of colonialism.

Rich in color and shape, his rhythmic compositions find influence in Olga Albizu (1924-2005), Rosado del Valle (1922-2008), Carmelo Fontánez (1945) and Julio Suárez (1947), among others. Torres pulls from Puerto Rican masters, to push through colonial systems resulting in stylistic revolutions that move from fervent marks, to graceful arcs.

Torres graduated from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras with a BA in theatre and philosophy and continued his studies in video art, installation and performance at the University of Puerto Rico, Cayey. He is the recipient of the 2018 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and has participated in group and individual exhibitions across Puerto Rico, Europe, Japan, and the United States.