SIX
Recent MFA graduates of Bard College
The Supreme Trading Annex Gallery
93-95 North 9th street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn

November 19 - December 19, 2004

BROOKLYN, NY - The Supreme Trading Annex Gallery is pleased to Present "Six: Recent MFA graduates of Bard College", a group exhibition organized by the participating artists. The show includes work by Allison Gildersleeve, Jacob Hartman, Erick Johnson, John Jurayj, Fawn Krieger, and Gail Stoicheff. These six graduates of Bard College's interdisciplinary MFA program suggest a community tied together not by ideology or style but by a critical conversation that has occurred and continues to occur over the course of the last three years. In a sense they have defined a community from the sharing of space, conversation, critique and influence. The differences between their practices are as important as their similarities. They continue to define a fertile space that allows them to overlap, argue and grow in their practice.

Allison Gildersleeve's paintings play with the intricacies of pattern, dislocating them to develop her own personal language. Using elements of mid-20th century abstraction, fragments of wallpaper and childhood settings, Gildersleeve re-contextualizes the family relationship into an elliptical narrative landscape.

Jacob Hartman spends much of his time in Brooklyn, NY, next to a cement factory and a paper recycling plant. He spends his days, and sometimes nights, watching millions of pieces of trash get heaped into a large pile and prepared for recycling. During the day he also watches cement trucks enter the cement yard empty, and then leave sometime later filled with cement.

Erick Johnson uses layered calligraphic marks and flat areas of color to suggest an unstable world. The theme of "mark making" and its history is disturbed and altered by spontaneity and reflection. The paintings hover between depth and decoration, skirting the edge of a knowable style and reference to unseat any easy designation. This effort and failure to reference and embody the whole is inevitable, tragic, and playful.

John Jurayj samples images from a myriad of sources. Operating from a space of fragmentation, he uses the materiality of paint as a subjective vehicle to both reinforce and disrupt the image. In debasing the ostensible subject of the work, he locates the true subject as the space between the image and its making. It is a space of disequilibrium interlaced with exuberance and melancholia that reinvestigates, deconstructs, and ultimately celebrates dusty notions of the taboo.

Fawn Krieger uses the vernacular of domestic Western architecture to explore a building process that sheds traditional notions of erections as a form of empowerment and promise. Her work reveals a structure fueled by non-linear, horizontal and earthbound forms. By engaging in the work's inlets and recesses the viewer becomes a participant in an activated yet uninhabitable space. Each piece asks the viewer to reconsider notions of ownership, choice and power, simultaneously actualizing vulnerability and fortitude.

Gail Stoicheff's work expresses and contributes to our contemporary terrain in both its physically strange and psychologically disorienting manifestation. Her complex use of air-sprayed acrylic, painted pigment and gel, creates an optical zone that hovers somewhere between window and object. Lacking a contemplative vista or a clear composition, it is a space that sits close-up and remains in motion - one that acknowledges and embraces the speed, instability and weirdness of our time and place.