IMAGE MAKERS

Curated by Avital Burg and Eleanor Ray

December 10, 2014 – January 10, 2015

Opening Reception – Wednesday, December 10, 6PM

MEQUITTA AHUJA

POLINA BARSKAYA

MATT BOLLINGER

ASHLEY GARRETT

NORA GRIFFIN

RIDLEY HOWARD

AUBREY LEVINTHAL

EMIL ROBINSON

ELENA SISTO

SUSAN JANE WALP

EMILY ZUCH

For immediate release

Elena Sisto’s "Seeing Sound" shows the back of a small canvas placed at a jaunty angle in front of a woman’s face. The visible edges of her cheek and neck appear to be blushing, suggesting an intense, perhaps playful, engagement with the image on the canvas. The space between her face and the canvas is compressed, as if she might be pressing her nose against its surface. Many of the works in this show similarly project the viewer into an image, with assertive, frontal shapes, close cropping, or a shallow space. Sisto’s "Seeing Sound" also presents an apt image of the show’s central concern: the artists’ engagement with the image itself, often as the catalyst from which other painterly elements emanate.

In "Image Makers", Novella Gallery presents the work of 11 artists, offering a range of approaches to image making: from day-lit clarity to enigmatic fragmentation, and from explicit autobiography to hinted narrative. Varied source materials and sometimes-autobiographical details are transported into fictive realms that remain open and generous in implication. Each artist’s work articulates a clear interest in the meeting of the image with the language of painting, whether as a distillation of the observed world, a questioning of preconceptions, or an ordering of personal history. As Susan Jane Walp wrote about the world of painted equivalents that Lennart Anderson opened to her as a student, “For lack of a better word (and one he might not approve of), it was an abstract world. Entering it was entering a realm of infinite possibility, and from the very beginning I loved dwelling in it.”

—Avital Burg & Eleanor Ray