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Preternatural_Selection
Feb. 28 – March 23, 2008 Curatorial Statement: Preternatural Selection considers paintings and sculpture made using abstraction as a tool. The five artists in the exhibit present unusual and synthetic images that rely on a close relationship with the natural or experienced world. These documents recall private and contemplative experience while refusing the politics of transcendence, creating a beautiful, pragmatic and paraobjective language. The show’s title, Preternatural Selection, describes the way in which these artists select the prevailing motifs, functions, or manners of different systems of representation and merge them innovatively to produce a fluent, powerful, and superior means of statement. Guest curator for this exhibition is Jessica Slaven, a New York-based artist and author of a forthcoming article in Paper Monument discussing contemporary urban earthworks. A graduate of The Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and Skowhegan, she has shown recently at Brooklyn Fireproof and David Krut Projects in NYC.
Artists Hanna Sandin lives and works in Brooklyn, N.Y. She studied painting and printmaking at the School of the MuseumFine Arts, and earned a B.F.A. in Glass from R.I. School of Design. In 2005 she received the Emerging Artists Fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park, and participated in the fellowship exhibition. Her material investigations of process and product, dissipation and residue, play with this dichotomy of active and static, with objects as traces of gesture. Objects remain a tangible means of accessing the experiential and subjective valuation of meaning.  Lisha Bai studied Painting at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her B.F.A. there and an M.F.A .in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. She has won many awards and been in group exhibitions in New York, Vermont, Connecticut and France. Her pieces shift between being autonomous abstract experiences, engaged with the history of art, and familiar experiences, tied to the world through the social and cultural references of the material. She is interested in using common cultural materials to expand upon a conversation about abstraction while dissolving the boundaries between art and it’s environment. Hunter Stabler received a B.F.A. in Painting from Maryland Institute College of Art, and an M.F.A. in Painting from the University of Pennsylvania. His mesmerizing cut paper sculptures are influenced by synaethesia, baroque architecture and design, ancient eastern pattern-oriented design, rugs, tapestries, lattices, tile, cymatics, symmetry, self-similar plant growth, interference patterns, vibrations, vortexes, war, war-machines, mysticism, divine and religious art, and symbols and themes of good and evil. Much of the content, he says, is abstract and a retinal experience rather than rhetorically discernible. When recognizable imagery is present it is non-narrative and functions as enigmatic or deviant emblematic character development for the artist. Jon Rajkovich received a B.F.A. in Studio Art from Michigan State University and went on to earn an M.F.A. in Sculpture from Winthrop University in South Carolina. His surrealistic sculptures are fashioned from a skeleton of two by fours upon which plywood has been bent. The sculptural forms are grafted onto the wooden structure with careful craftsmanship and the form is then painted in bright color. Strips that look like plastic morph into rocking horse heads and sea monsters that are oddly beautiful and hallucinatory. Roger White lives and works in Brooklyn, N.Y. He earned a B.A. from Yale University, followed by an M.F.A. at Columbia University. He has had numerous exhibitions in N.Y., N.J., Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Texas and Albania. He has also written extensively for the Brooklyn Rail and Time Out New York. He is also the co-founder of the new art publication, Paper Monument.
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