Art Shows // April 2024

ARTIST STATEMENT:

My work aims to explore the relationships between the intervals of color and sound. The experience of the observer is to engage and consider their nonobjective perception as the canvas. 

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY:

Evan Schlomann was born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania and grew up in Warwick, New York. He studied graphic design at SUNY Orange. While there, he was selected for a scholarship to study lost wax bronze casting under master sculptor Greg Wyatt at the Modern Art Foundry. He continued to study sculpture at the Newington-Cropsey Foundation, and the Beacon Fine Art Foundry. After SUNY Orange, Evan furthered his graphic design education at Parsons School of Design at the New School in NYC. He has been part of group exhibitions at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and the National Arts Club in Manhattan as well as a solo show in Warwick, NY. Evan has also consistently remained active in local music scenes; creating posters and layouts, as well as touring and performing all across the country several times. Evan currently lives in High Bridge, NJ. He loves Star Trek, dogs, and death metal. WEBSITE

Open Hours 
06 April 12-3pm
13 April 12-3pm
27 April 12-3pm

Dots and Lines: a Mother & Daughter Exhibit” is a celebration of art as it carries through generations in the lineage of two painters. Ugly, an active New Jersey-based artist since 2015, joins her mother Clarice in this dual exhibition.  This will be Clarice’s debut.  Together, both artists encourage the viewer to follow the lines and connect the dots.

Clarice Artist Statement:

Using bright colors that come alive through her artwork, painting has followed Clarice through most of her life. Channeling her pointillism-inspired technique with acrylic paint and many dots and details, Clarice’s work nods to ‘millefiori’, the floral art technique in glasswork, having an even deeper connection to the Italian translation of the word: a thousand flowers.

Clarice can be found on Instagram at @__millefiori_

Ugly Artist Statement:

Ugly aims to present calculated and passionate painting with attention to bold lines and modest colors.  Influence is drawn from depictions of mythological and religious beings, traditional tattooing acetates and anatomical plates, and biological art.  In words of the artist, “Ugly” is not intended for personal reflection, but instead to describe the perception of figures found in her work.  Focusing on their lines allows for the viewer to center in on what may have been lost in the details, and such deconstruction by the artist draws suggestion to the above layers.  Demolition, reconstruction, segmentation, and magnification of the indecency of being human brings forth the crude and Ugly.

More of Ugly can be found at uglywebpage.format.com and on Instagram @ugly.webpage 

The photos made with the Shadow Almadel are made by projecting a light source through a piece of plastic food wrap. The piece of plastic wrap is slowly manipulated until a face is seen in the shadow, it is then photographed with a digital camera and edited on the computer. The pieces of plastic wrap eventually wear out, so they are being saved to be used in a future project.

Artist Statement
The idea to use scrying with shadows developed out of my work with automatic drawing, specifically the style developed by Austin Osman Spare and Frederick Carter. This is where you let the hand move freely and try to subconsciously draw a face. After hitting a plateau with the technique, I began to compare the drawing style with pareidolia, to the point where I started to describe it as active pareidolia. This led me into a consideration of the history of scrying, and particularly to the grimoire Ars Almadel, commonly compiled in the Lesser Key of Solomon (17 th century). I discovered by way of Joseph Peterson’s research that several versions of the text exist. In the common version a wax altar is constructed to be used for scrying into smoke, but earlier versions coming out of the Islamicate traditions used copper, and a later version from England used wax but was designed to be used with a crystal ball instead of smoke. I chose shadows as the primary medium after noticing a really strange face on a wall from a light bulb shining past a flower. My own weird version of the Almadel was imminent.

Using the Shadow Almadel is always an exercise in controlled chaos, any attempt to sculpt the sort of face you want to see will fail. The best approach is to move the plastic around randomly until a face presents itself, a consideration for the free form movements of the hand is a fun part of the process. This has allowed for the project to express a concept I’ve been pondering for a couple of years, what I call pseudo-imaginability. The short explanation of the concept is that any spirit can take any form, and in this case, any face. So for this reason, any face that happens to show up is legitimate. All of the forms taken together are conceptualized as a kind of blob or slime. This notion of slime was influenced by the work of Arthur Machen, particularly his novella The Great God Pan. So here the slime is represented by the plastic wrap which leads to innumerable shadow faces. The reason this is important to mention is because in the photos it is the color, not the details of the face, that express the particular entity. The use of bold colors in some of the photos was heavily influenced by the art of Steffi Grant.

The Shadow Almadel photography fits into a larger series of esoteric art, music, and actions that has been on going since 2014. Several of the musical actions can be heard at emptyingplace.bandcamp.com. More of the visual art can be seen on Instagram @iatetheknife. Additional drawings and music at ranseur.bandcamp.com.