Bucket Rider welcomes the fall season with Black Light, new paintings and installation by Chris Uphues in Gallery One. Running concurrently in our second gallery is The End is Nigh, a collection of new works on panel and paper by Alexia Stamatiou. The show opens Friday, September 7th with an artists reception from 5 to 8 pm, and continues through October 13th.
Brooklyn-based artist Chris Uphues presents a new body of paintings, a sculpture and a wall piece for his first solo exhibition since 2005 and his first with Bucket Rider Gallery. Uphues previous paintings have been informed by popular culture objects, graffiti, animation and fireworks. With Black Light, he continues to be influenced by poetry and line, while embracing a new direction that references the thangka Buddhist paintings of the 17th century, negative theology, rock album art, and black light posters. Drawing largely from the formal elements of the nagtang, a specific category of thangka that describes a bright gold line on a black background, Uphues utilizes his own visual language to create paintings that perform a contemporary ritualistic action, transmuting a dark background, representing the threshold of experience, into a richly detailed surface that posits something bright and transforming. Uphues has also augmented his visual vocabulary to embrace a new set of referents that dig deeper into our own popular cultures limit experiences, utilizing iconic images of a cobra, a seventies trans am decal, a weeping rose, and a skull to respectively conjure notions of danger, freedom, anguish, and our own mortality. Also included in his exhibition are a large-scale installation of a stark black pagoda, complete with an interior stenciled with his iconic, luminescent flowers and flooded with black light and a large wall drawing of a contemporary dragon rendered in bright, digital colors.
Chris Uphues was born in Chicago in 1971 and resides in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Carl Hammer Gallery, both in Chicago, and Monster Island, in New York. Recent group exhibitions include the University of Memphis and Manchester Community College in Connecticut. This is his second exhibition with Bucket Rider Gallery.
Running concurrently in Gallery Two, we present The End is Nigh, new paintings by Alexia Stamatiou. Still drawing from the rich and bizarre doctrines of the widely held Christian belief known as Dispensation Premillenialism, Stamatiou's paintings depict a group of the most devout members of the religious movement prematurely relinquishing all earthly possessions and submitting themselves to the wild, believing entirely that all signs point to an approaching Armageddon. Before the vivid carnage begins, the tribe waits to be raptured- 'caught up in the air' to meet Jesus in his Second Coming. Much as countless predictions of the world's end have come and gone without occasion for centuries, time quietly passes and The End seems unwilling to arrive. An unexpected limbo develops as the group busies itself with the foreign tasks of gathering food and cataloguing their dead as they continue to wait. Contrasting with the heavy narrative substance of her paintings is a richly colorful, often bright palette and a figuration that not without its whimsy. This disparity between form and content gives her work a unique poetic capacity to be engaged on multiple levels.
Alexia Stamatiou was born in Miami, Florida in 1978 and received her BFA from Cooper Union in 2001. She lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island. Recent exhibitions include Left Behind, Hesperides, curated by Hernan Bas, at Sandroni Rey and In the Twinkling of an Eye, a solo show at Sunday Gallery, in New York. She has also had several solo exhibitions at Frederic Snitzer in Miami and recently performed as part of JVA Flag Corporation at Deitchs annual Art Parade in New York, in collaboration with Jeremiah Clancy and Vanessa Walters.
