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CHATHAM SQUARE

Michael Bell-Smith
Sascha Braunig
Ellen Cantor
Petra Cortright
Sara Magenheimer
Travess Smalley

Opening reception: Sunday, March 13, 3-6PM
Exhibition dates: March 13 - April 24, 2016
Gallery hours: Wed-Sun, 11-6PM

Foxy Production is pleased to announce Chatham Square, the inaugural exhibition at our new Chinatown location in New York City. The new address is 2 East Broadway, 200, New York, NY 10038, USA. The new space is designed by London-based architects MATHESON WHITELEY, their first project in the United States.

Chatham Square is the historic junction that Foxy Production's new gallery overlooks. The confluence of eight streets, it also once hosted the meeting point of two elevated railways lines. 
 
In this light the gallery’s first exhibition in Chinatown takes as its theme the juncture of diverse dynamics, both within and among works. It includes drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, and video by Michael Bell-Smith, Sascha Braunig, Ellen Cantor, Petra Cortright, Sara Magenheimer, and Travess Smalley.

Michael Bell-Smith presents collages on aluminum. Using laser-cut adhesive vinyl, the artist integrates design elements, typography, and figures to produce unique works that mine the histories of animation, Modernist painting, and Internet visuals.

Sascha Braunig presents portraits in oil that appear to both avow and disavow the figure. Foreground, middle-ground, and background shift into and out of her subject’s armature-like bodies in paintings that are at once vivid, playful, and anxiety-inducing.

Ellen Cantor’s works on paper integrate childhood characters, such as Barbie, with graphic lines and dots. These abstract element fuse onto and around her iconic figures, giving each work a sense of disengagement, where the familiar and reassuring become odd and unnerving.

Petra Cortright’s semi-abstract digital painting on linen is an intense, riotous field colors and forms. Its flowers, horizontal plane, and landscape orientation combined with its painterly gestures and geometric shapes give it the sense of a hallucinatory Disney woodland scene.

Sara Magenheimer’s new video is a mix of music, still images, and text that together produce semi-abstract poetry. Likewise, her wall sculptures are configurations of disparate elements–photographs of young women, numbers, shaped wire, household objects–that synthesize a visual lyricism.

Travess Smalley presents a new series of compact digital paintings on aluminum that feature duplicated abstract sections. Recalling Warhol’s screen-prints’ plays with repetition, Smalley’s works use the process of printing as both their subject and form.


About the artists:

Michael Bell-Smith (East Corinth, ME, 1978) takes familiar visual elements from games, advertising, interiors, and corporate design, among other places, and positions them within unexpected conceptual frameworks. His digital animations and appropriations wryly reflect upon our cultural moment: as he tracks the circulation and proliferation of images and sounds, he charts a rapidly changing history of viral content. He mixes flatness with deep perspectives and motion with stillness in dynamic meditations on the image’s hold on truth.

Bell-Smith lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He holds a BA in Semiotics from Brown University, Providence, RI; and an MFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.

Sascha Braunig (Qualicum Beach, BC, Canada, 1983) makes paintings and drawings that combine vibrant color and an hypnotic style. Her works reflect upon illusion and the surface of the represented subject. In dream-like scenes, where repetition and patterning are foregrounded, Braunig’s figures emit an extrasensory glow; flaring with reflected color, they are iridescent beings whose very skin seems to be a source of psychic power.

Braunig currently lives and works in Portland, ME. She holds a BFA from The Cooper Union, New York, and an MFA in painting from Yale University.

Ellen Cantor (Detroit, MI, 1961 – New York, NY, 2013) made drawing, painting, collage, and video that combine autobiography, Disney characters, and horror films, among other elements. She created disturbing mythical narratives that, like modern adult fairytales, juxtapose innocence, violence, and sexuality. Unsparingly fusing the comedic and the tragic, her disarming scenarios cross back and forth between fantasy and realism.

Cantor lived in London and New York City. She studied painting at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (1983), and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture.

Petra Cortright (Santa Barbara, CA, 1986) has developed a practice centered on the creation and distribution of digital files, whether they be videos, GIFs, or jpegs. Her self-portrait videos are made using her computer’s webcam and their default effects tools, which she then uploads to YouTube. Cortright’s paintings on aluminum or linen are created in Photoshop using painting software and appropriated images, icons, and marks.

Cortright lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She has studied fine art at Parsons The School of Design, New York, NY (2008), and the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2004).

Sara Magenheimer (Philadelphia, PA, 1981) makes sculpture, collage, installation, video, sound, and performance. Her language-based practice uses objects, images, and the human voice as raw materials. Working with text, an actor, a set, or a song, she transforms symbols into discrete objects.

Magenheimer lives in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2014), and a BFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2004).

Travess Smalley (Huntington, WV, 1986) makes works that are hybrids of analog and digital practices. Combining painting, drawing, Photoshop, Xeroxing, scanning, or stenciling, he renders images that confound the viewer’s perceptions. Content and form never seem to stabilize; his images are dynamic fusions of the past, present, and future: of art historical methods, of the state of the art object today, and of art generated by code.

Smalley lives and works in New York City. He holds a BFA from The Cooper Union, New York, and studied at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA.



About the architects:

MATHESON WHITELEY is an architectural studio established by Donald Matheson and Jason Whiteley in 2012. From its London base, the practice has undertaken projects in UK, Europe, and North America. Both directors founded the practice following a number of years in senior positions with leading architects Herzog & de Meuron (Switzerland) and Tony Fretton Architects (UK) delivering complex cultural and residential projects throughout the world, including the Fuglsang Kunstmuseum in Denmark and The Tate Modern Project, the £215M expansion of the contemporary art museum in Southwark.


For further information please respond to this email or contact the gallery at +1 212 239 2758.
 
Foxy Production
2 East Broadway, 200
New York, NY 10038, USA

t: +1 212 239 2758
www.foxyproduction.com