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In Gallery One

Jessie Edelman
Los Enigmas

ANDREW RAFACZ is pleased to announce Los Enigmas, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Jessie Edelman in Gallery One.

Chicago, IL, January 30, 2016– ANDREW RAFACZ opens 2016 with Los Enigmas, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Jessie Edelman in Gallery One. The exhibition continues through Saturday, March 5, 2016.

With her new series of paintings, Edelman continues her narrative of lone female figures gazing out on vibrantly colored and richly detailed seascapes. Although not easily identified as a known location, each painting’s details are unique and imply a lived-in, cinematic place. These natural spaces are directly tuned to the figure’s contemplation. Turned away and facing into the painting’s environment, the positioning of the figure implicates the viewer as voyeur into her solitary world, functioning as a filter onto their shared field of vision while denying access to her gaze and psychology. We cannot see her face, so we cannot gauge her state of being. This mirroring effect also reminds the viewer of his or her role as seer and the presence of the painting as an object. Edelman is not afraid to present these scenes as unabashedly nostalgic or archetypical. For the artist, the potential for allusion within the painting’s pictorial plane is essential for the viewer. They seduce us by simultaneously placing us within the painting’s action and on the periphery of its frame.

Edelman’s painting-within-a-painting trope is sublimely pushed forward and even disrupted in her newest body of work. In her earlier paintings, the figure is situated outside the seascape but within the composition, as if looking out of a window. They are posed in leisurely positions and engaged in the pure act of looking. Although we don’t know if they are deeply engaged or daydreaming, nor what they might be thinking, we do know they are disciplined in doing so. In these works, the figures' relationship to the background is purely psychological and open to interpretation. In several of the paintings in her new exhibition, the figures are physically interacting with the painting’s world. They are grasping branches or stepping through a thicket of trees as if responding to their earlier state of looking and contemplation.

The title of Edelman’s exhibition, Los Engimas, is taken from the Pablo Neruda poem of the same name.
A cautionary tale about our impulse to understand and quantify the natural world, the poet reflects on how human interpretation ultimately falls short of answering nature and in the very attempt, risks reducing the infinite to nothing. By placing her figures within this seaside landscape, Edelman reinforces the natural world as mysterious and hermetic. By employing distance and depriving the viewer of more concrete information, she articulates these concerns for both her characters and the viewer caught in their compelling act.

JESSIE EDELMAN (American, b. 1986) lives and works in New York. She received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2013. She had a recent solo exhibition, Day Gazer, at Robert Blumenthal Gallery, New York, NY (2015) and she has an upcoming two-person exhibition at The Suburban, Milwaukee, WI, in March 2016 and solo exhibition at Denny Gallery, New York, NY in October 2016. Recent group exhibitions include PRTY PPL, curated by Josh Reames, at Circuit 12, Houston, TX (2015) and The Landscape Changes 30 Times, Anahita Art Gallery, Tehran, Iran (2015). She is currently in a group show, Avoir Une Peur Bleue, at Bahamas Biennale, Detroit, MI. She was included in Untitled., Miami, FL (2015) with Andrew Rafacz, and will be part of the forthcoming Art Brussels (April 2016), with Johannes Vogt Gallery. This is her first solo exhibition with the gallery.

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In Gallery Two

Elliot Bergman
Praxis


ANDREW RAFACZ is pleased to announce Praxis, a solo exhibition of new work by Elliot Bergman in Gallery Two.

Chicago, IL, January 30, 2016– ANDREW RAFACZ opens 2016 season with Praxis, a solo exhibition of new works on paper and cast bells by Elliot Bergman in Gallery Two. The exhibition continues through Saturday, March 5, 2016.

As both an accomplished musician and visual artist, Bergman’s art practices are uniquely intertwined. He often builds the instruments, variations on the African Mbira that are electrified and amplified, forming the basis for many of the compositions in his bands Wild Belle and NOMO. His interest in metal work led him to study bronze casting, and he has begun producing bells and bronze totemic sculptures in the last several years.

Bergman utilizes both traditional tools and found objects in producing his large-scale ink drawings, employing a process similar to monotyping. He uses these non-traditional objects as stamps, transferring their unique designs via India ink to the surface of watercolor paper. The results are heavily layered and distinctly textured, employing iteration, patterning, and space. They evoke a furtive visual code that is familiar but indecipherable. At times loose and open or densely worked, the palimpsest and repetition of marks suggests a strange, obfuscated text in an unknown language. Their compositions have a relationship to early graphic design, gestural abstraction, and Kurt Schwitter’s typewriter compositions.

The artist will also present a new series of cast bronze bells as a focal point of his exhibition. Created using the lost-wax method of casting, the artist works with wax and hand carved wooden forms to shape each piece uniquely. They are left in a natural raw state, which develops a rich patina with use over time. The resultant sound vessels have powerful sustain and complex overtones when played.

As Bergman explains, “Bells have an inherent power. They have captivated me since my great-grandmother gave me some of her Swiss cowbells before she died. Since those first gifts, which still hang on my bell wall, my collection has grown as I’ve traveled the world. I love the sounds, shapes, forms, textures, and patinas of these instruments. Bells can sound an alarm, mark the passing of time, save a boxer from his opponent, help herd animals, punctuate a wedding or act as a portal to transcendent states of consciousness. Sound and vibration have incredible power; the power to heal, the power to move people and an ability to awaken neglected or forgotten parts of our humanity.”

For the artist, the production of these bells is an exploration of these concerns. The overtones that they produce are complex and rich, and when played in concert they are sometimes consonant, sometimes dissonant. They are not tuned to a traditional scale, and they ask you to listen and explore the relationship between them, other instruments and the player.

ELLIOT BERGMAN (American, b. 1981) lives and works in Chicago. He received his BFA in music at the University of Michigan in 2004 where he studied Jazz, Composition, African Drumming and Gamelan Music. Since then, he has toured and recorded with a number of musical groups including Wild Belle, NOMO, Iron and Wine, His Name is Alive, and Saturday Looks Good to Me. Bergman has been an active part of the creative music scenes in Ann Arbor, Chicago and Brooklyn, where he booked bands at the esteemed and now defunct club Zebulon in Williamsburg. This is his first exhibition with the gallery.