Kenise Barnes Fine Art is pleased to open the fall season with an exhibition of extraordinary drawings by artists Peter Hamlin, Jessica Maffia and Sarah Morejohn. The exhibition is titled Multitude and reflects the numerous and complex systems of small hand-drawn marks that each artist uses to build relationships and compositions. The practice of drawing is often described as meditative, intuitive and intellectual. Morejohn’s and Maffia’s artwork embody those traits and have in common a dedication to beauty and close observation of the natural world.
Multitude is Jessica Maffia’s debut exhibition with the gallery. She is a native New Yorker whose work is characterized by obsessive, detailed mark-making. Maffia is dedicated to the discovery of beauty in unexpected places, and to revealing the extraordinary in the insignificant or unnoticed. She observes that under a microscope a droplet of water from the Atlantic contains an astonishing universe of creatures, plant life and dried sea salt; these exquisitely complex compositions inspire some of her drawings in this show. Other work focuses on a cosmological scale; intimate relationships of particles and the solar system are worlds in which every shape begets an entire universe. Maffia’s meticulous process and her extreme attention to detail and to small, repetitive motions are intrinsic parts of her process and the driving force behind the work.
Nature’s propensity towards patterns is reflected in Sarah Morejohn’s exquisite colored pencil drawings. The intricate spectacle of a cluster of dots evoke near endless associations: murmurations, constellations, bacteria, landmasses, a small, spiraling shell found on a beach. Multitude includes three large drawings in the Dandelion Tree series that were specifically inspired by the circular arrangement of petals and stamens of flowering blossoms and mathematical models of branching. Morejohn's drawing practice has led her to find a common ground between the poetic and scientific. Her drawings communicate different possibilities of life, and emotions such as tenderness and longing.
This is Peter Hamlin’s first exhibition since earning his MFA this past spring. Blurring the boundaries between the artificial and the organic, the nefarious, benevolent and benign, Hamlin constructs environments where nanopeople, robots, cyborg plants and curious synthetic organisms live their lives. Hamlin uses his highly refine drawing skills in a masterful story-telling style combining mythological, art historical and decorative art references. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn.
