Kenise Barnes Fine Art is pleased to celebrate the summer of 2017 with a tribute to the legendary summer of 1967: The Summer of Love.
In the words of Abbie Hoffman, “The cry of ‘Flower Power’ echoes through the land. We shall not wilt. Let a thousand flowers bloom.” (Workshop in Nonviolence, May 1967)
This exuberant exhibition includes Mary Judge’s powdered pigment Pop Flower series, the highly imaginative quasi-landscapes by Gabe Brown, David Konigsberg’s romantically interpreted flower paintings inspired by his personal garden and Melanie Parke’s lushly painted abstractions, all of which celebrate the joie de vivre and the spirit of freedom embodied in long summer days.
Kingston, NY-based artist Gabe Brown explores a world beyond tangible reality, searching for meaning in the unknown. The artist writes: “Art is like magic, an illusion created by the force of humanity. Our choices in life can be amazing portals for adventure”. Brown’s paintings create a secret recipe for an inner landscape of the human condition, narrative vignettes that are both alluring and mysterious. Nature and those elements existing in its microcosm become metaphors for a strange and at times super reality, a parallel universe that questions the natural scheme of life itself. Using a visual vocabulary derived from a world that often goes unnoticed, Brown begins to reinvent reality.
Mary Judge’s work is about transformation through repetition, the concept of endless possibilities and underlying order and chance are inherent in her processes. The Pop Flower series are powdered pigment drawings made by laying a series of handmade perforated stencils on rag paper then pouncing the stencils with sacks of pure powdered pigments. The ground pigments pass through the perforations, creating patterns, building the multi-layered compositions and velvety surfaces of this ongoing series. Judge has developed this technique based on the Italian process spolvero (“dust”) as used by renaissance artists to transfer drawings to wet plaster for fresco painting. Judge’s work is in collections and museums worldwide. The artist lives and work in St. Louis, MO and New York, NY.
David Konigsberg bridges the divide between art and real life in narrative paintings that are both objective and conceptual. His work occupies a netherworld of image and memory in his very personal narratives, which are not meant to be deciphered but experienced as emotional possibilities. This exhibition features a series of flower paintings that are a tender and romantic observation of life through the language of flowers. The artist’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and has been featured in The New York Times, Chronogram, Brooklyn Journal and numerous art and culture blogs. David Konigsberg lives and works in Hudson, NY.
Michigan-based artist Melanie Parke contributes a series of abstract paintings that emerge from her own life through the ideology of memory. Flowers bind the artist to friendships and the women in her life, that sentiment propels her to paint compositions which reference lush clusters of time. Specific interiors, botanical species and landscapes are often implied through these abstract compositions. By shifting the emphasis to pattern, texture and tone, she works to destabilize notions of exacting representation to build on a sensation of memory which conjures both comfort and longing. Parke’s paintings are widely exhibited throughout the United States.
