SOMETHING ELSE TO IT
Curated by Todd Kelly
Hannah Beerman, Patrick Brennan, Mike Cloud, Mark Joshua Epstein, Danielle Mysliwiec, Yage Wang, and Sun You
July 1 – August 6, 2021
Asya Geisberg Gallery is pleased to present "Something Else To It," a painting exhibition curated by gallery artist Todd Kelly.
Jasper Johns' famous quote, "Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it," written with the weight of historical European painting still leaning heavily on artists was a revolutionary approach to art making. Seventy some years later, however, Johns' edict is more or less standard practice. The concept of 'painting' no longer feels like a parameter within which one must work, but a tool with myriad options and layers of potential. The seven artists in this show have taken painting itself and done something else to it.
Mike Cloud and Mark Joshua Epstein both upend the traditional structure of painting. Cloud toys with the standard fabric stretched over wooden supports, often literally breaking and then piecing the supports back together in non-establishment shapes. Epstein abandons fabric and stretchers altogether, painting on variously shaped and layered resin covered foam panels.
Hannah Beerman and Patrick Brennan both preserve the traditional rectangle choosing to stretch painting in other ways. Beerman's brilliantly ad-hoc pieces function less as objects and more like personalities in an epic drama, while Brennan's endlessly experimental pieces consistently land on the off-beat of art world expectations.
Danielle Mysliwiec, Yage Wang and Sun You use painting to straddle the perceived gulf between the worlds of craft and fine art. Mysliweic uses skeins of extruded paint to create wonderfully off-grid woven paintings. Wang creates traditional Chinese blue and white porcelain pieces using the structural bones and imagery of Occidental 'high art' painting. You makes 'marks' with polymer clay that are rolled out and baked in her home kitchen before being transferred in cardboard boxes to the studio and arranged on painted plywood panels.
"Something Else To It" opens July 1 with an all day public reception 11am to 8pm. The show will run through August 6.
Hannah Beerman lives and works in New York. She earned her MFA in painting from CUNY Hunter College, and a BA from Bard College. Beerman has held solo exhibitions at Kapp Kapp Gallery in Philadelphia and NYC, and received awards from Bard College and the New York Studio School. Her delightfully quirky and explosive assemblage paintings combine found and collected items with thick globs and soft strokes of oil and acrylic paint, pencil, glue, and more. For Beerman, no material is off limits, everything becomes painting, therefore painting becomes everything. Beerman's paintings, like Carol Rama's Bricolage works of the 1960s, or like the kinetic works of the late Carolee Schneemann (who was a friend of Beerman's), at once combine heartbreak and humor. Each painting is intimately connected to Beerman herself and to each other work; elements are attached and reattached, moved from one painting to another, but always leaving something behind. Beerman compares her work to fly paper, as she says "they pick up on things that are going on around them."
Patrick Brennan currently lives and works in New York City. Recent solo exhibitions have been at Cornell University Ithaca, NY; Halsey McKay, East Hampton; Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco; Essex Flowers, New York; as well as group shows at MOMA / PS1, Galerie Lelong, Safe Gallery, Jack Hanley Gallery, Nicole Klagsbrun, Monya Rowe Gallery, Zieher Smith, Edward Thorpe, Artists Space and Clifton Benevento, New York; Cooper Cole, Toronto, and V1, Copenhagen, Denmark. He is recipient of the NYFA fellowship in painting, a founding member of Essex Flowers in New York City, and has been a visiting artist and lecturer to the US Embassy in Bahrain, Alfred University, Bennington College and others. Brennan is represented by Halsey McKay Gallery.
Mike Cloud is an American painter living and working in Chicago, Illinois. He earned his MFA from Yale University School of Art and his BFA from the University of Illinois-Chicago. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at P.S.1, NY; the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, Slovak Republic; Honor Fraser Gallery, CA; Thomas Erben Gallery, NY; Good Children Gallery, LA; Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY; White Columns, NY; Max Protetch, NY; Apexart, NYC. Cloud has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Art Review and featured in the publication Painting Abstraction by Bob Nickas. His awards include the inaugural Chiaro Award from the Headlands Center for the Arts, an artist Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Barry Schactman Prize in Painting from the Yale University School of Art as well as the Grace Holt Memorial Award in African American Issues from the University of Illinois, Chicago. His work is held in private and public collections including The Bronx Museum, Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Cloud has lectured extensively on his work and contemporary theoretical art issues at the Jewish Museum, Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, Yale University, Cooper Union, Bard College, Kansas City Art Institute and the University of New Orleans. He is currently an assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Mark Joshua Epstein received his MFA from the Slade School of Fine Arts, University College London, UK, and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University, Boston, MA. Epstein has had solo and two-person shows at Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY), SPRING/BREAK Art Show (NY, NY), Handwerker Gallery, Ithaca College (Ithaca, NY), NARS Foundation Project Space (Brooklyn, NY), Caustic Coastal (Salford, UK) Vane Gallery (Newcastle, UK), Demo Project (Springfield, IL), Biquini Wax Gallery (Mexico City), Breve (Mexico City) and Brian Morris Gallery (New York, NY). Selected group shows include Arlington Art Center (Arlington, VA), Collar Works (Troy, NY), Good Children Gallery (New Orleans, LA), Monaco (St Louis, MO), DAAP Galleries at the University of Cincinnati, and Beverly's (New York, NY). In early 2021 he will have a solo exhibition at Ortega y Gasset's Skirt Project Space (Brooklyn, NY). In 2019, Epstein was included in Queer Abstraction, curated by Jared Ledesma at the Des Moines Art Center. The show then traveled to the Nerman Museum in Overland Park, KS. He has been an artist-in-residence at Vermont Studio Center, Millay Colony, Jentel Foundation, Macdowell Colony, Saltonstall Foundation, I-Park and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, amongst others. His work has appeared in publications, such as New American Paintings, Art Maze Magazine, Dovetail and Two Coats of Paint. Epstein has curated or co-curated exhibitions at Woskob Gallery, Penn State University (State College, PA), Spring Break Fair New York (New York, NY), and MONO Practice (Baltimore, MD), amongst other venues. He currently works as a lecturer at the Penny Stamps School of Art and Design at University of Michigan.
Danielle Mysliwiec received a BA from Wesleyan University and an MFA from Hunter College. Mysliwiec's paintings probe the metaphorical possibilities of process-based abstraction. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Novella Gallery (NYC), Vox Populi (Philadelphia) and Kent State University (Kent, OH). Select two-person and group exhibitions include Transmitter Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Mixed Greens Gallery (NYC), COUNTY (Palm Beach, FL), Rockelmann & (Berlin), The Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design (Asheville, NC), Baer Ridgeway Gallery (San Francisco, CA) Chandra Cerrito Contemporary (San Francisco, CA), and Heiner Contemporary (Washington, DC). Residencies and awards include the Surf Point Foundation (2021), The Individual Artist & Scholars Grant from the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County (2020) and two full fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center. Reviews of solo and group exhibitions include The Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, Art F City, Two Coats of Paint, BMore Art, and The San Francisco Examiner among others.
Yage Wang (/雅格 , b. China, working in New York) re-interprets historical artifacts to explore the relationship between east and west. In his most recent body of work, depictions of blue and white ceramic objects in European and American oil paintings are appropriated onto porcelain forms that look like stretched canvases. Wang has received support from grants including Graduate Student Research and Creative Projects Award, Sandra Shea '56 Fisher Prize for Exceptional Achievement in the Creative Arts and the Remis Grant for the Arts. He has worked as a ceramic instructor for several private studios and as a teaching assistant in State University of New York and Penland School of Art and Craft. Wang recently received an MFA from SUNY New Paltz and a BA from Brandeis University in 2018.
Sun You is a Seoul born, New York based artist. You has exhibited her work in galleries and museums internationally. Recent exhibition venues include Geary, New York, NY, The Pit, Glendale, CA, Step Sister, New York, The Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA , Queens Museum, New York, The Korean Cultural Center, New York, Scotty Enterprises, Berlin, Kunstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, Bad Ems, Seoul Arts Center, Seoul and The Suburban, Chicago. You was an artist in residence at The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Marble House Project, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Triangle Arts Association and Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral in Bad Ems, Germany. She was also selected as "Artists to Watch" in 2016 by WIDEWALLS and "18 Artists to Watch" by Modern Painters, 2015. You heads President Clinton Projects, a curatorial project and co-runs an artist collective gallery, Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York.