Suggesting mythological creatures with fearsome powers, “Centaurs and Satyrs” features seven artists whose work involves a hybrid of two or more practices. While many artists today refuse to pigeonhole themselves as “painters” or anything as jejune, the very real creatures that make the works in “Centaurs and Satyrs” embody the cross-fertilization of multiple ways of thinking, physically making, and approaching a work.
Yevgeniya Baras creates heavily textured works on canvas that straddle the line between sculpture and painting. With a wide range of materials such as wood, yarn, papier-mâché, velvet or foil, the works evoke deconstructed domesticity and unruly craftsmanship, with often dark undertones.
Naomi Safran-Hon interweaves photography, paint and cement pushed through lace, to underscore a symbolic attack of militarism within the domestic sphere. Abstract and aesthetically elegant surfaces hint at an underlying heaviness, brought on by the indelibility of Middle-East politics.
Ezra Johnson makes animation films out of continuously changing paintings, and then allows the paintings to exist as frozen objects. By constantly cutting, rearranging, and repainting each image, Johnson bounces back and forth between filmic narrative and abstract moments, exposing the process of conventional painting in his complex and poignant films.
Melissa Brown produces wood-block prints, and paintings whose layering, stencils, gradients, and recurring patterns point to a variety of print-making methods. With these tools, Brown plays with the perception of same/not-same, positive and negative, and the real and supernatural.
Irys Schenker’s practice alternates between colored pencil works on paper and sculpture in cardboard and thread, often incorporating both. With their hand-drawn and simple materials, her re-imaginings of Old-World synagogues plaintively speak of cultural survival and the wistfulness of diaspora.
Francesco Longenecker’s recent works on plexiglass, mylar and acetate take advantage of transparency to show many architectural layers flattened into one. His drawings are inspired by the methodology of traditional cell animation, pushing the medium from clarity and movement into confusion and stillness.
Julia Bland builds complex form and surface in often symmetrical wall works that could be mistaken for avant-garde quilts. Painting on woven material, Bland burns, cuts, rearranges, sews, and disassembles, ultimately creating amalgams of painting and traditional craft techniques.