Botanic's first commercial [c'mon let's allow ourselves to have a little fun once in a while!]

The Commons
Installations by Brooklyn artists Sarah Butler & Julie Tremblay; Curated by Paul Nicholson

OPENING RECEPTION Saturday March 10, 2012; 6:00 – 10:00 PM
(Part of Bushwick’s Beat Nite)

Botanic Gallery
150 Wyckoff Avenue, Brooklyn New York, 11237
Gallery Hours: Saturday/Sunday 1:00 – 5PM & by appointment
The Commons will be on display at Botanic Gallery through April 1st

Sarah Butler
In a site-based work created specifically for Botanic’s storefront window, Sarah Butler has transcribed observed text from the local graffiti and signage and intertwined it with notional annotations from her personal experience. By marking the glass window of the gallery, the invisible barrier becomes both personal notebook and public display; a lens and screen at the same time. The formal casement of a storefront window frames the artist’s own subjectivity through which she reflects on the poetic lyricism of advertising rhetoric, parking ordinances, and neighborhood graffiti on Wyckoff Avenue.

Sarah Butler is a Bushwick based artist whose text based creative practice uses self-imposed rules, guidelines, and systematic limitation to share glimpses of her autobiographical bias on page and plane. Often using a methodological approach, she employs lyrical pen strokes, through backwards cursive, simultaneous ambidextrous and automatic writing to offer glimpses of a biased autobiographical essay. Her words and text are at first familiar but at the same time obfuscated by context, juxtaposition, and formal play, making them quickly unrecognizable. Meaning is illusive, thereby frustrating the viewer by being at the same time both revealing and concealing.

In 2011 her text-based artworks were exhibited at Regina Rex Art Gallery in Queens; The Do Right Hall in Marfa, Texas, and Interstate Projects in Brooklyn, New York. Sarah is chapter author and co-editor (with Raymond Quek and Darren Deane) of the forthcoming book Nationalism and Architecture (London: Ashgate, 2012)

Julie Tremblay
In her first Botanic exhibition Julie Tremblay offers a new installation titled Simulacra. She has transformed the gallery into an artificial green space that is saturated with vibrant grass, bright sun, and an unlikely perch from which viewers are encouraged to take it all in. Tremblay has covered the entire floor of the gallery with patio-style astroturf. In the center of the gallery, a seamless turf-covered chair boyishly leans back, absent its’ occupant, under two specialized spotlights that are positioned as if to nourish the plastic flora. Astroturf since it’s advent in the ‘60’s has been not only a kitsch-symbol of urban oases but also a genuine space for both informal and professional play. In the context of Botanic Gallery, Tremblay has embraced and combined these associations, creating a new game that she invites us to partake in.

Julie Tremblay is an interdisciplinary artist working in performance, sculpture and installation from her Bushwick studio. Recent exhibitions include Luxembourg, Montreal, and New York, including upcoming shows at 571 projects on April 5th The Nassau County Museum in Rosyln NY later this year.

Botanic Gallery is sponsored by Vinos en Wycoff we love this place and hope you do too!!!

Popular Subculture

An exhibition of recent work by Bushwick artists, Mark Bouthilette &

Daniel Derwelis

OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, February 3, 2012 7-9PM

Botanic

150 Wyckoff Avenue, Brooklyn New York, 11237

Gallery Hours: Saturday/Sunday 1–5PM & by appointment

Popular Subculture work will be on display at Botanic Gallery through Feb 19^th

Mark Bouthilette is showing a new series of works influenced by the illustrated natural history books and music culture from his youth.Bouthilette’s works employ representational images of animals painted with an earnest amateur naturalist's sensibility placed on top of abstract glossy foundations. Using radical juxtaposition, he combines archetypal imagery from competing hobby's from his rural New Hampshire childhood; on one hand in hispsychedelicbackgrounds blend and swirl in the muted tones reminiscent of 1970's album art, simultaneously various animals atop sit indifferent to the chaotic surroundings.

Daniel Derwelis' recent paintings are inspired by the artist’s dreams; in these visual transcriptions he shares his own questions about the meaning and substance of the dream plot. Appearing almost cinematic in nature, Derwelis’ cathartic paintings invite participation through ambiguous narratives waiting to be filled with meaning.

Botanic Gallery is generously sponsored by Vinos en Wyckoff

Mutatis Mutandis:

EMI BRADY & NIKKI ROMANELLO AT BOTANIC GALLERY

January 6^th – January 27^th, 2011

OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, January 6th, 2012 7-9PM

150 Wyckoff Avenue, Brooklyn, New York 11237

Gallery Hours: Saturday / Sunday 1:00 – 5PM or by appointment

In a changing neighborhood, a warring microcosm has emerged where drawings and sculptures enliven Botanic, a provisional gallery space in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. Lithographed birds fly off the page to escape being affixed as prostheses to hybrid mammalian monsters. Crystalline skeletons rest on white gallery pedestals transformed into examination tables. They hold fossilized evidence of the violence of which echoes an upheaval happening all around us.

This exhibition is the first major collaboration by Emi Brady and Nikki Romanello. While divergent in their approach, each artist posits an alternate world full of oddities, mutations and deviations from the objective artifact. Brady’s excised print images seem to flutter around the room and come alive; flat & linear; they simultaneously maintain their “drawingness” while fully engaging the interior of the three dimensional gallery space. Romanello’s sculptures, skeletons composed of various animal bones re-cast in glycerin soap. They become inanimate objects of existential contemplation. Though derived from things once animated they are motionless objects whose fragility is heightened by the nature of their material. The whole installation is an environment where the viewer is permitted to walk among the remnants of a primordial land.

Brady and Romanello’s creatures are carefully considered down to the last detail where each bone, limb, bird and flock was chosen and arranged for its’ relationship to the whole. Axioms surrounding creation, augmentation, and biodegradation heighten the interpretation of these combinations. The incredible cultural artifact collides with the credible depiction in this exhibition. And it is this conflict that creates a sense of timelessness, a moment of tranquility in the center of the melee that affords us the opportunity to be absorbed in these artists’ vision.

F O R I M M E D I A T E R E L E A S E

B o t a n I c G a l l e r y i s a p r o v I s I o n a l s p a c e g e n e r o u s l y s p o n s o r e d b y V I n o s E n W y c o f f

www.BotanicBK.com

A Strange Sense of Calm
An unconventional drawing show highlighting creative experimentation by 8 artists

December 3 – December 26, 2011 at Botanic
Opening Reception for the Artists
Friday 12.9.2011, 7 – 9 pm
150 Wycoff Ave, Brooklyn NY 11237

Artists: Amanda Browder, Joy Drury Cox, Justin Goetz, Parinot Kunakornwong,
JF Lynch, Paula Searing, Marc Slanger, Jessica Walker; curated by Paul M Nicholson

A Strange Sense of Calm is intended to shine light on to the notional and aesthetic meanderings of artists employing a drawing methodology in their creative practice. For this show finished and unfinished works were chosen from a group of 8 artists [most of who do not self-identify as drawers]. Nonetheless, each artist makes use of drawing in their own way, they have ideas, make plans, sketch things out, experiment, record and describe in some way as a part of their creative practice.

Drawing is a process to record, work out, and describe ideas using sign, symbol and form; it’s one of the oldest and most accessible ways of working that almost every practitioner in every discipline uses at one time or another. Moma’s recent exhibition, On Line; Drawing Through the Twentieth Century, put forth a persuasive argument in support of drawing’s “departure from the institutional definition of drawing” while abandoning the burden of the illusionistic representational image paradigm. Drawing as a practice has undoubtedly gone well beyond the page in this our digital era manifesting itself in every form imaginable, while at the same time mark-making has managed to maintain its importance.

Employing a minimalist sensibility, Justin Goetz’ 2011 piece “A Strange State of Calm”, uses a deceptively simple approach which is at the heart of this unique exhibition. In this work we’re presented with a photocopied book of ephemeral line drawings depicting utopic homes, castles, manors, and other environments, each image crafted in a strange state of calm.

press from hyperallergic

http://hyperallergic.com/41136/5-more-bushwick-galleries/

@ dekalb show artists

J.F. Lynch, Chino (Vinos en Wyckoff], Paul M. Nicholson, Jose, Chris Cardinale, Kira Bucca, Mark Bouthilette, Jim Stanis, Lemia Bodden, Robin Mork, Daniel Derwelis