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.