All-over or nothing

September 7 – October 6, 2013

Opening Reception: Saturday September 14th, 6 – 9 pm

Open: Saturdays and Sundays 1-6 pm

Parallel Art Space: 17-17 Troutman Street #220, Ridgewood, NY 11385 [map]

Direction: L Train to Jefferson St. / B57 (Flushing Ave) to Cypress Ave

Parallel Art Space proudly presents All-over or Nothing, a selection of works that have a non-differential surface treatment as one of their primary characteristics.

Featuring the artwork of Paul Corio, Theresa Daddezio, Nate Ethier, Patricia Fabricant, Peter Lapsley, Max Warsh, and Carleen Zimbalatti

All-over or Nothing is by no means intended as a survey of such, but rather as a subjective recognition of artists working in a specific related vain, harking back to earlier days of modernism when the treatment of the picture plane changed from one with dominant points of interest to one with hallmarks of a more uniform surface treatment. This emphasis on uniformity was seen as a move toward the flattening of the picture plane, as opposed to the illusion of depth commonly found in painting since the renaissance, with the invention of pictorial perspective, etc. Particular progenitors of this approach were artists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey in the 1950's and, according to Clement Greenberg, a lesser-known Janet Sobel somewhat earlier.

From his 1955 essay, “American-Type Painting”, Clement Greenberg defines “all-over” as “filled from edge to edge with evenly spaced motifs that repeated themselves uniformly like the elements in a wallpaper pattern, and therefore seemed capable of repeating the picture beyond its frame into infinity.” It is this sense of both shallow, defined space and infinite time hinted at in the “all-over” pictorial stratagem that seems to make it such an attractive modus to art-makers today. In a visual culture that includes Google-Earth imaging and pinch and drag zoom features on electronic tablets, the repeating field of close-up and far-away graphics is an everyday, observable truth.  The fact that the all-over motif typically asserts only the shallowest of pictorial depths, leads the viewer to consider the primacy of a flattened picture plane and thus, the validity of the art object unto itself. In this way, it is both a perfect example of modernist ideology and a useful tool to employ in the unpacking of an increasingly, post-Post-modern world.

With its mix of formalistic attributes and philosophical properties, the all-over disposition provides an intriguing bridge between present art-making concerns and an earlier era’s movements away from Cubist conventions and space toward something altogether more modern. The artists in All-over or Nothing carry markers in their work that can be directly related to this art-historical shift in pictorial perception, whilst moving well beyond it, into considerations and questions both current and consciously their own.

Paul Corio employs a geometric system of execution within many of his works to engage his primary concern; color.  Within a system of approach that includes, occasionally, numeric input from off-track horse racing, Corio erects a systematic and personal approach to his method of distributing painting medium. The resulting gradations of hue and tone achieve something akin to depth, space and especially a sense of light. Through carefully applied color, the grid-like works included in All-over or Nothing assert the feel of light on form and establish an intriguing sense of scale; in the artists own words “a blow up of something small or a reduction of something huge.”

Born in Providence, RI, Paul Corio received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA from Hunter College. He has shown at various venues including Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn NY, Paris Concret, Paris FR, Allegra LaViola Gallery, New York NY, Center Galleries, Detroit MI, and Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York NY. He has been covered by NY Arts Magazine and artcritical.com. He teaches at Parsons School of Design and lives and works in New York City.

“… everything is both endlessly divisible, but also inextricably tied together” - Theresa Daddezio.  Creating large and small-scale works that employ chaos and careful paint application in equal measure, Daddezio “grows” paint compositions with a bio-morphic sensibility.  Atop a foundation of all-over drips and spills, she creates techni-colored cosmologies and micro-biological worlds. For All-over or Nothing, Daddezio presents works that engage the viewer with a variety of surface texture and chromatic impact.

Theresa Daddezio received a BFA from the Purchase College of Art and Design that included study abroad at the Scuola Lorenzo de Medici in Florence, Italy.  She has shown at various venues including Centotto Gallery, Brooklyn NY, 212 Rivington, New York NY, the Albany State Museum, Albany NY, NYCAMS, New York NY, and the Active Space, Brooklyn NY.  Her work has been covered by Hyperallergic, Bushwick Daily, the Queens Ledger, and the L Magazine. A current co-director of Associated Gallery in Brooklyn NY, she lives and works in New York City.

Nate Ethier is an artist that infuses his vibrant compositions with a lively, syncopated meter.  Brilliant greens, carnation pinks with rectangles and triangles seem to float and slide atop a thin layer of depth within these planar works.  The selections shown in All-over or Nothing establish regimented systems of repeating color and shape while incorporating visual breaks within this same arrangement.  The artist is said to have an interest in “self-perpetuating visual motion within a system”; an interest he explores here in earnest.

Nate Ethier received a BA from Goddard College in Plainfield VT and an MFA from the Boston University College of Fine Arts in Boston MA. He has shown at various venues including Brian Morris gallery, New York NY, Lenore Grey Gallery, Providence RI, Center Galleries, Detroit MI, and Allegra LaViola Gallery, New York NY.  His work has been included in the flat files of Lenore Grey Gallery, Providence RI and Minus Space, Brooklyn NY.  He was awarded the 2010 Visual Art Grant to the Vermont Studio Center Residency in Johnson VT. He currently lives and works in New York City.

Patricia Fabricant makes works whose patterns, though graphic and repeated, seem inspired by nature and the myriad of abstracted shape all around us.  Her compositions are dynamic and teeming with inspirations from plant form, wood grain and geological strata.  For All-over or Nothing, Fabricant presents configurations of colorful, concentric line that radiate outward and inward, re-calling topographical maps and mitochondrial, cellular forms. The artist suggests that her works are not about images per se, but rather “they are about nature, about color, and about process.”

Patricia Fabricant holds a BA from Wesleyan University in Middletown CT that included study abroad at the Syracuse University Center in Florence, Italy.  Her work has been exhibited at various venues including Front Room Gallery, Brooklyn NY, Sikkema Jenkins, New York NY, Geoffrey Young Gallery, Great Barrington MA, Artists Space, New York NY, and Cheim and Read, New York NY and has also shown at Fountain Art Fair, New York NY. An award winning book designer and art director, Fabricant lives and works in New York City.

Artist Peter Lapsley brings an awareness and sensitivity of the elemental spaces of human habitation to his art-making practice. With subject choices ranging from architecture to cartography to history, Lapsley approaches his work with a deft sensibility to how the eye and body receive and process aesthetic materiality.  In All-over or Nothing, Lapsley offers “Virtu/Ozio/Rovina” (which in Italian mean Virtue/Sloth/Ruin), a barnacled, sub-oceanic looking Ionic Greek column composed  solely of small, golden Neodymium magnets; the strongest type of permanent magnet made.  This literal all-over composition conflates issues of permanence, history, legacy and tension with delicate finesse and substantial aplomb.

Bermuda born Peter Lapsley obtained his BA degree from St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada and his MFA degree from Parsons The New School for Design in New York, NY.  His work has been shown at various venues including Five Myles Gallery, Brooklyn NY, Shore Institute of Contemporary Art, Long Branch NJ, The Bermuda National Gallery, Hamilton Bermuda, Envoy Enterprises, New York NY, and Victori Contemporary, Miami FL.  He has exhibited at the Scope Art Fair in both Miami FL and Basel Switzerland and the Fountain Art Fair in New York NY. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Max Warsh makes work inspired by the markers of industry and the facades of urban architecture that create the city’s visual environs.  Culled from perambulatory expeditions around various neighborhoods, the photographs that Warsh takes of cast, architectural ornamentations are reprinted and used in his studio to build up his densely patterned compositions. In All-over or Nothing, the artist offers collage-like constructions made of photographs and acrylic paint, wherein repeated architectural patterns interlace formally with painted shape and line.

Max Warsh received his BA degree from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville NY and his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago.  He has exhibited his work at various venues including toomer labzda, New York NY, C.R.E.A.M. Projects, Brooklyn NY, Sam Lee Gallery, Los Angeles CA, Shoot the Lobster, New York NY, and Longhouse Projects, New York NY.  Warsh is a co-founder and curator of Regina Rex, an artist-run art space in Ridgewood Queens. He lives and works in New York City.

Carleen Zimbalatti creates all-over compositions featuring colorful fields of acrylic over which she implements reams of interlacing, undulating line.  These line-based patterns curl and roil like an ocean surface and seem to take their visual inspiration from weaving, leaves and plant-forms. Indeed, the artist is said to be interested in the “recurring fractal-like patterns as observed in nature”. These works are on hand in All-over or Nothing and straddle the demarcations between observed influence and non-objective abstraction and process.

Carleen Zimbalatti received her BFA from Moore College of Art in Philadelphia PA and her MFA from Bennington College in Vermont.  She has exhibited her work at various venues including SEABA Gallery in Burlington VT, Westbeth Gallery, New York NY, AVA Gallery, Lebanon NH, Bennington Center for the Arts, Bennington VT, and Helio Gallery, New York, NY.  Her work has been sponsored by the Sanford Sharpie Corporation and collections include Dartmouth College in Hanover NH and Bennington College in Bennington VT.

Featured in the L-magazine Fall Preview. [link]

17-17 Troutman Street - # 220 - Ridgewood NY 11385  • www.parallelartspace.com • parallelartspace[at]gmail.com