Jeff Bailey Gallery is pleased to present, Contrapposto & Other Stories,
a group exhibition of sculpture, painting, drawing and photography, featuring the work of Christopher Hanrahan, Dean Levin, Amy Pleasant, Ruby Sky Stiler, and George Woodman, curated by Katia Rosenthal.
Contrapposto is an Italian term meaning to counterpose, suggesting an off-axis twist. Using both traditional and new techniques, each artist draws attention to ideas of contrast, weight and light. The works evince simplicity in their construction while containing a surprising amount of dynamism and edge.
Hanrahan forms drawings in space using polished metal silhouettes. The brass and steel shapes are crafted through conventional welding. Delicate bends and curvaceous slopes combine to form reductive objects, vaguely mimicking something that may exist in the real world.
Converting hand-drawn grids into a digital format, Levin’s printed stainless steel canvases have a mirror-like affect: reflecting both the viewer and the space in which they are exhibited. Levin also makes convex paintings using a minimal surface technique to create seamless rounded profiles. Two of these are combined in the diptych, Untitled (Indigo and White).
Pleasants’ drawings and paintings focus on various parts of the body: the nape of a neck, the back of a head, legs in motion. These isolated shapes float in space, evoking fragments of classical statuary.
Stiler’s reliefs pay homage to Greco-Roman architecture and sculpture while contrasting line and shape from varied historical and contemporary sources. The patina resembles the look of stone, but is actually created using foam, the lightest of craft materials. Large format black and white photographs are made with a camera obscura and combine collage-like arrangements of the human figure, household ephemera, plants, flowers and classical sculpture. The images’ rough edges seem to expand and contract, while bodies and objects shift dramatically in perspective and scale.