The Broadway Gallery is please to announce the upcoming group show Pensive States. The exhibition, featuring the works of Sefkat Islegen, Giovanni Carlo Rocca, Daniel McKinley, Helen Joynson and Guillermo Riveros (current Illustration student!) will be held from August 1st-15th, with an opening reception on Saturday, August 2nd.
Curated by Christina Zhang, Pensive States explores a deeply contemplative corner of the visual sphere. The artists in Pensive States seek to eliminate the boundaries of memory, history and geography in order to make a state of true contemplation possible. The works span a dynamic assortment of stylistic and thematic conclusions that are linked by their reflective nature. Each artist utilizes Pensive States as a forum to display the conclusion of a journey that begins with their imagination and ends with a poetic act of expression.
Pure art springs from a meditative state of mind. As a process, it brings wakefulness and awareness to the creative and viewing processes through the integration of contemplation and meditation. Pensive States brings together artists whose work is intent on achieving a better understanding of spiritual and aesthetic enrichment by opening innovative and thought provoking new dialogues up to the viewer.
Executed through a dynamic visual language, the exhibition is structured upon the idea of pictorial clarity as the elimination of all obstacles between the artist and the idea, and between the idea and the observer. By paying close attention to the transitional works of each artist, Zhang constructs an exhibition of effortless compositions, luminous color and passionate ideas—all of which are found through each artists own experimentations with everything from Realism and Surrealism, to Portraiture and Landscape.
Guillermo Riveros has this to say about his ongoing series, called “Golden Age”:
In my work I explore, through self-portraits, the ideas and discourses surrounding the construction of sexual identities and their representations. In this new series, entitled “Golden Age,” I introduce new devices to my previous technique; the mask to accomplish the anonymity of my subjects, but the clear signal of performativity. The mask allows my characters to inhabit new bodies that serve as an extension of my conceptualized self. These characters inhabit a utopian world of faceless fantastical hybrid sexual identities. Using 60’s horror B-movies as reference for compositions, I also intend to add an additional layer of dramatics to underline the notion of performativity(visible in both the photos and the identities they reference). The use of exteriors intends to speak about a hybrid cross between “the real”/the fantasy, also displayed in the color treatment of the images.
Opening
Saturday, August 2, 2008
6:00pm – 8:00pm
The Broadway Gallery
473 Broadway, 7th floor
New York, NY
[image by Guillermo Riveros]