NEW YORK, NY.- For
gallery nine5’s summer exhibition, the gallery invites you to experience WILD, a semi-conceptual art garden that features works by contemporary artists influenced by flora, fauna, and everything beyond and in between. Through literal and less-literal interpretations of botany and nature, participating artists in gallery nine5’s group exhibition create a transformative experience intent on engaging all senses, mimicking the stimuli of the outside world.
WILD features Jessica Lichtenstein, Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, Peter Gerakaris, Tatyana Murray, Kirsten Kay Thoen, Lina Puerta, LeRone Wilson, and Ivan Stojakovic. Each artist exemplifies a novel approach to the relationship between constructed and organic realities.
As the title piece of the show, WILD by Jessica Lichtenstein encapsulates the playfulness inherent in naturally occurring gardens. Female forms frolic in a wooded scene, inviting those outside their world to join them within it. In opposition, Peter Gerakaris’s Rappacini series, which depicts the old Italian fairy-tale of the tragic story of a young man and his literally poisonous love, uses blaring neons and mysterious faces to lure viewers in.
Kirsten Kay Thoen unveils one of her hanging structures for the first time in WILD , showing her deft handling of industrial materials, particularly when juxtaposed against her photographs of far-off natural landscapes and forms. Her work hangs in the middle of the back room.
Tatyana Murray utilizes a similar multi-layered approach to her haunting glass works. Hand-etching each glass pane, Murray creates literal and figurative depth in her Ghost Tree , using LED lighting to highlight the individuality of each leaf and each branch; only by stepping back does the intricacy lend itself to a great organic form.
It is LeRone Wilson’s encaustic sculpture-paintings that grasp viewers’ attentions through their exploration of texture. Melted encaustic finds itself molded, pressed, formed, and handled into lush, naturally-occurring forms that call to the imagination fresh blades of grass or underwater plant life. Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann’s long Untitled work accomplishes this sensation as well: thick vellum overlays her traditional paper, inviting one to engage multiple senses when viewing her work. The abstracted forms in the piece shape and swirl, protrude and hollow out, simultaneously wild and precise in their many manifestations.
Ivan Stojakovic’s geographical gardens of succulents investigate the tension between architectural and natural landscaping. Composed of live plants, the shapes of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, and other cityscapes lend themselves to simultaneous nostalgia and fear. The tension inherent in the battle between a growing garden and a developed urban center are visualized with Stojakovic’s works.
Throughout the gallery, Lina Puerta’s installations hang, caress, hug corners, and sprout within the architecture of the space. Her works resonate as bodily forms, organs that live and breathe, organisms that threaten to overtake the space, yet somehow live harmoniously within it.
gallery nine5 invites you to fully explore WILD; to live, breathe, play, touch, feel, experience a fully-formed art garden that seeks to engage every single sense you possess. See colors and forms expanding around you and imagine the concepts they inspire or are inspired by. WILD provides an opportunity to escape the drudgery of daily life. Settle in. Explore.
