Inside Voices

February 23 – April 07, 2013

Armory Night: Saturday, March 9th, 6pm - 10pm

Closing Reception: Saturday, April 6th, 6 pm – 9 pm

Hours: Sat/Sun 1-6pm and by appointment

Location: 17-17 Troutman Street #220, Ridgewood, NY 11385 (map)

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

Inside Voices is a group show that examines the ways, disparate and complimentary, that six artists employ and transform aspects of the domestic interior within their own creative practice. Featuring works by Katie Bell, Hilary Doyle, Robert Otto Epstein, Tuomas Korpijaakko, Amy Lincoln, and Paul Loughney, these artists apply a formal vocabulary from various disciplines to consider more intimately the spaces, both physical and cerebral, that we inhabit everyday.

Second only to the securing of food and water, a mortal interest in shelter and the trappings thereof, are as old as history itself.  The domiciliary movement from tents and mud-brick huts to glass and steel apartment buildings mirrors the trajectory of human civilization; “the home” being an archetypal marker that is readily discernable in art history as well. From the shallow mysteries of early Roman wall paintings, to the quiet warmth of 15th Century Flemish portraits to the chromatically dizzying quarters of the Impressionists and the Nabis, the domestic interior has been, and remains, a vital source of inspiration for art-makers even today.

Taken from the admonishing, parental instructions to “still oneself” the title “Inside Voices” references the idea that, even from childhood, our interior spaces are synonymous with quietude, interpersonal exchange, and introspection.   Correspondingly, our private rooms and internal thoughts are sometimes linked as both are the locus of some of life’s most unrevealed dramas & intimate disclosures.  About secrets as much as safe haven, partitions as much as protection, the troves of this subject matter are deep indeed and provide ample source material for the six artists in this show. Employed according to the dictates of their individual endeavors, the genre of interiors is but one similarity shared among them. A firmness of investigational footing, cumulative tonal dissonance, and deep psychological underpinnings are also shared qualities within the results of their making; artworks that, like the interior spaces of their inspiration, might be described, by turns, as placid, dynamic, convivial, and haunted.

Katie Bell brings a sculptor’s sensibility for structure, scale and space to her painterly practice. Her work engages both two and three-dimensional forms, and pulls from the tropes of both art and home-making practice. Here stretcher bars and Venetian blinds collide with gesso and insulation foam, with resultant work that is as much about destruction as balance, construction as consideration; where scraps of the household familiar, long liberated from functionality, flirt along the edges of recognizability.

Originally from Rockford, Illinois, Katie Bell received an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI) and a BA from Knox College (Galesburg, IL). Selected exhibition venues include Mixed Greens (New York, NY), Nudashank (Baltimore, MA), the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Lincoln, MA), the Fort Worth Drawing Center (Fort Worth, TX) and the Rockford Art Museum (Rockford, IL). Bell was a 2011 recipient of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Space Program and has been covered by the publications Art Fag City, New American Paintings and Bomb Magazine. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

With an interest in surface textures, value and light, artist Hilary Doyle brings a playfully serious examination to the proto-typical subject matters of painting practice. Firmly established upon a formalistic foundation, Doyle’s artwork guides our eye to explore the detritus and the accouterment of the day to day. Scuffs along a baseboard, food stains upon fabric, and the subtle hues of a pre-fab countertop, weigh in equally in her craft; one that begs us reconsider the visual context of our not-so waking moments.

A native of Worcester, MA, Hilary Doyle received an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI) and a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (Boston, MA). She has exhibited with The Bruce High Quality Foundation (New York, NY), Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA), Airplane (Brooklyn, NY), La Montagne Gallery (Boston, MA), and the Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix, AZ).  A Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant nominee and recipient of the Vermont Studio Center Artist Residency, Doyle has been covered by Artscope Magazine and Greenpointers.com. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Combining the materials of home decoration (construction ‘craft’ paper and house paint) with a fine art approach, Robert Otto Epstein not only pulls from vintage decorative lace patterns and DIY knitting schematics for source material in some of his work, he also takes on a needle-workers methodology for the systematic realization of his art. He paints or draws one graphed square at a time, row upon row of applied color or graphite on paper until the work is complete. In this way his works are, from his artist statement,  “as much about the repetitive, mechanistic process as they are about the final product.”

Hailing from Pittsburgh, PA, Robert Otto Epstein completed Post-Baccalaureate studies from the University of Durham (Durham, England) and received a BA from the University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA). He has shown with Envoy Enterprises (New York, NY), Maloney Fine Art (Los Angeles, CA), Finch and Ada (New York, NY), Uprise Art (New York, NY) and Retramp Gallery (Berlin, Germany).  Included in the Artists Space Irving Sandler Artist File, Nurture Art Registry and White Columns Curated Artist Registry, he can also be found within the Pierogi Gallery Online Flat Files. He currently lives and works in Maplewood, NJ.

Tuomas Korpijaakko’s work seems a collection of happenstance and intentional arrangements of the detritus of his immediate environs. Whether discovered by chance or culled from his surroundings, Korpijaakko’s pictures highlight the extraordinary constructions all around us and the serendipitous connections between image, place, and personhood. For this show, the photographer reconsiders the milieu of his childhood, and offers a visual counter for the psychoanalytic concepts of “object-oriented” and “in-vivo” exposures.

Tuomas Korpijaakko was born to Finnish parents in Princeton, NJ.  He received an MFA from the ICP-Bard Program in Advanced Photographic Studies (New York, NY) and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts (New York, NY).  Selected exhibition venues include Smack Mellon; New York Photo Festival (Brooklyn, NY), Night Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), the Showpaper 42nd St Gallery (New York, NY), End of Century (New York, NY), and the Hedreen Gallery; SU Lee Center for the Arts (Seattle, WA).  His work has been featured in Parallelograms (weekly on-line publication) and he has self-published a number of photography books which have been exhibited most recently at Photobook London (London, UK) and Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (Los Angeles, CA). He lives and works in New York, NY.

Amy Lincoln’s output combines several genres of painting, typically within one work. Vacillating deftly between emblems of figurative, landscape, interior, and portrait painting, Lincoln constructs scenes that are at once fantastical, familiar, restrained and aboil. For “Inside Voices” Lincoln offers compositions of shallow depth, with subjects that tilt forward in space, skewing perspective like theater props or pop-up books. These tightly rendered scenes exist equidistant between the imagined and the observed.

Amy Lincoln received an MFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University (Philadelphia, PA) and a BA from the University of California (Davis, CA). Selected exhibition venues include Storefront Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Thierry Goldberg Projects (New York, NY), Geoffrey Young Gallery (Great Barrington, MA), Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA), and Norte Maar (Brooklyn, NY).  Recent residencies for the artist include the Inside Out Art Museum (Bejing, China), Pocket Utopia (Brooklyn, NY), and the Swing Space Award from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Covered by publications as diverse as Hyperallergic, Painters’ Table, and The Wall Street Journal, the artist currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.  

Working primarily from magazine advertisements and printed photo-scans, Paul Loughney constructs collaged compositions largely devoid of identifiable human and product forms. Instead, these quasi-interior spaces fill with abstracted, haunting light where painterly schisms of shape, line, and color converge. Like the pastiche that is memory, Loughney’s collages conflate notions of the lurid, the prosaic, the notional, and the real.

Paul Loughney received an MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ) and a certificate in Printmaking from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Philadelphia, PA).  Selected exhibition venues include Vera & Melchor de Arcenegui (New York, NY), Seraphin Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), La Lutta Project Space (Brooklyn, NY), Subspace Gallery (Berlin, Germany), and the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (Santa Ana, CA).  Former visiting artist at both the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, his work can be found in the permanent collection of Purdue University, Indiana, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum and the Brodsky Center at Rutgers University. The artist lives and works in New York City.