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The Rainbow / Prism Show 

September 9th - December 4th

Curated by Kirstin Lamb and Jordan Hutton

 

Shown By appointment with Jordan Hutton (914-393-0253)

The Yard, Williamsburg 

33 Nassau Avenue, Brooklyn NY 11222  

https://kirstinlamb.squarespace.com/rainbow-prism-show

 

Kirstin Lamb Curatorial, Jordan Hutton, and The Yard, Williamsburg are pleased to present The Rainbow / Prism Show. Soft opening on September 9th, this show will run until November 10th.  This show was a long time coming, starting online on March 23rd right at the beginning of the pandemic and finally installed at The Yard this September.Artists’ work will be available online at https://kirstinlamb.squarespace.com/rainbow-prism-show throughout the run of the show, and in person by appointment with Jordan Hutton (914-393-0253 or jordant.hutton@gmail.com).  There will be no opening event for the show, but we hope folks will make time to come see the show in person, we are delighted by the installation.

 

Rainbows and prisms break white light into color. Painters work to divide color on their palettes and observe color from life to place upon a surface. In this show we are interested in painters whose practices highlight the rainbow, the literal brights of the spectrum in their work. Imaging not so much from life but from a kind of alter-plane of magik and conjuring, wishful dreaming and gauzy filtered viewing. 

 

Neons, hard edges and sultry curves abound in the work of Hayley Youngs. Hayley struck us both as strangely out of place and time, belonging more to a mid-century Miami. Using bright chalky pinks, soft limey greens, and strange neon hot pinks and fuchsias, her world is both old world garden and hotel marquee. Sometimes she strikes as engaging in a talismanic type of mourning as with her painting Joaquin Phoenix, a cross between a design for a stained glass and a futurist tapestry. Other notes in her work feel like fantastic trips or haunted revisionist landscapes from the future. Haley works with earnest dreaming and devotional painting that is searingly beautiful, part hard edge and part flower bed. 

 

Leigh Tarentino has been staging her jewel box oil paintings with stunningly hand painted furniture and hand made vessels in her studio. We need you to know this before we launch into a discussion of the work at hand. We wish we could have brought to you the credenza with its perfectly dyed runner with matching vessels on top. It feels like Leigh has created a whole interior world for her lush utopian canvas scenes. At times the landscapes she renders feel downright Arcadian, showcasing perfectly trimmed hedges arrayed in a scene with architecture that feels collegiate but also reads as classical. As she has continued this work we think the perfectly trimmed topiaries have veered into leering clouded abstractions, still reading as landscape but starting to overtake the surface with pure color and shape. 

 

There is an emotional challenge in Kelli Thompson’s work that mirrors her wonderfully creepy planty and figurative paintings, but it emanates from a deep center horizon and a kind of eerie perfectionism of line and removal of the hand. We were honestly more familiar with Kelli’s writhing hands and ominous tangled creepers, but when we saw her abstractions we felt a moody familiarity to the other body of work that both charmed and unnerved. How can you stare someone down with just color? Can alterations of color and width to a single vanishing point create an dancing event horizon, a kind of Mardi Gras for the end times? Kelli has a delightfully strange way of observing the world, and her abstractions elevate that sensibility to a kind of pared down symphony of pinks, greens, blues and teals. 

 

Jen Shepard is an artist who makes wonderlands in a deliberately light, loose and off-kilter way. We love the slipshod rainbows that belt out color hymns next to awkward space legs or wiggling terrarium plants and shells. There is no way to describe this work except exuberant, but spliced with a kind of knowing compositional and palette thrust here and there that rewards slow viewing. How can a simple painting of a rainbow be so much more? In Shepard’s “Chroma-Rizons” she blocks off the bottom right of the picture for a grungy gray, leaving the color theatrics for the rest of the space, off-setting the pace and exuberance of the bows. In “Enlightened” the rainbow has its own neon green shadow, while in “Magik” a dark bow casts a full chromatic rainbow shadow. Shepard hides longer conversations in conceits like moving shadows or color-ways, playfully asking her viewers to think beyond simple conversations for the usual signifiers. 

 

Painting is terraforming and also splicing and shattering space according to painter Leah Montalto. Kirstin has known Leah since graduate school and we find her consistently looking for ways to hone in on why painting feels more like science fiction than real life. Leah carefully works from exquisitely modeled digital maps that are hand designed to create very large scale oil paintings masterfully crafted and blended to allow you to sink into a world of blended and fractured color. You live in the experience of world building and hollowing out, floating in the painting’s space as you look at it. Additionally, Leah is sharing some stunning small digital prints online with us, which give a window into her labor-intensive digital process.  The warmth and condensed space of the newest print works hint at new larger oil paintings to come. 

 

Alesandro Keegan’s paintings are the jeweled offspring of Bosch, a praying mantis, and blueprints for perpetual motion machines. If you have ever found yourself in the interdimensional web of being, then you are familiar with this type of imagery. The painting’s subjects could be machines or organisms on the psychic plane (or perhaps both). Beautifully handled oil paint gleams as the prismatic gradients of the background accentuates the subject’s kaleidoscopic parts. They confront you with their beautiful otherness head on. They exist and remain in light. The paintings are confrontational yet calming. Like landing on a new planet for the first time and exploring it’s forests. We marveled at the beauty but could not shake the alarming primordial reminder that these new organisms could be friend or foe. Radiant, Alessandro Keegan’s polychrome paintings share another realm in a way few others can do.

 

For Kirstin’s last show with the Yard, we thought we would bring you one to two paintings, just to round out the group show. Kirstin has been showing work that is in dialogue with her practice and her studio world. It only felt fitting to bring these artworks in at the end and join the conversation. Briefly, these paintings were made as a series called “new props” a first group of works designed as still life props for the studio. Many of the paintings were made as a kind of re-engagement with the language of abstraction and color. The body of work including “Haze” and “Oh Hello” was interested in a re-engagement with languages of abstraction, and the artist was no longer interested in one kind of picture, one way of making, but a multiplicity. The group of paintings was a kind of love letter to Russian Constructivism and Abstract Expressionism, but the painting itself would serve as a prop in a cartoonish faux-naïf interior portrait of her studio. We feel that the works fall in line with the heterogenous practices of the other artists in this show, weaving between different ways of making, different types of imaging, using polychrome/prismatic palettes to seduce and play with aesthetic categories.

 

Rainbow / Prism for us was an exploration of artists we admire working almost exclusively with rainbow and color imagery. It allowed us to look at their practices through the lens of a colorist, something that frequently feels self indulgent, but shouldn’t. Color is important. The beauty and pleasure of color is a deep and lovely thing, revel in it and find peace, joy, complexity. Be well.