Amy Genser

In Between

2023

Ayse Wilson is a Turkish-American artist who lives and lives and works in Connecticut. Her work draws from memory and emotion to remind viewers of youth, innocence and the timeless s...

Ayse Wilson is a Turkish-American artist who lives and lives and works in Connecticut. Her work draws from memory and emotion to remind viewers of youth, innocence and the timeless space we occupy when we are young. She creates lively and childlike characters, finding inspiration in the works of early Italian Renaissance masters such as Fra Angelico. Wilson graduated from Wellesley College in 1991, and pursued her education in Florence. She received her MFA at New York Academy of Art, and later worked as a painting assistant to Jeff Koons for two years. This current series employs the toile wallpaper samples that the artist had lying around her house during lockdown as a backdrop for ambiguous and complicated feelings toward quarantine and domestic confinement. In this work, she is hoping to narrate how fear of the pandemic unknown, coupled with household anxieties, and increased self-awareness contributed to the mixed emotions of security and hostility towards enforced domesticity within a masked world. The toile tradition represented a coincidental parallel with the COVID era rediscovery of old-fashioned pastoral lifestyles, and the embrace of self-reliant artisanal practices like cooking, gardening, sewing, and prescribed homeschooling. Her colorful inscriptions, some original, some appropriated, layer in our contemporary lifestyle, our modern methods of connectivity as well as our high-tech world. The punky playfulness of the neon and fluorescents contrasts with the backdrop of Fragonard-esque imagery and hopes to delivery her messages of love and connection, awareness and newness, hope and emotions, as well as the occasional glossily veiled hostility expressed in certain so-called “love” declarations. The phrases evolved from a previous series addressing the Me Too movement...

Ayse Wilson is a Turkish-American artist who lives and lives and works in Connecticut. Her work draws from memory and emotion to remind viewers of youth, innocence and the timeless space we occupy when we are young. She creates lively and childlike characters, finding inspiration in the works of early Italian Renaissance masters such as Fra Angelico. Wilson graduated from Wellesley College in 1991, and pursued her education in Florence. She received her MFA at New York Academy of Art, and later worked as a painting assistant to Jeff Koons for two years. This current series employs the toile wallpaper samples that the artist had lying around her house during lockdown as a backdrop for ambiguous and complicated feelings toward quarantine and domestic confinement. In this work, she is hoping to narrate how fear of the pandemic unknown, coupled with household anxieties, and increased self-awareness contributed to the mixed emotions of security and hostility towards enforced domesticity within a masked world. The toile tradition represented a coincidental parallel with the COVID era rediscovery of old-fashioned pastoral lifestyles, and the embrace of self-reliant artisanal practices like cooking, gardening, sewing, and prescribed homeschooling. Her colorful inscriptions, some original, some appropriated, layer in our contemporary lifestyle, our modern methods of connectivity as well as our high-tech world. The punky playfulness of the neon and fluorescents contrasts with the backdrop of Fragonard-esque imagery and hopes to delivery her messages of love and connection, awareness and newness, hope and emotions, as well as the occasional glossily veiled hostility expressed in certain so-called “love” declarations. The phrases evolved from a previous series addressing the Me Too movement...

Ayse Wilson is a Turkish-American artist who lives and lives and works in Connecticut. Her work draws from memory and emotion to remind viewers of youth, innocence and the timeless space we occupy when we are young. She creates lively and childlike characters, finding inspiration in the works of early Italian Renaissance masters such as Fra Angelico. Wilson graduated from Wellesley College in 1991, and pursued her education in Florence. She received her MFA at New York Academy of Art, and later worked as a painting assistant to Jeff Koons for two years. This current series employs the toile wallpaper samples that the artist had lying around her house during lockdown as a backdrop for ambiguous and complicated feelings toward quarantine and domestic confinement. In this work, she is hoping to narrate how fear of the pandemic unknown, coupled with household anxieties, and increased self-awareness contributed to the mixed emotions of security and hostility towards enforced domesticity within a masked world. The toile tradition represented a coincidental parallel with the COVID era rediscovery of old-fashioned pastoral lifestyles, and the embrace of self-reliant artisanal practices like cooking, gardening, sewing, and prescribed homeschooling. Her colorful inscriptions, some original, some appropriated, layer in our contemporary lifestyle, our modern methods of connectivity as well as our high-tech world. The punky playfulness of the neon and fluorescents contrasts with the backdrop of Fragonard-esque imagery and hopes to delivery her messages of love and connection, awareness and newness, hope and emotions, as well as the occasional glossily veiled hostility expressed in certain so-called “love” declarations. The phrases evolved from a previous series addressing the Me Too movement...

In BOOM BUST REPEAT17, Peña creates a silhouette of house and fills it with sharpe-edged shapes that contain gradients and saturated hues of red, green, and violet. He balances these colors with muted tones of orange and yellow . The viewer can create a house that is yet to be built in between the gaps here. In "Boom, Bust, Repeat", Peña remarks on a house and landscape that has yet to take place. The painting is created with watercolor and acrylic paint on paper. In the foreground we see Sintra board or flattened PVC that has been CNC routed. In the "soil" beneath the house are small circular lines that have been hand drawn with India ink. The Sintra board has been cut to reveal arrows in the negative space pointing upwards as to hint at a boom in the market. Peña’s works range from painting to multimedia installations that question the ever-changing psychological landscape of America; asking the viewer to re-examine their perceptions of the “American Dream” and the affects that pursuit has on our environment and national psyche. The realization that both the idealistic pursuit of happiness and the relevance of painting in a technologically driven world informs his practice. With each composition the labor begins with digital composites of a fragmented American landscape in peril —where tension lies in the contrasts between past and present, analog and digital, representation and abstraction, and stability and instability. In his most recent series the American home (stability) and fragmented and shifting landscape (instability) are veiled by a digitally produced mat. Traditionally a mat is, by definition, a flat, thin piece of paper based material included within the picture frame and serves as additional decoration when framing artwork. He activates this commonly overlooked material by using a non-traditional material, Sintra (flattened sheet of PVC), that has a negative digitally drawn image cut-out. This cut-out might, at first glance, look hand cut however, a more astute viewer would realize the precision is mechanical. The mat has been transformed from inactive decoration to digitally produced veil that represents the technologically anxious precision we surround ourselves with. Nick Peña...

In POSSIBLE, IMPOSSIBLE, POSSIBLE, Peña combines representational elements of a bright green landscape in the background with a more abstracted silhouette of a house in the middle gr...

In his couture series, Peter Hoffer explores the theater of fashion through a reinterpreted runway. In this mixed media painting, a realistically rendered model for the Italian luxur...

Beauty Spring Woman - Acrylic and 3D Painting on Canvas + Artificial Boxwood Hedge Baby Green Leaves Foliage Biophilic design 24 x 24" Figurat...