Nick Hunt

Untitled (Life Fragment) Various Colors

2018

Nick Hunt grew up in in Newport Beach in the 80’s and early 90’s. As Hunt states, “It was an unknown area to a lot of the world. Development was in progress, but at that point in time it was still mostly open land, populated with surfers and desert-beach dreamers. My work is inspired by this desert-ocean dangerous allure.” Hunt’s work, while abstract, conjures a sense of history - both in their Light and Space influences and in the the rough beauty of the objects themselves. The scumbled, dented, sometimes bullet riddled surfaces reveal layers of color, painted on metal, and hint at a romantic complexity beneath the glossy enameled surfaces. Hunt spent a lot of time in Mexico as a boy, where he got to know Billy Al Bengston, Peter Alexander, Chuck Arnoldi...

Rex Yuasa’s work explores the relationship between beauty and the sublime. Yuasa first began developing a body of work based on the idea of “void,” which he describes as a non-sign...

Jessica Houston’s most recent works look north. What is north? Where is it? Is it a fixed place, or something else? Her second solo show at Art Mûr brings together paintings, a sound sculpture, and chine collé prints, all of which reveal a fragile, fluid, and often fractured, north. An iron ore stone becomes a speaker, playing recordings of interviews and singing, and expanding the physical presence of the stone. The exaggerated textures of the paintings give them, too, a sculptural and documentary feel. They record how actions—breaking and piercing, pushing and pulling—disrupt and transform the paintings’ surfaces. By resembling patterns one finds in the wild—scratches across the surface of a rock, uneven waves that form on melting snow—they unhinge any clear distinction between what is natural and what is made. Made with a printmaking technique that binds together distinct papers, the chine collé prints begin with photographs Houston took of Baffin Island. She then combines the images with coloured paper, creating traces of the process of extracting and replacing parts of a scene, and an equal awareness of both what is present and absent. Some are composed of double circles, like looking through binoculars. In Business As Usual, a decaying interior—peeling wallpaper, a rusted stove—is juxtaposed with the soft glow of a yellow circle. This continues Houston’s ongoing use of colour to question the particulars of perception. Heritage of All, White with Greed and Iron, and The Spaces we Breath, Houston’s titles read like lines of a haiku. Composed as prose, they are also confrontational, mapping out the cultural and environmental impacts of the extraction of resources in the Arctic. We witness scenes of violent decay, and yet simply carry on, like Business As Usual. In What Nations Come and Go a pale purple oval nearly fills the frame, revealing only in the very far right a simple cabin in front of a rocky incline. A similar imposing cloud of colour, this time blue, dominates the landscape in Mapped, Claimed, and Evaluated. The north is just as much an idea as it is a place, and is one that looms large in the Canadian imagination. There are few better examples than Glenn Gould...

Leslie B. Weissman Untitled abstraction, 2016 Acrylic and mixed media painting on paper 15 × 18 inches Pencil signed and dated by the artist on the lower left front Unframed Biography: Leslie B. Weissman (b. 1966, NYC) Education: Hobart and William Smith Colleges BA 1988 Art and Economics New York University / Tisch MPS 1991 Recent and Upcoming Exhibitions: PFLAG Pride In Bloom Exhibit and benefit Auction October 2020 Blue Door Gallery - Yonkers, NY Group Show, Global Expressions September 12, to October 24, 2020 Blue Door Gallery - Yonkers, NY Group Show, Summer Blues July 24, to August 29, 2020 Blue Door Gallery - Yonkers,, NY Group Show, Kinda Blue October-November 2018 Riverfront Art Gallery - Yonkers,, NY Group Show, Womantide March-April 2019 Blue Door Gallery - Yonkers,, NY Group Show, Kinda Blue October-November 2018 Morgan Stanley Corporate Headquarters - Purchase, NY September-October 2018 The Art Closet Gallery March 2018 Selected Works Artist in Residence Chappaqua Performing Arts Center 2018 New Castle Board Inauguration conducted by President Bill Clinton Katonah Museum AA at NWHC September 2017-March 2018 Left Fields Gallery SAN LUIS OBISPO, CA - 12/18-1/17/16 FORM IS NOT DIFFERENT FROM EMPTINESS - Curated by Ryan Schneider...