MONO PRACTICE is pleased to announce Resonant Space, a group exhibition featuring the work of Jacob Cartwright, Joanne Freeman, Karen Schifano, Jim Osman, and Melissa Staiger.
The distinct two and three-dimensional work of the artists in Resonant Space is enriched by the reverberant tone they invoke in each other. The affinity of these artists—Jacob Cartwright, Joanne Freeman, Jim Osman, Karen Schifano, and Melissa Staiger—can be seen in a lexicon of marks: lines, scribbles, scratches, smudges, dots, dashes, patterns, geometric and organic forms, textures and color, even as each stands firmly and uniquely in their approaches to art making.
Reaching beyond the boundaries of form, these works call out and comment on each other's ideas about the ongoing exploration of abstraction. Joanne Freeman does this in the way saturated color shapes overlap, converge and angle for footage within the edges and surface area of the raw linen canvas, while Melissa Staiger’s organic shapes of radiant and trippy color combinations jostle between foreground and background. Jacob Cartwright's highly organized compositions of geometric forms, combined with dense patterns, solid and translucent color, allude to an architectural space, man-made or natural. Like a theater set, Karen Schifano populates the stage with simple, provocative shapes and solid expanses of color that come in and out of the picture plane. And Jim Osman's ideas, with the addition of a third dimension, flow throughout the spaces and colors of his carefully constructed multi-leveled abstract tableaux of cut-out, exposed, and painted wood.
The artists in Resonant Space are all current members of the American Abstract Artists (AAA). AAA was founded in 1936 in New York City at a time when American abstract art was met with vigorous critical and popular resistance. AAA is a democratic, artist-run organization that promotes and fosters understanding of abstract and non-objective art.