JUNGLE JINX

Hannah Antalek, Sally Scopa, Rachel Hayden, and Anthony Padilla
On view: October 9th – November 14th, 2021

5-50 Gallery is happy to announce JUNGLE JINX, a group show including paintings and drawings by Hannah Antalek, Sally Scopa, Rachel Hayden and Anthony Padilla. The show will be on view from Saturday the 9th of October through Sunday the 14th of November.

JUNGLE JINX includes mystical and mythical gardenscapes by Hannah Antalek, with a hint of 90’s childhood memories. Sally Scopa’s explorations of the painting frame, filling the borders of her paintings with plant-like growths or flames, repetitive abstract forms and fabric patterns. Rachel Hayden’s brightly colored butterflies, figures, fruits, shells, the sun and the moon, painted with a childlike simplicity. Filled with icons and symbols, using repeat images as characters in her own alphabet. And Anthony Padilla’s forbidden invitations to enter the glorious, yet hazardous, realm of nature in which humanity does not seem to belong.

Hannah Antalek’s work employs the use of animals, plants and symbols to carve out an emotional dreamscape hedged in memory, imagination and apocalyptic myth. A stampede of horses slips between a childhood obsession to the four horsemen of death, famine, war and conquest. A field of medicinal flowers part to reveal an inferno shaped tunnel releasing a cloud of moths with eye patterned wings. The forest’s edge is curtained in darkness, suggesting the potential for everything, nothing and anything beyond the illumination of the scene. Hannah’s work evokes a personal mythology that speaks to the anxieties born from a lack of control, crisis and trauma both real and imagined. Through pattern, repetition, obscuring and excavating, Hannah’s works make order from disorder and illuminate the cyclical immanence of apocalyptic thought and the struggle to seek ascendancy over chaos.

With their carefully worked surfaces and self-contained, often portable nature, paintings are physically vulnerable and unavoidably awkward, despite their traditionally high status as art objects. Sally Scopa emphasizes this precarity of paintings as objects by exploring the finite aspect of paintings: their frames,
at once protective and limiting.

In thinking about the frame, Scopa proceeds with both humor specificity, often by painting cartoonish, gilded frames that overwhelm the tiny pictures within. Frames usually legitimize paintings, signaling that a work is cohesive, complete, and revered. In her paintings, however, they are visual encumbrances that almost parasitically consume the images inside. Rather than reproduce the clean lines and polished ornamentation associated with frames, she gives them a cellular or microbial quality. When she doesn’t paint a literal frame, she fills the borders with flames or plantlike growths, repetitive abstract forms and fabric patterns, literalizing this idea of the frame as a burden on the image.

When arranging a painting, Rachel Hayden removes clutter. The paintings are full, but everything is in its correct place. Objects float harmoniously in midair without touching. Hayden choses a handful of objects to paint, and paints iterations of those objects again and again in various sizes, colors, and contexts. She thinks of the objects in her paintings as prized possessions, somewhere between souvenirs and icons. Choosing objects whose existence in nature she finds mystifying: rainbows, colorful fruits, shooting stars, tropical flowers and iridescent butterflies. Objects are often anthropomorphized, with sleepy, anxious, or mischievous human faces.

Recent paintings include imagery of moths. Visually, Hayden appreciates the natural symmetry of a moth. Coming across a rare moth in the wilderness is a real treasure. Suddenly, among all the sticks and mud, there’s a moment of bright color and perfect symmetry. Some moths have markings that make their wings look like the eyes of a larger animal, which scares away their predators. The markings are a natural disguise. The moth’s wings are delicate, but their decoration acts as their armor. This strikes Hayden as very resourceful and clever, and simultaneously beautiful. It’s a phenomenon that makes you feel like the force of nature is inherently well-designed, intentional, and under control.

Anthony Padilla’s work depicts both minimalistic and overwhelming close-ups in the kingdom of nature where flora and fauna are sovereigns. Highlighting the abstract and surreal qualities of our natural world by using the elements found in nature, specifically elements from the jungle. His paintings are forbidden invitations to enter the glorious, yet hazardous, realm of nature in which humanity does not seem to belong.

Padilla’s work has often focused on the dense luscious scenery found in the tropical jungles of our planet. With his more recent work he has decided to focus on the dense jungle floor as well as the forest canopy, the hills valleys and other landmarks the jungle has to offer. These new added layers are intended to give the viewer a sense of depth and distance within the painting. By looking past the surroundings, into the distance, beyond the horizon, Padilla is intending to convey a sense of peace and meditation.