REARVIEW MIRROR

Debbi Kenote, Jenny Kemp, Kyle Gallagher, Hayley Youngs, Kelli Thompson, Theresa Bloise, Matthew Uebbing & Jack Arthur Wood
On view: 25th of February - March 26
Opening reception: Saturday March 4, 4 - 7pm

5-50 Gallery is pleased to announce our show Rearview Mirror, a reprise show; bringing together eight artists we have displayed in various past shows. This exhibition is a manifestation of our joy and commitment to supporting artists. Included are works by Jenny Kemp, Debbi Kenote, Kyle Gallagher, Hayley Youngs, Matthew Uebbing Kelli Thompson and Jack Arthur Wood.

Formally rooted in abstraction, Debbi Kenote’s paintings and drawings take on both natural and anthropomorphic forms. She often references memories of isolated play in nature, and the imaginative worlds she created before being introduced to the idea of fine art. Her paintings and drawings have a geometric underpinning, and use positive and negative space to make the viewer question if they are looking into—or out of—the works.

Jenny Kemp’s paintings focus on line and pattern and their ability to embody conduits for trains of thought. She creates rhythmic spaces where compositions begin with a revelatory moment and grow into a reactionary process in which linear marks thread, converse, and evolve into teeming forms. Housed within evocative shapes that reference personal events and musings, her works become visual manifestations of discovery, habitude, and navigation.

Kyle Gallagher’s works combine sharp angled ‘Neo Gothic’ biker script with moldy graffiti tags and an anarchic comix attitude, offering the most ‘now of now’ painting. Grounded in both popular imagery and abstraction, Gallagher creates hauntingly resonant images that embrace our moment of shifting certainties. His work is mostly non-narrative and he focuses more on the formal aspects of painting–providing works of bold design, unexpected color and compelling compositions.

Brooklyn-based painter Hayley Youngs creates lavish geometric paintings, alluding to a realm beyond the physical world, both philosophically and spiritually. Employing a visual language of esoteric shapes and curvilinear motifs, she navigates a mystical pictorial space, governed by symmetry, color, and intuitive precision. Drawing stylistic influence from Art Deco, Psychedelia, and Visionary art traditions, these kaleidoscopic abstractions are a timely reflection of the universal desire for balance and positivity, serving as a safe haven for comfort, collective meditation, introspection, and re-orientation.  

Kelli Thompson’s work consists of figurative and geometric elements, tied together by a bright, synthetic color palette and smooth gradient. She merges these two painting styles to engage with formal painting in a way that combines mimicry of digital production and overly descriptive painted hyperrealism. She aims to inspire awe in the pristine level of finish in these renderings, but is not trying to fool the viewer into thinking the objects are real. Thompson’s paintings nod to reality while situating themselves firmly in an artificial space. 

Matthew Uebbing is a NYC-based artist and designer whose recent works are a reflection on this tense period in time. His practice combines techniques and materials that are visually at odds with each other to create environments that seem confused or polarizing, both to the viewing audience and the beings that inhabit each work. He does this in hopes that, by solidifying these stratified elements through representation, we will be able to use them as touchstones, and maybe find our way back home.

Science that feels like science fiction inspires Theresa Bloise’s most recent paintings. Bloise uses small earthly objects as a reference, meteorite like slag stones and pebbles on the sidewalk. Collecting and arranging these small objects to create a scene meant to inspire awe is a routine practice in the way she works. The work is intended to be read as both still life and landscape: microscopic and monumental, primordial and apocalyptic. Her works are created through experimentation with spraying, pouring, masking and stenciling as well as playing with different materials such as gold or silver leaf.

Having always explored his world sensorially, Jack Arthur Wood builds spaces of color, light and material through multilayered painted and collaged surfaces. In his work he explores the inseparable anxiety and joy felt while anticipating the nature of things oscillating between two points. Wood turns paint into an object when he cuts it from the page. Color, mark and shape rearrange freely in a process he likens to divination, an unconscious knowing.