A World Awry, an exhibition features the work of eight exciting, early-career artists: Kyle Browne, Gillian Davis, Winslow Funaki, Michael LaMarche, Morgan Petitpas, Alex Stroup, William Weygint and Marika Whitaker. Working in an array of media, these artists nonetheless share distinctly off-kilter visions of reality befitting our current world - one marked by the breakdown of a shared sense of truth, stable social categories, natural ecology, boundaries of every kind and of safety itself. If not completely “comfortable” in this unsettled reality, these are artists willing to grapple with - and even play within - it.
Works skillfully rendered in traditional mediums of oil, acrylic, pencil, watercolor, charcoal and video reflect the dizzying pace and disorienting transformations of everyday life and render the ordinary strange. Wielding the tools of realism - fine brushstrokes, precise drawing and lustrous surfaces - William Weygint peoples mundane environments with the alienated and grotesque, sometimes stretching figures to the brink of recognition. In playful, free-wheeling paintings by Alex Stroup and videos by Michael LaMarche, curious figures and creatures traverse densely-layered, wildly colorful and mutating landscapes. Drawing a direct line between whimsy and the deadly serious, Gillian Davis’s eerily prescient large-scale watercolor Big Mama, depicts an enormous Matryoshka doll whose torso contains not a series of nesting dolls, but rather an old European town engulfed in flames.
The pressures exerted by new technologies, pandemic, environmental crisis, social upheaval, and war lurk just below the surface in many of these works, but equal doses of magic, humor, and even hope are also on offer. Anarchic uses and pairings of materials express a kind of giddy incredulity in the face of a world out of control. Winslow Funaki’s marriage of iridescent stretch satin and insulating spray foam create wonky, impractical baskets, and a befuddling probe equipped with high-tech haptic sensors buzzes and lights up in the presence of both living and inanimate “beings.” In Kyle Browne’s diminutive, exquisitely formed sculptures, limpet shells grow ceramic tongues and engage in an uncanny, illicit exchange. Salvaging beauty and delight from the material detritus of contemporary life, Marika Whitaker repurposes drywall scraps, thread, push pins, and discarded house paint into improbably elegant paintings and sculptures while Morgan Petitpas’s fanciful sensibility transforms a broken taillight and old vinyl remnants into an anatomically correct, though broken, heart and shapes foraged lengths of fishing net and chain link into a rainbow-hued hammock fit for a weary, misshapen creature.
Holding up a multifaceted, surrealist mirror, these artists offer us a cockeyed perspective on what is, indeed, a world awry.
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Wing a Thing Workshop with Morgan Petitpas
Friday April 15, 1-5 pmKyle Browne Virtual Artist Talk Thursday April 28, 6-7 pm
Will Weygint Virtual Artist Talk Thursday May 5, 6-7 pm
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E. Winslow Funaki
My work is about in-betweenness. It’s an examination of how we identify people and objects, the categories we use to do so, and those that don’t fit squarely into one or the other … continue readingMorgan Petitpas
My work is fueled by juxtaposition, duality, and a sense of the interconnectedness of all things. My childhood was spent in the great outdoors and at antique stores, my thoughts come in the forms of calculated … continue readingMarika Whitaker
What Holds What—All of the materials used in this body of work were found in my home during a period of rupture, reconstruction and transition in 2020-21. As the walls of my home came down, I began an almost-unconscious practice … continue readingMichael Lamarche
I have a background in filmmaking and have taught myself some basic animation techniques. My latest videos have found themselves somewhere in between narrative storytelling and non-narrative … continue readingWill Weygint
I am currently influenced by artwork which confronts a repressed desire for chaos within western culture. I look at art which handles behavioral symptoms acted out in mass-culture that characterize a desire for … continue reading
Will Weygint, Neighborhood Exceptionalism; Morgan Petitpas, Magnet; Michael LaMarche, The Fort; Marika Whitaker, Heartifact XIV; Kyle Brown, Sound Waves; Gillian Davis, Big Mama; E. Winslow Funaki, Blue Velvet; Alex Stroup, Fool Moon
Opening Reception
Saturday, April 16, 4-6 PM
Gallery Hours
Thursday-Sunday, 12-5 pm