My attempt to redefine the archetypal postwar house form and the relationships of dweller to house and house to earth, has lead me to a search for cultural authenticity and identity in the "ordinary" places of life. A family archive of nearly one thousand items of memorabilia, spanning three generations and one hundred years, provides the primary resources for my ongoing painting installations, Family Stories: Historical Dislocations in the Domestic Landscape. I integrate multiple visual styles, diverse materials, deconstructed domestic patterns and images of the body and popular culture in my investigation of the pluralistic, multifaceted and complex condition of life in the contemporary American home.

Karen Arm

Born: New York, NY
Lives: Brooklyn, NY

In my paintings I explore natural phenomenon as my subject resulting in an image that is a combination of abstraction and figuration. Utilizing different types of mark making, I interpret forms such as roots, grass blades, fields of stars, smoke formations and droplets. The obsessive detail in the work refers to the infinitely detailed structures found in nature. In some works, my investigations move away from their actual source toward abstraction, while in others I work closely from observation as I analyze a particular form. My focus is with the intimate and the expansive -- setting up a tension between the two.

In these works I hope to create an emotional space for the viewer. With each entry into these pictures of nature, the viewer brings to mind its own experience, and their own understanding of systems, structures, and the spirit.



Jaime Arredondo

Born: Dallas, TX
Lives: Long Island City, NY

In Mesoamerican culture, the flower operates not as decorative device as in the Western world but comprises aspects of a dual character, recollecting moments of the living and of the after-life. They act not as items of embellishment, but as portals to gain access to the sacred and divine. Native peoples view the flower as living symbols of memory, faith and spirit, concrete artifacts by which we may tap into the lives of our ancestors.

As the central motif it plays a significant role in allowing me to embrace issues from Western and non-Western cultures. The intensity of consideration, color and light towards the flower by Monet, and my research in Native American treatment of them, has informed the primary direction of my work. Combined with a similar baroque background utilized in previous works, my work explores aspects of the sensual and the erotic. The flower has been magnified in scale, the color intensified, and its voluptuous nature exposed, to create a painting that is as tangible as flesh itself. I have composed a flower that does not simply depict, but is reinvented within terms of the grandiose, the sublime and the hallucinatory.



SoHyun Bae

Born: Seoul, Korea
Lives: New York, NY



Jewish mysticism has had a profound influence on my vision as an artist. In this series of paintings entitled, Wrapped Shards, I explore the “the Mystery of the Breaking of the Vessels” (tzimtzum). This Cabbalistic image describes the exile of God’s Divine Presence (Shekhinah) and offers it as an explanation for the suffering in our world. I paint shards as I believe that they better reflect the state of our world. The painted shards are poetically “wrapped,” bringing together new figurations which allude to marble, ice, stone, rock, flesh, garments, distant stars, the moon and the egg woman, in an attempt to reconstruct the vessels.



Pedro Barbeito

Born: La Coruna, Spain
Lives: Brooklyn, NY



Computer technology is now able to render visible what has in the past been left to the imagination. I’m interested in presenting this new imagery through the medium of painting, a medium that has historically represented both the visible and the realm of ideas. Whereas technology translates the phenomena into a flat digital image, the painting brings the experience to it. The finished piece combines the flatness of the screen, the physicality of the paint, and the organization and presentation of the computer.



Steven Charles

Born: Birkenhead, England
Lives: Brooklyn, NY

I am interested in creating problems. Painting is a vehicle for me to dedicate myself to something I know won't work. Abstract painting is the most confusing dilemma I have encountered; it is this confusion that motivates me. I am not a believer. I am in search of holes and gaps. When I start a painting I don't plan or sketch, I just begin. The beginning could be simple drips, splashes or paint shot out of a squeeze bottle. Then I work into the initial marks with a process I call targeting. This is where a shape is filled in with a smaller shape leaving only the outer edge of the first shape showing. This process is repeated until the amount of shape being covered is reduced to the smallest part possible with the selected brush. Each painting begins to generate logic unique to its own composition. Even though it's obvious that I am making these paintings, the end results always educate me on what I'm doing. The impetus for this work is my optimism, although what I am optimistic about constantly escapes me.



James Esber

Born: Cleveland, OH
Lives: Brooklyn, NY

The sparks for my work are certain charged images, which float like graphic objects between media, and depend on context for all their meaning. In my work these images are digitally distorted before being reconstructed bit by bit in paint or plasticine. This remaking is done with myopic focus on each part, shifting between a range of graphic marks and allowing for doodle-like digressions, which edge the image toward abstraction. These images are fragmenting and imploding while at the same time stubbornly retaining their integrity. The aim is to create dissonance and space within the contours of a single figure. Like the mathematical infinity existing between two points, I am counting on the potential to expand space inwardly by obsessively subdividing it.



Dan Ford

Born: Poughkeepsie, New York
Lives: Brooklyn, NY



The purpose in making old-fashioned paintings which draw from old styles (Hudson River School, English landscape genre, Arts & Crafts, etc.) is not just to glean the aesthetic aura, but also to call forth the historical backwash. In our current moment of virtual imperium, we echo the urges, acts and conflicts of those prior times. The divination of a cultural specificity in an effort to give substance to a new nation converts into a consideration of a pop culture so powerful that it blankets the world. The insistent provinciality and domesticity of English art at the heart of the industrial revolution and empire preconfigures the apparently comfortable lack of interest -- at this time of technological, commercial and military domination -- in who we as a nation are, and who we want to be.



Phil Frost

Born: Jamestown, NY
Lives: Albany, NY



The aspiration of my work is to continuously arrive at a more clear vision and understanding of my present self, as I am challenged through experience by each moment in time and space spiritually, mentally and physically.



Cadence Giersbach

Born: New York, NY
Lives: Brooklyn, NY

I make paintings that deal with ideas of pictorial space and location. Each series describes the social character of a particular location or type of place that I have spent time with. Subjects have ranged from Federal-style interiors to an amusement park in India.

The two paintings in this show are from a recent series called Main Street. In these pictures, the romantic icon of American small town life is neglected while signage pledges patriotism. Beginning with snapshots taken in Western New York, I digitally manipulate the photographic images to heighten the sense of isolation and dislocation, to make the streets look familiar and strange, illusionistic and abstract. Using this source material, I paint the scenes with flat paint on wood using a colorful and contrary palette.



Ellen Harvey

Born: Farnborough, Kent, United Kingdom
Lives: Brooklyn, NY



My work exists in the narrow space between two clichés ­ between the popular but conflicting conceptions of art as both an uplifting or enlightening experience and as a space of unbridled license. Frequently using traditional media, I try to take the desires implicit in a given social or physical situation and to make them explicit. Of course, such desires, like all true desire, are often transgressive or ridiculous: a museum may secretly long for the very graffiti that it spends so much time suppressing; a sidewalk may long for a carpet. Such interventions can also serve to make visible a previously invisible situation. Painstakingly illegally painting landscapes in oils as graffiti in the city raises the question of whether official hostility to graffiti is truly predicated on its illegality rather than on its aesthetics and the demographics of its practitioners. Recreating a miniature version of the Whitney Museum in the Altria (formerly Philip Morris) lobby begs the question of why the Whitney is there in the first place.



Eric Hongisto

Born: Keene, NH
Lives: Lawrenceville, NJ



My art’s highest concern is process -- how it can be seen, interpreted, and how it is understood when remembered later. Can color act as verb, noun and adjective at the same time? By using existing architectural walls as a painting surface, I hope to reveal to a viewer that artwork is not necessarily an object. It can be an undefined space. I am challenged by the symbiotic nature that art and architecture provide.



Shigeno Ichimura

Born: Naha-City, Okinawa, Japan
Lives: New York, NY



The original concept behind the silver monochrome series was to rethink my approach towards flat artwork. How to create the simplest piece of artwork by just using the art factors of color, shape and material led to the creation of these paintings. Silver was rarely used as a color. Even though the human eye is almost totally reliant on light, by adding protrusions to the image and a coat of chrome, I was able to create a pure reflected form of light. The dot is known as the smallest visible object and is used to personify singularity. But, by joining dots together, they become lines, starting to personify a group characteristic. By skillfully controlling the neutral characteristic that silver holds within itself, I believe my artworks can show the image as itself, freed from the preconceptions of color.



Tricia Keightley

Born: Alexandria, VA
Lives: New York, NY



The paintings I make may seem organized and pre-planned. I actually improvise from the start of the painting until it is finished. I begin with a framing device culled from my interests in printmaking and illuminated manuscripts. From this starting point, I interweave various elements as I build up the entangled composition. The forms I make are influenced by a variety of subjects, ranging from the scientific to the mundane. In the end, each painting is an amalgamation of details for the viewer to visually unravel and explore.



Robin Lowe

Born: Providence, RI
Lives: Brooklyn, NY



As I enter into the adolescence of my fictitious characters, the Jack of Clubs, the Queen of Spades, the Joker, as well as many others, I am struck by the memory and trauma of my own adolescence. These emotions have been resurrected through recent drawings and paintings with a force for which I have had no anticipation or defenses. At the age of 43, I would think that I could look back on this time with the security and confidence of years, yet I find myself completely exposed and vulnerable (a mid-life crisis of sorts). As I develop my characters and their environment, Erehwon, I have awakened the memory of specific events and unexplainable emotions. Though disoriented and frightened, I feel simultaneously liberated from the adult mold in which I have been trapped. By stimulating my own adolescence, I have rejuvenated feelings of youthful rebellion that have forced me to push beyond the approach to life and artistic expression that I have pursued as an adult.



Matt Magee

Born: Paris, France
Lives: New York, NY



I began the dot paintings in 1994, and the surfaces evolved into a densely constructed matrix. The painting process is obsessive yet meditative and corresponds to a dreamy, even hypnotic quality. To discover the paintings' intimate, nuanced facture is to experience the integral relation of process to meaning in my work.



Alison Moritsugu

Born: Honolulu, Hawaii
Lives: Beacon, NY



In my ongoing series of log paintings, I use art and art history to examine our past and present relationship with the land. By taking these landscapes out of their familiar context, the framed canvas and painting them on real wood with bark, I hope to show that the very idea of landscape implicates a human dominance.

I have always been interested in creating landscapes not viewable in the traditional way taught to us by hundreds of years of European art and art history. As much as I try to make the landscapes beautiful, an homage to the log on which they are painted, there always seems to be a tension created when looking at the pieces. The cursory glance and the dominant gaze do not readily work here. Whether the view has been fragmented into many log sections, or whether non-European styles are introduced, my intention is to get the viewer to recognize how often he sees in a predisposed path following the well-trod lines of European dominance.

Phyllis Gay Palmer

Born: New York, NY
Lives: Tivoli, NY



When I was little, I discovered the best time to get my mother's full attention was when she was immersed in a hot bath. I would sit on top of the toilet seat and she would soak, usually with a washcloth adhered to her chest. I've taken up the habit and decided to explore the effects of soaking on others. Tub #6 and Tub #7 are part of a series painted from life - with lots of hot water added during the posing. Then I went to Italy and fell in love again with plaster, frescos, Pompeii, and early vase painting. In spite of the obvious changes in materials and in my approach to the figure, I'm still hooked on the intimacy of tub soaking and other bathroom activities.



Michael Rodriguez

Born: Miami, FL
Lives: New York, NY

My paintings are an aggregate of simple marks layered over time, fueled by desire and intellectual curiosity.



Lisa Sigal

Born: Philadelphia, PA
Lives: Brooklyn, NY



My paintings on canvas, walls, and recycled sheet rock explore artifice and the possibility of physical entry to the picture plane and offer a momentary bridge between the unequal worlds of the imaginary and the real.



Mark Stilwell

Born: Arcadia, CA
Lives: Brooklyn, NY

My work deals with issues of violence, aggression and fantasy in the world of pre-adolescent children. I create installations using cardboard cut out figures that are painted and arranged in clusters and configurations on the wall. It is apparent upon close inspection that the figures are engaged in fights, gun battles and general mischief.

The piece Fight, has the overall shape of a bow that is composed of a mass of children. The installation appears playful until one notices that the children are clustered towards a boy and girl who are engaged in battle in the center of the bow. The children in my work (which are mostly boys) represent the aggressive nature of the social hierarchies in the adult world as well as the culture of the playground. I am influenced by the multicolored abstract installations of Polly Apfelbaum, as well as the violence and harshness of Goya and the German Expressionists. I am interested in juxtaposing innocence and corruption by using decorative forms with a violent content.



Steed Taylor

Born: Cumberland County, NC
Lives: New York, NY

I am interested in the intersection of memorials, ritual and pubic art. I have been investigating how personal emotional significance can be placed on a public space, and how this emotional resonance can be manifested in public artwork.

My Road Tattoos are a result of this investigation. Because roads are the skin of a community, a road is to the public body what skin is to the private body. If people mark their skin as a means of commemoration, communication and ritual, then roads can be marked for the same reasons. Road Tattoos are placed at locations of personal significance and are composed of cultural designs previously appropriated to mark skin. Once the design is drawn on the road and names or other specific information painted within the design, then a prayer is said and the design is painted in, covering over the names. They are subtle, close in color to the roadway, in hi-gloss causing them to appear and disappear with passing light. They wear away in a few years, depending on traffic and weather conditions.



Mark Dean Veca

Born: Shreveport, LA
Lives: Brooklyn, NY



In There is No Spoon I have replaced the "elegant" images of history, mythology and idyllic pastoral scenes typical of toile de jouy (a Rococo textile design) with "vulgar" sci-fi images from movies, comics, and album covers. The Nutty Professor, Barbarella, Iron Man, Robbie the Robot and The 50 Foot Woman, all linked by a surreal and organic graphic network, form an idiosyncratic branch on the family tree of recent popular culture.



Amy Yoes

Born: Heidelberg, Germany
Lives: New York, NY



The overlooked and the peripheral take center stage in a hybrid of abstraction. Partially quoted decorative motifs from disparate eras, architectural structures and calligraphic shapes make up the raw material for my paintings. Disjunctive elements and influences coexist in a field of various depths, evoking the passage of time, with its evolution of forms and discourses. Sometimes lyrical and often loud, my paintings pose questions about style and interpretation, while engaging the viewer in an endless search.

"On and Off the Wall: New York Foundation for the Arts' Painting Fellows" is made possible by the major support of the Helena Rubinstein Foundation. Sponsorship is also provided by TimeOut New York. Additional funding is received from Susan Ball. This exhibit is presented through the generous partnership with Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg.