James Fuentes LLC is pleased to announce a four-artist exhibition featuring Adam Marnie, Noam Rappaport, Daniel Subkoff, and Tracy Thomason. Within this exhibition these artists are unified by their shared interest in transcending the two dimensional plane through various strategies including drawing, painting, punching, kicking, cutting, bisecting, smoking and, in some instances, setting it free.

Adam Marnie’s process combines drawing, performance, and sculpture. He draws minimally on drywall and then punches or kicks the image, destroying the image. Marnie thus turns the flat plane of drywall into a three dimensional object, with fissures revealing layers of cardboard, dust, and plaster. Framing the cracked drywall in salvaged frames, Marnie’s work explores masculinity and precision along with spatial considerations.

Noam Rappaport makes the structural elements of paintings his subject. Rappaport maintains a delicate aesthetic balance while highlighting the materials of art construction—the painting on view has a wood board bisecting two canvases. This juxtaposing is representative of an intersection between modernism and everyday life.

Daniel Subkoff’s works engages with blankness, creating striking images with unpainted canvas. In Grounded, a canvas reaches from stretcher to floor and toward the middle of the gallery, with fraying threads making further inroads. With Smoking, Subkoff uses the blankness of canvas and an empty overhead projector to capture immaterial smoke: silhouetting the curving tendrils of burning incense. The works both explore holding on the ephemeral or unseen, with a slow build-up of NYC dirt on the Grounded canvas and with a gradual yellow-brown staining by ash on the Smoking canvas.

Tracy Thomason creates gendered abstractions that use pointedly feminine colors and materials—one painting on view has hair extensions, another spray tan. In her work the canvas is not a flat surface but a space to be cut and layered and covered with everything from oil paint to rope to hobbyist’s gold leaf and cotton. These components are very specific and highly evocative, so that her works become almost political in her material choices.