The temporary arts space, 439 Franklin, is proud to present NEW MEAT FLAVOR, a diptych style show between two artists, Kelwin Coleman and Michael Kondel, and their visual journals. Both artists will be exhibiting new series of printed and sculptural work. Colemanʼs series codifies the internalized frustrations of a simultaneously excluded and deified group of people contrasting Kondelʼs external observations of current and past events within his move from Michigan to the northeast. The exhibition is on view for one night only, Saturday, March 5, 2011 at 439 Franklin Avenue in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, from 6-9pm.

Both artistsʼ journals originate from private personal memories but their respective forms have been distorted and masked to be accessible to a public forum. The dichotomous relationship of NEW MEAT FLAVOR exploits Colemanʼs observed white male nude and the Kondelʼs celebration of everyday items that outlive their usefulness.

Colemanʼs work is a series of multi-media works on paper. Limiting himself to a particular scale, 22ʼʼx 30”, and through the painterly gestural quality of the work and use of stamped text, his work exists as intimate sketchbook pages, oversized and torn out. Influenced by turn of the century German expressionists and by process artists such as Eva Hesse, Colemanʼs practice seeks to harmonize process with portraiture. Whether working heavily from self-portraits or from live models, his compositions focus on the figure alone instead of creating worlds in which these characters can exist. Omitting a background, he invites a dialogue about the human figure doubling as background and foreground in one structured pose.

Kondelʼs work ranges in themes inspired by everyday visual opportunities, employing an alternative process of lithography also called paper lithography. Extracting from midcentury and contemporary pop-to-political American publications, he dissects the imagery into his personal visual afterthoughts. Using these collages as a guideline he enlarges the image through tiling thus granting the viewer a larger accessible abstracted color field. The once smaller precious imagery remains intact while being open to interpretation by the public. It is in the process of visual disintegration and the distortion of scale relationships that his imagery becomes less personal and more purposeful.

439 Franklin Avenue, 2nd Floor Bed-Stuy Brooklyn, NY 11238 C to Franklin Ave, G to Bedford-Nostrand