Louis B. James is pleased to present its inaugural exhibition You can never go home anymore, featuring the work of Travis Boyer, Kelly Jazvac, Arnold J. Kemp, and Virginia Poundstone. Through diverse media, the four artists grapple with the materiality and origin of an object, creating subtle transformations and minor displacements.

You can never go home anymore is a verbal stumble, a deviation on Thomas Wolfe’s title sung by the Shangri-Las, a story of a regretful runaway whose home has disappeared. The work on view betrays this inconspicuous though definitive shift away from one’s origins.

Travis Boyer makes paintings on silk and velvet that recall abstract paintings and fiber arts in equal parts. Their architecture reveals Boyer’s interest in the lateral agency between how one adorns the room and adorns one’s self.

Kelly Jazvac’s sculptural assemblages of salvaged vinyl reveal and conceal their origin in the realm of the commercial. Jazvac’s sculptures lean, drape, and droop over metal or plywood armatures, or else in biomorphic lumps on the floor. Their unblinking brightness of color betrays the manipulative optimism of advertising.

Arnold J. Kemp’s don’t make friends comprises full-scale digital scans of torn and crinkled foil, ripped into various mask forms. The fragility and mutability of the foil reveal the artist’s hand, while the masks evince a refusal to engage.

In her sculpture and photographic works Virginia Poundstone explores the mechanisms of artifice and the exploitation of the natural world through the international flower trade. A pristine mountain landscape printed on metal embedded in cement sits atop commercial floral boxes, the natural and industrial intertwined.

Louis B. James was founded by David Fierman and RJ Supa in 2011. The gallery is located at 143 Orchard Street, New York. The gallery is open from Wednesday through Sunday, 11 to 6PM. For more information please visit www.louisbjames.com or email [email protected]

Travis Boyer (b. 1979, Fort Worth, TX, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) has an extensive history of collective and collaborative practices and performances based largely on painting and fibers art. He has shown at John Connelly Presents, New York; Evas Arche, New York; SOMA Arts, San Francisco; Galleria Glance, Torino, Italy; Dumbo Arts Center, New York; and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York. His work has been featured in several group shows, including Flat File, curated by Eve Fowler, ACP, Los Angeles; Dome Colony X, curated by Fritz Haeg, X Initiative, New York; 2009 Brucennial, Bruce High Quality Foundation, New York; and co-curated Flex Your Textiles, John Connelly Presents, New York. He is an MFA candidate in Painting at Bard College, Annandale-on-the-Hudson, NY.

Kelly Jazvac (b. 1980, lives and works in London, Ontario) works primarily in installation, sculpture and collage. Drawing from interests in material quality, obsolescence and consumerism, her three-dimensional work investigates surface quality and its correlation to desire and the abject. Her current body of work transforms two-dimensional, salvaged advertisements into three-dimensional abstract objects. Jazvac has exhibited nationally and internationally, including recent projects at i8 Gallery, Reykjavik; Soi Fischer, Vancouver; and Diaz Contemporary, Toronto. In 2011 her work will be included in Barocco Nova, Museum London, Ontario.

Arnold J. Kemp (b. 1968, lives and works in Portland, OR) works in drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, video and sound. He has exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco; Debs & Co., New York; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art; and PDX Contemporary, Portland, OR. His work has been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Berkeley Art Museum. International venues for his work include exhibitions at Chisenhale Gallery, London, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, and Hyére Festival, Hyére, France. His upcoming shows include Queen’s Nails Annex and 2nd Floor Projects in San Francisco.

Virginia Poundstone (b. 1977, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) received a BA in non-fiction writing from Eugene Lang College, a BFA in fine arts from Parsons, and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. Sculpture, photography and installation combine within her work to present a layered critique of the economics involved in the constructions of the built and natural worlds. Poundstone’s work has been exhibited at Sculpture Center, High Desert Test Sites, Socretes Sculpture Park, Harris Lieberman Gallery and La Mama Gallery, among others.