Edward Thorp Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of nine contemporary painters and one sculptor. The title “Assembly” reflects the various approaches and subjects found within current art practice.

Each work in the exhibit foregrounds technique and a desire to push their subjects, sometimes through a conflation of representation and abstraction as with Allison Evans’ with her ghostly figures emerging from clouds of glossy pink pigment, suggestions of a shark’s mouth are created with large gestural brushstrokes all creating situations that are difficult to decipher but are immediately engaging. Branden Koch’s paintings are also filled with inexplicable narratives of fictional worlds, sumptuously painted visions that are filled with humor and a sense of foreboding. The folding spaces of place and time in Mike Olin paintings challenge notions of a single reading and endeavor to create new archetypes of signification and interpretation.

Some works in the show deploy hybrid methods of production in an active investigation of process. Drew Beattie’s large scale multi-media paintings question assumptions about painting as a vocabulary and a genre. In his sculptures, Mark Schubert creates works that shift between the carefully measured and disorganization while developing ideas of architectural space and bodily form. David Scher’s works are worlds unto themselves crafted with muted colors and gestures that are imbued with a Dadaesque absurdist humor.

Other works in “Assembly” are produced through a deep investigation of process and abstraction as with Patrick Berran’s painting method that produces a heady mix of atmospheric surface with forceful imagery breaking through revealing a tension of the sublime and the disturbing. Andrew Masullo’s geometric configurations of biomorphic shapes with a linear lyricism combine to create a graphic dynamism of the symbolic. Gary Petersen’s reflections on the interaction of pure abstraction and spatial illusion are at once compositionally forceful yet sensitive to issues regarding the synthetic versus the natural. The subject matter in Craig Taylor’s work appears, dissolves, and then reemerges within a narrative of signs and marks, which unfold to tell the story of how painting is resolved.