Tatiana Berg/Sarah Faux: DANK

(sticky, hairy, stinky, highly potent, florid, pungent, molding, rotting, DOPE)

Bill Murray claimed that improv prepared him for SNL because he was so used to dying onstage every night that he no longer feared death. He just kept making jokes until one of them got a laugh. It’s hard to make a good painting. But you try! You just accept that you are going to die onstage sometimes.

Sarah Faux and Tatiana Berg’s recent work is characterized by haphazard, incidental mark-making, where stripes of spray-paint and globs of oil chase a perverse formalism to the edge of every canvas. Chronic over-producers, both artists indulge in the fearless gusto of improv. They satisfy their lust, but resist finish, and leave their paintings open: this is painting by the pull-out method. Faux and Berg collaborate by sharing source material, searching for emotional content in every plastic crystal, pipe cleaner, broken taillight, scrap yarn, rock garden, youtube celebrity funeral, failed ceramic vase, and front row movie seat.

Berg and Faux playfully refer to their incomplete, distressed surfaces as “Bushwick wabisabi,” or “DANK”: a word that implies dampness and decay, but also intense potency (e.g. “That smells dank!”). DANK encompasses this duality, and their stumbling enthusiasm for their painting practice.

Tatiana Berg‘s constructions are three-dimensional canvas supports she calls “tents,” a ploy to get painting off the wall and into our corporeal realm. Since graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2009 with a BFA, she has since been an Artist-in-Residence at the Vermont Studio Center, Byrdcliffe-Woodstock Guild and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Sarah Faux studied at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a joint BA/BFA in 2009. Her paintings share an abstract relationship with her body, its proportions and everyday textiles. She has been an Artist-In-Residence at the Ox-bow School of Art and the Byrdcliffe-Woodstock Guild. Both artists live and work in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

TOMPKINS PROJECTS is a contemporary art gallery showcasing compelling work by emerging and mid-career artists. The gallery is located near the G and JMZ trains as well as the B54 and B43 bus lines. In addition to the gallery’s normal viewing hours, the gallery is lit and visible from the street daily until 10pm. It is street level and handicap-accessible. It is located in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, and was founded by artists Milton F Stevenson V and Jeanne Jo in 2009.

For additional information, or to set up a viewing outside of our normal hours contact Director Milton Stevenson at [email protected]