dm contemporary is pleased to present ♥+ Art : Artist Couples Collaborating and Exhibiting Together, a group exhibition of recent work in various media, including painting, sculpture, photography, video art, and mixed media, by Jackie Battenfield & David Headley, Isabel Bigelow & Luis Castro, Katy Martin & Bill Brand, Michael Kukla & Marietta Hoferer, Sheila Pepe & Carrie Moyer, Tamiko Kawata & Ian Ferguson, Elizabeth Duffy & Brian Miller

In line with the sentiment surrounding the month of February – Valentine’s Day and all, these six artist couples were invited to participate in, and to create artworks for this show. The degree of collaboration between the artists within each couple was to be decided upon by the couple, themselves. The range of treatment and / or interpretation of the subject, the medium, the scale, and the resulting – joint or side by side – artistic expressions, were all left up to the artists. The written statements that hang alongside the artwork, offer a window into the creative choices and processes that brought about these works. In fact, through the artworks in this exhibition, these artists have graciously let us in on their world – touching on the public and private – revealing, and sometimes concealing, their relationships with art and with each other.

The exhibition continues in the project room with Elizabeth Duffy and Brian Miller’s collaborative art project, ‘A Series of Minor Miracles’, which is based on Jan Van Eyck’s (1395-1441) Arnolfini Portrait – a quintessential expression of intimacy and domesticity in art. The Arnolfini Portrait became the catalyst in creating the sculptures and photographs for this project, as the artist couple sought to recreate the intensity of Van Eyck’s world within the contemporary reality of their own lives.