Featuring: Zoe Beloff Cynthia Chan Devon Costello Justin Craun Gregory Edwards Jill Hubley Timothy Marvel Hull Mïrka Lugosi Justin Samson & Aisling Hamrogue Sara VanDerBeek Johannes VanDerBeek

Curated by Esme Watanabe.

Zoe Beloff will screen her new stereoscopic film, Charming Augustine, at Bellwether on Jan. 28 at 6 p.m. Augustine was the most extensively photographed of the young women hysterics at the asylum of the Salpêtrière in Paris of the 1870s; she was “the Sarah Bernhardt of the asylum.” This film is the first in an ongoing body of work, A Hundred Years of Hysteria, exploring the history of hysteria in relation to theater, cinema and art. Beloff grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1980 she moved to New York to study at Columbia University, where she received an MFA in film. She has worked with composer John Cale, sound artist Ken Montgomery and the Wooster Group theater company. Her work has been exhibited internationally at The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, Rotterdam Film festival, Pacific Film Archives and the Pompidou Center.

Cynthia Chan’s paintings hover on the invisible border where exterior meets interior. The subjects of the paintings seem to shimmer in and out of the space they occupy, collapsing and expanding at the same time, torquing in and out of proximity. Chan received an MFA in painting from the Yale School of Art, where she was selected as the dual recipient of the Ely Harwood Schless Memorial Fund Prize and the Blair Dickinson Memorial Prize in 1999. Her work has been exhibited at the Nevada Institute of Contemporary Art in Las Vegas, the Contemporary Art Museum at the University of South Florida, and the NADA Art Fair. She lives and works in New York City.

Devon Costello’s work is a dialogue between painting and sculpture, surface and substance. His sculptures are painted as minimalist surfaces or with impasto, then wall-mounted as relief in relation to the paintings. The images on the canvas are isolated fragments with varying degrees of definition to their borders; the white of the canvas and the wall allows the image/object to become a specimen. Costello holds a BFA in painting and environmental installation from the School of Visual Arts. He has also attended the Rhode Island School of Design and participated in group shows, including Delicate Kinship at Hanna Gallery in Tokyo, I Am Five at Parker’s Box, Brooklyn, Infinite Fill at Foxy Production, NY, and Drunk vs. Stoned at GBE at Passerby, NY. His upcoming solo show at Taxter & Spengemann, NY, is scheduled for June 2006.

Justin Craun’s paintings and drawings combine anxiety, humor, and dread. His work is a satirical exploration of the young and old American problems of greed, disillusionment and fear. Craun was born in 1982 in Bethesda, Md. He lives and works in Brooklyn. He has solo exhibitions at Fredericks and Freiser Gallery in New York and Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis forthcoming in 2006.

Gregory Edwards shifts in and out of various modes of painting. Images are built out of autonomous systems that come from different perspectives, yet are held together by a basic empirical language. Edwards obtained a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2003. His work was recently exhibited in Sugar and Stress, Young Painting from New York, at Fredericks Freiser Gallery, NY. Greg lives and works in Brooklyn.

Jill Hubley was educated at Vassar College, Pratt Institute, and Eugene Lang College. She lives in Brooklyn.

Timothy Marvel Hull’s project, The War Against Sleep of G.I. Gurdjieff, deals with the ideas, personality and audience that surround the mystical thinker and orator G.I. Gurdjieff. Taking cues from Pop art, surrealist collage, kitschy craft movements and popular psychadelia, the project involves intricate patterning, constructivist masking tape wall drawings that serve as shrines and symbols, paper scrolls of esoteric knowledge, video wall installations, and bleak laser printed historical images of Gurdjieff and his original band of disciples, who were mostly American lesbian ex-pats living in Paris in the early twentieth century. Timothy has a BA in studio art and aesthetics from New York University and is currently a candidate for an MFA from the Parsons School of Design. He has recently exhibited his work in Red, White, Blue at Spencer Brownstone and at Tank Gallery. His work can be seen in the Drawing Center Viewing Program and Slide Registry.

Mïrka Lugosi’s drawings are self-portraits in erotic situations. She explores dark eroticism in relation to fear and death from the perspective of Georges Bataille. She lives and works lives and works at Clamart in Paris.

Using a process called “self referencing,” Justin Samson and Aisling Hamrogue take portraits of each other in the woods and colorize the photos before combining them in collage. For Psychic Reality, they have taken their practice one step further by transforming a collage into tapestry through the use of an automatic blanket weaver purchased at Sears. Aisling and Justin live and work in Brooklyn. Aisling obtained a BFA in painting from S.V.A. in 2004. Justin, born 1979, has exhibited at John Connelly Presents, Divided by Lightning at Deitch Projects, Elk Rattle at Kate MacGarry and if you think you see with just your eyes you are mad at Peres Projects.

Sara VanDerBeek’s recent photographs of “constructions” function as physical manifestations of a memory, whereas they are not linear in their structure but more gathered and assembled. She studied photography, sculpture and film at The Cooper Union, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 1998. From 1998-2001, she lived in London and worked as a commercial photographer. Since returning to New York in 2001, she resumed her studio practice. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Denver. In 2003, she founded Guild & Greyshkul, a gallery and artist studio in Soho.

Johannes VanDerBeek’s (b. 1982, Baltimore) sculptures delicately combine representations of real and imagined actions, bodies, and sites. A fascination with event perception pervades his constructions – culturally readable signs, symbols, and forms are reconfigured to produce an impossible reality, but one that captures the sense of mystery behind the lived realities in which we firmly believe. (from ps1.org)