An exhibition of paintings, drawings and installations dealing with notions of space and displacement, Fantastic Routes invites a group of New York City based artists to create methods of charting ideas, capturing memories, and expressing visions of the future in the dynamic, technology-driven context of globalization.

JANICE CASWELL – ELISABETH CONDON – CLAIRE COREY – FRANKLIN EVANS – SANDY LITCHFIELD – KAREN MARGOLIS – CARRIE SOLOMON – SARAH TRIGG – ALEJANDRA VILLASMIL

CURATED BY ALEJANDRA VILLASMIL

This two part exhibition can also be viewed at Lab Gallery.

In a dynamic context driven by globalization and the accelerated changes in technology and telecommunications, artists are reacting by creating their own parallel universes, places that exist somewhere between abstraction and representation and that are visually identifiable by gestures evoking intricate routes, swirling paths, and dizzying swirls.

Influenced by the clash between the organic and the artificial, the natural and the man-made and the intuitive versus the schematic, the artists showcased in Fantastic Routes find their own ways of comprehending and dealing with notions of space, displacement and nomadic conditions, and inventing methods of charting ideas, capturing memories, and expressing visions of the future.

In their search of Utopia, they transit dreamy landscapes and follow their personal cartographies for guidance. This process is one of collecting data, gathering knowledge, and ordering overloads of information. Formally, the expression of their personal perceptions of the environment and their experiences of place and time is a “fantastic topography” of strident colors, carefully orchestrated compositions, and repetitive actions of mark making, brushstrokes and gestures that derive in patterns, codes, and systems.

Caswell’s drawings and installations are representations of mental maps. The impetus for this work is a strong desire to capture and catalog experience, a desire that has its origins in a transient childhood. She uses a variety of materials in her work; hole-punched paper circles can plot steps along a path, or when skewered with pins, may become markers rising above the flat plane.

Evans’ work is located between near and far, painting and drawing, narrative and non-narrative representation. He allows the flow of watercolor and ink to suggest paths for the mind and the eye. Dreamy landscapes grounds his work in a familiarity that feels unfamiliar.

Solomon’s works reference memory, daydreaming, anxiety and spontaneity. At times they pertain to space, suggesting landscapes, while others connect to specific memories in personal history, from the biomedical sensations of a broken limb to the witness of a deeply internal illness. There are also topographical references to place, such as the vantage point of an aircraft tracking patterns in the land.

Margolis is interested in hidden patterns in the universe and connections that form between internal spaces and the cosmos. Working with divergent and contradictory elements that converge in a reflection between ideals of nature and the artificial realities of contemporary life, her intent is to express the synthesis between organic and artificial.

Condon paints invented landscapes shaped by mechanical and bodily movements, cultural associations and physical location. Queues, dance movements, jet takeoff, kitsch, the aesthetics and cultural experiences of the 1960s and 1970s when she grew up, places lived (Los Angeles, New York, Florida), sources ranging from Huang Gongwang to Paul Jenkins and Dr. Seuss inform the way she sees landscape. She views landscape as an internal as well as external space that hovers between representation and abstraction.

Most of Litchfield’s work is derived from walks in nature. Often, she will come home from a walk and make a map-like drawing that describes her recent journey. She is influenced by Chinese and Japanese paintings as well as geological maps of the earth.

Trigg collects aerial-perspective documentation of land forms that bear information resembling cancerous activity. She then prints and paints the layers of the collected information. Her aim is to document the confusion between normal and abnormal human systems that coexist and are revealed on the earth’s surface. By plotting the activity of these systems, organs and biological systems begin to emerge: industrial mines like red-cell-producing spleens; stadium arenas and airports like people-pumping lymph nodes; and burning oil fields as tissue undergoing cellular mutation.

Concerned with the art of painting in the present day as well as its history, Corey explores how technology both relates to traditional techniques and enables a new freedom in art making by fostering a dialogue between old and new media. She uses color and form to create the illusion of depth despite a completely flat surface.

Villasmil’s “fantasy landscapes” are eclectically informed by the artifice of American popular culture, medieval myths, fantastic literature, Victorian and Romantic art, organic patterns, natural phenomena, and the aesthetics of traditional Japanese landscapes. Whimsical, playful and sensual, her invented worlds are related both to the internal topography of the body and to nature’s external configurations.