Summer Sampler includes work by Amanda Alic, Sasha Bezzubov, Erik Guzman, Melissa Pokorny, Emily Roz, Jan Sokota, Sante Scardillo, David Schulz, Philip Simmons, Patricia Smith, Chris Twomey and Edie Winograde

The Front Room is proud to present “Summer Sampler”, a delightful digestif featuring artworks by the last season’s Front Room artists as well as a preview of the shows to come, and some new selections from our Multilpes and Editions program.

Amanda Alic’s photographs capture the construction of our personal and public character, domesticity, pleasure and discord. Her series “Off Season” portrays abandoned play areas—racetracks, mini-golf courses etc. Referencing the romanticization of ruins, these images convey exquisite yet eerie locations imbued with memories of pleasure and activity. They reflect the desperate drive to satisfy ourselves by filling our lives with external stimulus.

Sasha Bezzubov’s crushingly beautiful large scale photographs of natural disasters transcend the conscious, topical associations we have to these events in the world of 24 hour news channels. In these enormous dyptich and tryptichs one can’t help but marvel at the terrifying impersonal beauty in these destroyed and desolate landscapes.

Erik Guzman’s artworks consist of a multitude finely cut parts of aluminum, glass and plastics. Each of these material elements converge to create mechanical devices that move, generate sound, and light up (blindingly) without obvious or logical results. A marriage between craft and movement creates an aesthetic that is independent of the two.

Melissa Pokorny’s “homemade cultural probes” are assemblages consisting of quirky casts, found objects, and synthetic building materials. By using overtly artificial means to represent space, coupled with uncannily realistic animal figurines and casts, Pokorny questions our estrangement from, and subsequent longing for connection to the natural world, and the resulting substitution of the real by the fake.

Emily Roz’s family portraits use animals and toys to illustrate the subtle expressions of anger and violence within close family relationships. Wallpaper patterns ground the implied aggression in a domestic environment.

Through his work with newspaper articles, headlines, and magazine advertisements Sante Scardillo reclaims the public space the media uses for their marketing, and exposes a hidden message of compliance. He questions both their strategies and implied political aims.

Philip Simmons, through his large, exceedingly glossy silhouette sculptures taps the grandiose archetype of the American Wild West. The sculptures adopt the visual language of western road signs of a bygone era of idealism. Monumental and minimal-like a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western movie-his works almost demand to be consumed by the viewer in an instant.

Patricia Smith’s meticulous, quietly subversive works on paper in ink and watercolor are reminiscent of architectural drawings, medical illustration, and antique maps. Her fantastical structures house imaginary organizations. Text captions labeling the rooms and spaces make use of puns, double meanings and dark humor. These miniature worlds articulate slightly unsettling social phenomena and psychological patterns, suggesting a depiction of both the individual mind and the broader culture.

Edie Winograde photographs staged pageants-reenactments of incidents (legendary or real) in American history presented in their original locales. She is particularly drawn to reenactments of moments in the history of westward expansion throughout the United States. Her photographs represent an-at times—contentious constructed reality portraying events suspended between history and imagination.

The summer sampler will also introduce three new works into the Multiples and Editions program—the gallery’s ongoing selection of editioned work. New work by Jan Sokota, David Schulz and Chris Twomey will be on view at the gallery during the Summer Sampler.

David Schulz’s new photographic folio “Mirage” is a haunting collection of 10 photo diptychs that present a poetic dream-vision. Capturing glimpses of the external but implying elusive interior states the images together are elegiac and dramatic and even disturbing. In addition to the edition, two large scale versions of prints from the folio will hang the Summer Sampler show.

Another new multiple included in the exhibition is a print from Chris Twomey’s CheeriOpus series. Twomey’s work mixes the impersonal scientific study of genetics with the acutely personal (and not unrelated) subject of motherhood. Her eye-bending silkscreen prints in the series feature cast Cheerios along with printed versions of the breakfast cereal and pudgy and somehow disturbing babies swimming together in a colorful gene pool.

Also included in the exhibition is Jan Sokota’s “Chump Change” offered here in her altered readymade change machine. Place a $1.00 bill face up into the slot to receive your Chump Change—machine minted nickel-silver coins bearing contemptuous images of the country’s leaders. The change and its subjects are rendered equal in this transaction: Good For Nothing. The political rip-off, the value of real currency and the value of art are called up as your dollar is swallowed and the Chump Change is dispensed.