Ilene Sunshine, Matthew Magee, Valeri Larko, Dan Ford

metaphor contemporary art is pleased to announce the exhibition GREEN featuring the work of four artists; Ilene Sunshine, Matthew Magee, Valeri Larko, and Dan Ford; who respond to environmental concerns with wit and poetics. The reception is September 14, from 6-9 pm, at 382 Atlantic Avenue between Hoyt and Bond Streets in downtown Brooklyn. Gallery hours are Sat & Sun:12-6 and by appointment.

Ilene Sunshine brings the outdoors in with her use of twigs and branches and cleverly reimagines the detritus of found plastic bags in a colorful large scale site specific installation which bisects the gallery space creating a wall “of air” and pays homage to and playfully subverts formal concerns of mid century modernism and color field painting. Matthew Magee’s large site specific window installation also makes use of found plastic and references early modernists constructions. His vibrant green mobile is made entirely of recycled detergent bottles cut and arranged in a waterfall of green shapes that allude to bones and hieroglyphics. Valeri Larko in her Salvage Yard series; paints heaps of garbage in beautiful operatic jumbles of texture and subtle color. Dan Ford’s lush romantic paintings are both an homage to the 19th century painter Joseph Mallord William Turner and a wry comment on our contemporary conflicted relationship to oil dependency. The works of each of these artists, while not being polemically political reimagine the refuse of our consumer culture and our love affair with petrochemicals to offer a creative and hopeful reinvention of our future.