Talent 2007, a salon-style exhibition of new and emerging artists will be on view at the Allan Stone Gallery from September 15 – October 20, 2007. The exhibition will showcase realist and abstract work in painting, drawing, and sculpture. This year’s show reflects the broad and often unusual aesthetic that has shaped the Allan Stone Gallery over the past forty-seven years.

What began as an experiment in ceramic glazes has become an enormous sculpture is its own right with a distinctly organic feel. Nomos is 16×8 x 8 feet and weighs 4,000 pounds. It takes artist Martha Russo 50 – 60 hours to fit the thousands of ceramic tubes into pegboards covered with clay pigment and paper and backed with Styrofoam. The title nomos, comes from the Greek root of “to wander” and “to wonder,” while the work itself coalesced around the sighting of a squid during a nighttime fishing trip. Russo followed the advice of another season-opener from years past, Eva Hesse, who said, “Never squash a hunch.” Russo’s hunch became nomos, a piece that inspires nothing less than wonderment from each viewer, as her apt title would suggest.

Previously noted for her melancholy depiction of junk food, Gina Minichino now imbues the childhood image of plush Snoopies with a disconcerting quality in her painting Five Snoopies (2007). Lauren Schiller’s paintings, like Minichino’s earlier work, also depict food. With images inspired by particular eating habits, Lauren Schiller addresses the relationships between food, morality, and identity with a subtle sense of humor and social commentary. David Barnett’s tiny flying machines defy our ideas about mechanical objects with their delicacy and elegance. The contrast to the realism and intricacy of Minichino, Schiller, and Barnett is the bold color and brushstroke of Richard Schemm and Judy Molyneaux. Schemm’s engrossing abstract paintings are improbably contained on 4×4 inch canvases, while Molyneaux’s almost sculptural use of oils is paired with an unlikely palette of muddy earth tones next to bright fluorescents.

Additional artists: Nguyen Ducmanh, Cheryl Ekstrom, Peter France, Richard Haden, Marc Lambrechts, John G.R. Roth, David Wells Roth, Robert Valdes, James Watkinson, Walter Jurkiewicz, and others.