Curated by D. Dominick Lombardi

Gudjon Bjarnason Rodney Dickson Rieko Fujinami David Isenhour Elizabeth Joblin D. Dominick Lombardi Fumiyo Osawa Ed Smith Michael Zansky

As an artist, one of the works that has had the deepest and most profound effect on my work is the final version of “Europe After the Rain” that was painted in 1942 by Max Ernst. It shows a culture broken and beaten down against a pristine blue sky. From the rubble emerge strange new life forms, mutations that overcame the destruction and stress to be reborn anew. For this show, I tried to find a diverse selection of artists who, in my mind, share that interest in the forms that follow dysfunction, while at the same time, exploring the various demonstrations of the word bomb.

Gudjon Bjarnason contemporizes Modernist thoughts by literally exploding minimal metal forms that both destroys and creates a new action-packed esthetic.

Rodney Dickson’s soldiers and tanks blast their way through glossy fields of brilliant, crumpled candy wrapper fields that churns up the symbolism.

Rieko Fujinami offers us lost souls frozen to battered walls like the shroud of Turin.

David Isenhour gives us a personified, Disneyfied version of a post explosion dust cloud which complicates the energy.

Elizabeth Joblin records, with jagged fields and elegant colors, the beauty of the bomb.

D. Dominick Lombardi, like Bjarnason, simultaneously creates and destroys like a graffiti artist causing confusion and focus on the same field.

Fumiyo Osawa makes the benign blatant, presenting a possible reality in the post 9-11 era.

Ed Smith mixes mythologies and metaphors creating Iconic after images and foreboding foresight.

Michael Zansky’s humor is dark, as he turns the core symbol of a bomb into a brain center that controls thoughts.

D. Dominick Lombardi, 2008