Mountain Fold is pleased to announce the exhibition “We’re Not There”, a collection of works by Erika Somogyi and Evan Greenfield. The show consists of oil paintings, watercolors and mixed-media works that subvert conventions of traditional portraiture and raise questions about physical, personal, and representational boundaries.

Erika Somogyi presents a series of portrait/landscape paintings, wherein a human form embodies an environment, metaphorical for its psychology. “Self Portrait as the Lost Coast” originates from a photograph taken of the artist in the landscape depicted, however within the outline of her body, Somogyi has painted what she perceived at the moment of the camera shot. In “A Part of the Earth” two figures, demarcated by two separate settings, remain individual bodies from the neck down, but their heads dissolve into each other and into the icy backdrop. The group of work suggests the complexity of the relationship between person and environment: how each acts on the other; how the shape of one is influenced by the boundaries of the other; how they can serve as conceptual simile in Somogyi’s visual language.

Using photographic imagery, found objects, painting, and foam, Evan Greenfield layers references to himself, pop culture and art history. A stone face emerges from an expressionistic painting in “Rock Painting”. This work plays on the viewer’s urge to relate to art through projecting emotional intention onto both the object and the artist. Concentric cheeseburger buns telescopically frame a cat in “Sandwich”; the collage presents an enigmatic situation that alludes to excavation and deconstruction. Alternating between sincerity and absurdity, these works explore the impetus to create and to find meaning in the human experience.

Both artists address the framing of self as well as the potential to escape and to communicate individual experience. Their juxtaposed work offers contrasting views: Greenfield’s pieces approach such boundary breaking measures with both desire and skepticism to intimate an absence of meaning, while Somogyi’s portraits promote the inspiration of possibility whether realized or imagined.