We invite you to come see Unsung, the first installation by the collective known as “88’s” – short for “88’s and good numbers” which is CB lingo for “Best Wishes and Regards.”

The work in Unsung started with conversations concerning the current presidential campaign. Our plea for a massive paradigm shift had 88’s collective members George Ferrandi and John Orth contemplating what parts of their own psyches could use some serious shifting. They started with the imagery they associated with grassroots revolution – daggers, dynamite, pistols, the felled heads of toppled statues, and the closed eyes of innocents. Then they created painted, cast plaster and carved wooden forms that relegate the physical violence of uprising safely to the realm of metaphor, but still speak to a simmering volatility and to the potential for cataclysmic change.

George Ferrandi moved to Brooklyn on September 10, 2001 and became a New Yorker the next day. She runs a small business, called Saints Alive, which restores statues for churches. On any given day, her studio is given over in equal parts to the broken bodies of saints and to the less refined, but equally fractured figures of her own making. John Orth splits his time between Gainesville, Florida, where he tends to a succulent garden and a band named Holopaw on the Subpop record label, and Brooklyn, USA where he fleshes out his many creative projects and hangs on the arm of his lovely boyfriend, Alan. On any given day, his house is given over to various whittlings, delicate stippled drawings, and stacks of song lyrics scrawled on Steno pads.

The two met in Gainesville, Florida where George was a professor at the University of Florida. Soon after meeting, they organized an exhibit at an old train depot. This was the beginning of over a decade of collaborations that have included several national shows, a traveling circus (Cloudseeding Circus of the Performative Object), a comic strip, and an unfortunate summer haircut.

Their latest collaboration, the 88’s collective, is a celebration of their complimentary sensibilities and shared interest in delicately adorned pathos, B-movie violence, and small, hyper-sexualized animals. They’re happy to have 88’s as a conceptual hook on which to hang the many hats of their creative efforts and to present Unsung as the first of those.