Marvelli Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of works by Bill Abdale. As stated by the artist, “The control of information confers power. Coded messages are used in the service of motives of variable moral certainty. An advertising agency serves the same purpose as a propaganda machine: to render products desirable to consumers, whether the products are goods or ideologies. On the other hand, alchemy, and underground punk music enact a subversive empowerment through concealment. Information buried beneath iconography becomes a hidden body of knowledge.

In my work, these different approaches to power collide in diverse methods of drawing, collage, and printmaking that emphasize severity and formal control. The work is not intended to pictorially represent a world; rather, these are images to be passed through: the rally, the rock concert, the holy book, the secret formula, the slogan, the hit single, the street team, the come-on, the cop, the oratory, the tabloid, the altar, the poster, the free cigarette, the spam email, the encore, the sermon, the security camera.”

Abdaleís works are simple and mysterious. They strike a subtle balance between the formal rigor of abstraction and conceptual and psychological elements. Their restrain and elegance is often subverted by subtle printing and drawing techniques, and the use of irregular paper and un-stretched canvas. Bill Abdale lives and works in New York where he is completing a MFA at Hunter College.

In the project room, Marvelli Gallery is pleased to present Elizabeth Axtman’s American Classics. In the video the artist lip-synchs excerpts from films, such as Pinky and Jungle Fever, that deal with mixed race identity. Described by Axtman as “the inevitable tragic mulatto rant,” in which the characters, each played by the artist, are caught in a moment of confrontation with their own race. The artist fills the frame and stares directly into the camera; in doing so, she invites the viewer to be an active participant in the role-playing. Together, audience and artist affectively confront racial stereotypes through someone elseís voice and words. Although the montage of unexpected and unrestrained passages sets a tone that varies from disturbing to sensational, the artist delivers each line as though from personal experience.

Born in 1980, Axtman completed her BA at San Francisco State University and her MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, followed by the residency program at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2006. Her work has been exhibited in the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, TX, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH, among others. This spring, her video, Beef, will be featured at the Studio Museum, Harlem, NY. She currently lives and works in Oakland, California.