Curated by: John Haas

New York, NY – 33 Bond Street Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition ‘Terra Nova’ curated by John Haas. This exhibition is focused on a core element of four diverse artists, three painters and one installation artist. The exhibition will feature the work of Sara Carter, Karim Hamid, Benjamin Tritt, and Dan Mahoney.

The term ‘Terra Nova’ is derived from the Latin, meaning ‘New Earth’. The intention of this exhibition is to focus on more distinct terminology meaning ‘New Ground’. Each of the four artists involved in this show present four singular approaches to the idea of traditional landscape representation today. Based loosely on the idea of landscape, each artist demonstrates a strategy by which to define the traditional notion of what landscape actually is.

Of the three painters presented Sara Carter chooses to direct the viewer in an emotional tableau, where traditional representation is abstracted into organized color and form. Within this framework of constructed layers of paint emerges a highly personal description of an environment charged equally with logical sequencing and subtle melancholy for places that only exist within the realm of memory or previous experience.

The paintings of Karim Hamid find the human mind to be a landscape that shifts and turns in on itself with a mixture of muted expression and distorted reasoning. Though attached to a long tradition of figurative painting, he maintains a unique semblance of liquid space, altering a sense of perception and discounting the things that we take for granted often in our daily life until the entire world of our unconscious is revealed as a sort of internal tableau. This is the terrain of our unconscious world.

Benjamin Tritt’s are the most traditional of all. His paintings serve to the viewer a world at once recognizable. But, upon closer inspection what is presumed to be of the physical world is instead a description of the world in dream. Through the motion of paint he allows for the subject to dissipate and reconstitute itself continuously. These are places, and people, that we recognize – a world not made for us, but something we have made ourselves. This is landscape as a foreign place. Contrasted with the painters above is the installation work of Dan Mahoney, who takes directly from our earth for the building materials needed to recreate a semblance of the force of nature. Working in fabricated forms and utilizing stone he creates a portion of landscape designed to create a juxtaposition between that which we can accept in our minds to be true to reality and the placement of these forms into an unexpected circumstance. By conjuring physical form outside of recognizable context he gives us the answer to a question we did not at first think to ask.

Each of the four artists in this show have specifically been chosen to represent different quarters of the same overall picture. Working together in the same space each separate piece creates an incongruous whole, thus creating a strange dialogue of the similar. However dissimilar the starting point, each artist creates a complete notion of what the term ‘Landscape’ can and does mean. Terra Nova works to show ‘new ground’ within the constraints of historical precedence – a place not sought, but a place certainly born of the imagination.