Delightfully incongruous subjects and settings abound in Nick Ghiz’s immediately accessible and formally complex, small–scale, acrylic on wood paintings. His fantastical depictions of city life are fueled by an imagination infused by visual sources ranging from 14th – 16th century Northern Renaissance portrait and landscape paintings, personal photographs, stacks of vintage and contemporary, stock and magazine images, and the roofless buildings of architect Luis Barragán.

Rendered through thousands of minute, hatch-like brush strokes of thin acrylic paint applied directly onto unprepared wood panels, Ghiz’s paintings bring together divergent themes surrounding the exoticism of nature and the domesticity of city life. While he presents a small slice of life within a carefully delimited expanse on a flattened picture plane, his treatment of scale accomplishes the considerable feat of telescoping distance and proximity. These pictorial archetypes of city life are punctuated by charming living spaces and cheery-colored walls framed by recessed windows and doorways. The endless patterning formed by windows inside windows draws the viewer’s eye into convincing depth. Exterior settings display similar perspectival finesse and often take the form of idealized cityscapes featuring emblematic views of landmark buildings.

Playing with perception, Ghiz’s quixotic placement and pairing of humans, exotic animals, and birds within domestic scenes and cityscapes invites viewers to participate in his vision, and to complete it with their own personal associations and conclusions. In Courtship Dance of the Blue-footed Boobys, 2008 (pictured above), two exotic birds invite and reward inspection by displaying such uncommon sights as the striking coloration and motion of their feet, while their frozen and averted gazes hint that their presence within the picture frame may be only to create an impractical yet engaging theatrical illusion. At times, Ghiz heightens the overall sense of incongruity of subject with environment by truncating his figures, or by shifting the scale so that the subjects in the foreground take on a disproportionate and/or unsettling level of monumentality.

Interspersed among the paintings on view, and serving as a point of departure for his ongoing interest in the relationship between scale, context, and perception, are a selection of the artist’s earlier, life-size and large-scale wooden sculptures representing the most sensual parts of the human anatomy including buttocks and lips. In contrast to the muted forms of expression shared by many of Ghiz’s painting subjects, emotions take center stage in a series of wall mounted, life-size heads in relief also on view. Sculpted from clay, they depict performing artists including opera singers and actors. Each display their own dramatic personae, some with mouths agape, or foreheads arched, or crowned with waves of flowing hair.

A central underlying premise guiding Ghiz’s art is the idea of disguise and the ways people invent themselves through clothing, hairstyles, furniture, and posture. In his world, New York emerges as an idealized metropolis personified by its iconic architectural facades, and revered by those denizens who emulate its soaring rooftops with striking hats and hairdos.

Nick Ghiz’s solo exhibitions include the Sculpture Center, NYC, and the P.S. 1 Special Projects Room, L.I.C., NY. Group exhibitions include the Brooklyn Army Terminal, Brooklyn, NY. His most recent gallery solo exhibition took place at the Lesley Heller Gallery in 2007. He is a McCall Foundation grant recipient.

While Modern architecture remains Mike Childs’ primary source of inspiration, the grid-like geometric components found in previous works are increasingly met with the arrival of organic forms in his most recent group of abstract paintings. Intrigued by the action of expanding and contracting boundaries, the architectonic grid is now built within an organic plane in many works on view, supplanted by biomorphic zones that again contain additional geometric structures. Always looking to develop new color relationships, color often jumps ahead of the grid as a prime subject.

Space becomes more scattered and fragmented in paintings such as Church and State, 2009 (pictured), as subtle color variations within each section are offset by dramatic chromatic breaks to create a collage-like effect. Architectural references are still evident in the patterning, but color is being put to more structural use as witnessed by the shifts in rhythm, value, and scale taking place throughout the composition.

Born and raised in Ontario, Canada, Mike Childs received his undergraduate degree from the University of Guelph, Ontario, CA, and attended the MFA Program at Florida State University in Tallahassee, FL. Recent solo exhibitions include the CUE Art Foundation, NYC. Group shows include Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, NJ. Childs is a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner award.

Tom Doyle has always been fascinated by ways to achieve a tenuous balance between form, space, and gravity in sculpture. Using a portable chain saw, Doyle makes his own found objects by cutting forms from feld trees including Sassafras and Oak that capture their distinct growth patterns in reaction to natural forces. He later pulls from his “vocabulary of elements” to structure free- standing configurations from cantilevered forms that resemble floating calligraphic characters.

Reinforcing the illusion of movement and spatial flow, Doyle’s sense of scale and dimensionality allow for prime viewing from all angles. Monolithic, vertical, and carved out at the top, Enniskillen, 2009, Doyle’s newest work on view was inspired by imagery of solitary Celtic crosses that mark the Irish countryside. While still denying a base of support, its massing represents a departure from his past inter-connective abstract pieces by bringing more contrast to the counterbalancing elements.

Tom Doyle received his BFA, MA, and MFA from Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. Solo exhibitions include the Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, CT, and LongHouse Foundation, East Hampton, NY. Group exhibitions include the Austin Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL, and Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC. Doyle is the recipient of many grants and awards including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Jimmy Ernst Award in Art, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Award in Sculpture, and membership into the National Academy.