Michelle Elzay’s Opening Night, borrowed from a John Cassavetes title, presents photographs of shoes, furs, an owl and a framed ‘thank you’ card. Together the works address what Benjamin referred to as perfunctory individual characterization (of the photograph). Depicting things once collected and then left behind, the minimally composed photographs emphasize a tradition of still-life painting where objects themselves denote time and place.

Ernesto Burgos’s sculptures are rooted in Modernism, using the process of selection and combination of materials as a metaphor for reanalyzing formal structure. The 3-dimensional work in Apparent Calm manipulates material as a political gesture, putting systems under question and expanding the possibility of their functions. Repeated images, reflective fabrics and recognizable shapes such as a table are broken down and re-cast as abstracted figurative sculpture.

Michelle Elzay lives and works in New York City. She holds a BA from Smith College and an MFA from Columbia University. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut and at the Steven Kasher Gallery in New York.

Ernesto Burgos grew up in Chile and currently lives and works in New York City and Brookyln. He holds a BFA from California College of the Arts and is a 2008 MFA graduate from New York University. He held solo project space exhibitions at David Castillo Gallery in Miami and Cynthia Broan Gallery in New York.