Barney Savage Gallery is pleased to present our Autumn Invitational exhibition, featuring a selection of artworks by contemporary artists who work in a variety of new, as well as traditional media. Each has shown a significant voice that resonates within a visually compelling and relevant approach to contemporary studio practice.

Featuring artwork by

Julia Bland
Mark Dorf
Langdon Graves
Angela Heisch
Shane Hope
Olivia Locher
Lucy Mink
Jenny Morgan
Bret Slater
Kelly Worman
Tim Zercie

Julia Bland draws from mystic traditions and philosophies to guide her own visionary language through the use of threads and fibers. The artist skillfully layers woven, stitched, twisted, knotted, dyed and painted material into tapestry-like hybrid compositions while engaging with the infinite symmetry of expanding history and evolving tactile discovery.
Mark Dorf’s practice employs a mixture of photography, video, digital media, and sculpture. In his most recent work, Dorf explores the human perception of digitally simulated domains, urban and architectural environments and the “Natural Landscape”. With an interest in post-anthropocentric and new materialist theory, he scrutinizes and examines the influence of the information age in order to understand our curious position within a 21st century world.
Langdon Graves combines American familial storytelling and occult history. She subverts reality through the creation of seductively hermetic installation spaces, domestically adorned with intricately created drawings and curious sculptural components, that combine the seemingly ordinary with the occult. The uncanny experiences passed on through matriarchal stories and interpretations drive the artist’s examination of anecdotal history, while her creation of decorated spaces reinterpret that bridge between rooted belief and the supernatural.
Angela Heisch orchestrates images on an intimate scale, often using symmetry as a structural approach to intentional abstraction. Her paintings, seemingly drawing focused differ from her pencil on paper pieces exhibited in this show. There are hints of objective form and even facial elements within the balanced arrangement. These pieces stand out from the artist’s usual practice giving them a more iconic presence, to better understand the clever visual puzzle of planes and patterns that the artist elegantly demonstrates.
Shane Hope uses modeling software to custom code generative molecular designs and algorithmically automate alternative representations of nano-scaled structures. Hope hand built a selection of RepRaps (3D printers) through which he prints his advanced nanomolecular models. He collages thousands of these 2D rendered and 3D printed models into extraordinary painterly compositions that depict things that are at the same time organic, inorganic, or completely nonsensical.
Olivia Locher is lovingly viewed as an artist prankster due to her guerilla pop-ups displaying brightly colored photos of staged models reminiscent of fashion advertising while subverting with Warhol-esque humor. Through the clever poses of the models and placement of objects they interact with the viewer is lead to the perfect execution of the artist's visual humor and wit.
Lucy Mink’s oil paintings spring forth at one moment with visual poetry and elegant brush strokes, creating movement and guidance for the eye, while then retreating into intimacy. The corners of inviting shapes and terrains play on figure ground relationships that are cloaked with patterns and motifs, reminiscent of American quilts. Her newest work using hand made pigments have a lighter transparency and a warmer palette evocative of watercolors.
Jenny Morgan selects specific color combinations to layer an added picture plane over the illustrative figure models she paints. Although not directly referencing anything specific, her colors make a connection with the heart, nature and healing. They appear to pass over the subject, who is separated from direct observation, like a powdery shadow scanning across a soft landscape.
Bret Slater paints from a gut instinct. His intention is to seek resolve, while leaving a necessary mystery. The raw vitality that is evident in his paintings draws from action and theatrical experience that are at their heights during unencumbered youth, and again, during the mastery brought on through experience.
Kelly Worman’s painting conveys her outrage brought on by the political climate and rise in conservative rhetoric. As an artist, curator and instructor of color-theory, she has temporarily moved the meter from aesthetics towards protest and stepped from the sidelines into the foray of cultural defense.
Tim Zercie creates visual portals out of fabrics sourced from all over the world as a way to connect himself to the universality of music. Ephemeral and eclectic, each musical body sprouts arms that travel globally and connect like wormholes. Tapping into a range of styles and cultures, the artist sews a garden of figural traces, signs, ashes and seeds to symbolize the growth of music between the generations.