PARADICE PALASE is pleased to present Tangere, their first exhibition of the fall season, curated by Lauren Hirshfield and featuring paintings, works on paper, and ceramics from Jack Arthur Wood, Gaby Collins-Fernandez, and Madeline Donahue

The act of touch is a powerful thing. We are in a constant state of learning through the people, places and things we encounter and our ability as humans to comprehend so much of it through one single sense is extraordinary. What is perhaps even more wonderful is how we can brush past a stranger on the sidewalk, dive through a break in an ocean wave, or run our fingers through the hair of a lover and respond emotionally. “Tangere” is the latin for “to touch”, but it also translates more specifically as “to elicit an emotional response”. The artists’ practices and subsequently the works in this show each tackle the emotional and tactile, and the ways they intertwine as we perceive the world around us. Gaby Collins-Fernandez’s mixed media paintings and works on paper at their cores are tactile objects. She digitally renders layered imagery into bodily abstraction and prints them on towels and flocked paper, respectively.  Collins-Fernandez creates an artistic language that interprets texture, weight, text and gradient into an emotional landscape. This particular collection of works on paper respond directly to the larger diptych, all manipulating family photos and replicated faces and body parts from art history. 

Jack Arthur Wood’s work is equally layered, utilizing paper cut outs and paint blobs to build shallow relief on the surface of his paintings. They are wild and psychedelic and respond in many facets to the night terrors of his youth. Beyond the formal elements - gradient patterns, repetitive iconography - the paintings are wacky landscapes with rivers and sunsets bursting through on the horizon. From his statement: “he finds himself fascinated by sublime, romantic, phenomenal reality meditating on the notion that a tree does, in fact, fall in the forest if there’s no one there to see it.” 

Madeline Donahue’s many ceramics are peppered throughout the show, her divers’ butts buoying up to the surface of the waves that crash around them. Her practice largely focuses on the unique perspective she takes on motherhood - there is an unparalleled closeness one has with their parent or child. Here in this tangential series we see Donahue’s shift toward highlighting just the womanly form, as it moves through water. The feeling one has when waves crash around your body and sweep you effortlessly through its current can be completely freeing or overwhelmingly terrifying. In Tangere Donahue’s women seem to dive in and out of Wood’s and Collins-Fernandez’s paintings seamlessly, and the intense closeness felt in Donahue’s work is now between these women bathers and the surreal-colored waves they intercept.  

Tangere is on view September 7-22, 2019 with an opening reception Saturday September 7th and a closing reception in tandem with Bushwick Open Studios on Friday September 20th 7-9pm. Gallery hours are by appointment, 1-6pm. PARADICE PALASE is located at 1263 Bushwick Ave, Ground Floor, Brooklyn NY. For more information or to inquire about the works in the show please contact Lauren at paradicepalase@gmail.com