grayDUCK gallery is pleased to present DEPARTURE. This abstract show explores the deconstruction of words, architecture and information while paying homage to intuition, spirituality and imagination.

Ute Bertog
I am a painter intrigued by abstraction and its reluctant relationship to language. My goal is not to make transparent works, but to create opportunities for meaning to slip into other guises.

Texts from news media form the basis for erasures, where the majority of words are canceled out to disrupt and change a given storyline. The result is a fragmented text, interspersed with a multitude of gaps that coaxes meaning away from the original story. I slowly transform the text until the ability to read is either severely undermined or completely taken away. This is where imagination and play come in and readily fill in any gaps, offering the chance to destabilize and confuse original content.

Melissa Breitenfeldt
Overwhelmed at the amount of information available if not imposed on us everyday, I am constantly seeking a space of quiet resistance.

I’m interested in teaching people a new visual language. The only way to do this is through exploration and openness to the process. To exploit the viewers’ tendency to need something identifiable, I try to create a place with no ties to the existing world, free from the attached meanings of recognizable objects and forms. By using the tension between color, line, and space as my device, I seek to create a composition with its own progression of visual language and evolving rules. With a composition full of precedents the world begins to reveal itself.

Jennifer Chenoweth
Andiamo: This body of work reengages my research of Roman architecture. I study mathematical proportion, path, axis, and patterns in plans and elevations of buildings. I am interested in how these spherical clusters relate to human scale, as diagramed by Vitruvius. I want to understand how a sacred experience is created architecturally and sculpturally.

These artworks are abstractions of real architectural buildings from the Roman Empire. They are models for large-scale sculpture. I am interested in the paint and texture as a response to traditional surface decoration of domes in architecture. By constructing these shaped surfaces, I am creating sacred space for my own painting and drawing practice.

Court Lurie
I have spent years studying the intricacies of thought patterns and how they are expressed through action and emotion. I am particularly intrigued by the relationship between ego, motivation and faith. While painting, my awareness vacillates between intentional, premeditated mark making, and spontaneous, intuitive, risk taking, delving into the unknown and exploring new ways of creating space.

The process of creating each work is a dialogue that unfolds in the moment. This complex, ongoing conversation transforms into unpredictable, raw meditations on letting go. Saturation, layers, hue, transparency, content, form and texture intermingle to create an exchange that compositionally comes alive when balance and harmony are achieved.

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