Barbara Bonnano, David Fox, Stephen Lewis, November, 2021
Works by Barbara Bonnano, David Fox, and Stephen Lewis, will be on exhibition at Green Kill for the month of November, 2021.
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Works by Barbara Bonnano, David Fox, and Stephen Lewis, will be on exhibition at Green Kill for the month of November, 2021. Comorbidity will play a short set of jazz at 8 PM .
The opening party is on Saturday, November 6 , 2021, from 5 to 7 PM. The Exhibition runs from Saturday, November 6 until Saturday, November 27th.
Exhibition hours are from 3-5:30 PM, Tuesday through Saturday. You may make special appointments by calling 347-689-2323.
Barbara Bonnano
My work has always used the human form to express my observations. This series, Coastal Spirits, explores the idea of spirits roaming the earth, unnoticed by the populace, confronting their new death environment. In each painting the spirit has either given up its war with its new home or, as in Arrogant Spirit, is still fighting the finality of death. In Diving Spirit the figure is at peace with its new death environment. In Dispirited Spirit the figure seems to have surrendered by hiding in sleep, something we all do from time to time. The dreamlike landscape of the paintings is meant to evoke a time and place familiar to us, but unknown.
Like the work of the Spanish painter Goya and the post WWII British painter Francis Bacon, I believe I am reacting to the horror of living in a menacing world. My work is a rumination on what awaits after death. Will we live in an improved afterlife? Or a hell much worse than the life we've just left? Or will our consciousness simply be extinguished?
David Fox
These images originate somewhere in my deep subconscious. They are coaxed to the surface from a storehouse built over many years of looking, thinking and drawing.
I mostly work from imagination fed through observational drawing. I fill a lot of sketchbooks with images from my head. I have always relied on automatic drawing as a starting point to nurture and provide a strange foundation for the work. The main idea for me is to invent an image rather than merely copy.
Stephen Lewis
The art I create often involves the use of knowingly offensive stereotypical imagery; that is the intention of the work. Take, for example, the painting “Life on Mars”. Do I believe that many of the people who run this country see poor people of color as hapless, barefoot and pregnant, secretly bilking the government and driving Cadillacs, while the same politicians are lying about wars that kills poor Americans as they launch lofty plans for space exploration, and are somehow willfully oblivious of the problems right here on earth? Yes, I do. Jeff Bezos made that fairly clear last week. As Gil Scott Heron put it best, “A rat done bit my sister Nell. With Whitey on the moon”.
“Life on Mars” would not be representative of reality if it was not offensive. The real offense is how these things happen right under our noses every day. There is a constant movement to turn people against each other through stereotypes, to obscure the reality of what is happening (there is a long history of our ruling class turning disenfranchised people of different races against each other to consolidate and ensure its power and status quo). We are fed relentless, dishonest stories through corporate advertising and political double-speak, in manners and with language more insidious and disturbing than anything depicted on these walls. I try to use the same “language”, stereotype as tropes, to expose the reality of what is happening. You don’t bring a knife to a gun fight
This show observes two American realities: socio-political and the natural world. Both require different sets of language to translate what is being experienced into an image.
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