Elucidation ~ November 21 ~ January 15, 2015
Gallery I Porkchop Solo
Gallery II Dara Vandor~EliseWehle~Chad Wys~Jesse Draxler~Ellen Stagg~Percy Fortini-Wright
Elucidation Artists
Porkchop’s ever evolving installation “Elucidation” consists of a series of sculptures , paintings and illustrations created over the last three years. The show is an exploration and realization of the artist’s imagined post~apocalyptic religion named “Leviism”. It’s dieties, icons and prayer stations and it’s language are “relics from a multi-dimensional realm which has it’s origin in ancient times”. The artist has been developing and creating the font system, alphabet and symbols of these beings and using them in his work since the inception of his concept. This text is the common thread that connects the various elements and works in the show. Although some sculptures from “Elucidation” have been exhibited at SCOPE Art Fair for Art Basel Miami, this is the debut of the fully realized installation at Parlor Gallery.
Dara Vandor
“Everything I do begins and ends with tiny crosshatched strokes of pen on canvas. Nothing more, nothing less. No paint, no photography. Just pen.”
My work begins with the thin surface that divides lover from beloved, private from public, subject from object. Even when the female form is subtracted from the picture, the remaining clothing stands in for her and her desires, and in turn for the desires of the viewer. For the wearer, these garments can act as a form of armour, a way to conceal and protect the vulnerable human body from scrutiny, fear and shame, and a way to project an idealized image—if only to and for herself. Is the ritual of dressing/undressing a performance for an external viewer or is it an act of self-creation? A series of ambiguous portraits emerge: fantasies both societal and personal are explored through the commodity.
I began working with paint and portraiture, but soon my interest shifted away from colour and likenesses. The objects that frame the body enthralled me, their varying textures, their graphic forms, and so the brush was replaced with the pen. The medium itself seems ordinary: it produces small, intimate gestures, being a tool most of us use often, for daily tasks. Yet when tens of thousands of tiny strokes are marshalled en masse, they begin to assume a life of their own.
Dara Vandor received a BA from McGill in Art History. Her work is held in public and private collections in North America and Europe, and has been exhibited in London, Los Angeles, Toronto and Montreal. She has been featured by Harper’s Bazaar, the Telegraph, Interior Hong Kong, Square Mile, The Handbook, Sharp and Ask Men.
Jesse Draxler is a Minneapolis-based artist who has worked in the medium of collage (including 3D) for over five years and has been busy building an impressive portfolio of weirdly sexual and visually challenging images of deconstructed beauty. His pieces are enigmatic explorations of existentialism. His work is dark and visually challenging, and hits the same notes of beauty and surrender that are found in true nihilism. Draxler has shown his genre and medium~bending work all over the world, been featured in publications like Dazed and Popular, and counts The New York Times amongst his clients.
Percy Fortini-Wright is a Boston based artist who received both his BFA and MFA from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. While in his youth he wrote graffiti, becoming most active during the late 1990’s, and becoming a technician of wild style graffiti letters, tags and bubble letters simultaneously as he evolved as a traditional painter of scenes, abstraction and classical portraiture In graduate school he studied with artists Paul Rahilly, Ken Beck, Paul Goodnight, Vanessa Platacis, and Dike Blair. His inspirations range from painters like Anders Zorn to John Singer Sargent, to wild-style grafitti pieces and tags with drippy markers. Exhibiting within both the public and private spheres and creating large and small-scale pieces, Percy has participated many graffiti events including Meeting of Styles in the Bronx, and Under Pressure in Montreal. He was juried into the Copley Art Society and was honored with a recent solo show at Milton Academy’s Nesto Gallery in 2013, and he has been selected in a juried exhibition by Jonathan LeVine at Parlor Gallery, NJ in 2013 and in 2014 a group exhibit at the Copley Society juried by Paul HA and a solo shot at Lot F gallery in May 2014. His work and has appeared in a number of art publications including the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Juxtapoz, ArtScope, American Art Collector and the centerfold of the Improper Bostonian magazine. Recently his work was commissioned by Adidas for the Boston Marathon which was featured in Hypebeast and Sports Illustrated. Future projects include an upcoming solo shows in the fall of 2015 at Babson College, The Copley Society of Art and Exact Science Gallery in LA for spring 2016
Chad Wys “I was born in Illinois in the fall of 1983. From an extremely early age picture books devoted to 19th and 20th century painting were more valuable to me than any toy. The impressionists were my idols and museums were my arenas. This naive fascination with art and its history would persists in varied degrees throughout my adolescence, contributing to a full-blown vocation in adulthood. I would go on to graduate from Illinois State University in 2011 with a Master’s degree in Visual Culture, a discipline with a multi-pronged emphasis on art history, visual theory, and philosophy. “At its broadest point, my work concerns the examination of visuality: of images and objects, decorations and art and how the manifestations of the reproductions of these materials come to influence our everyday experiences. Appropriation as a methodology came naturally and early to me since my academic and personal interests had for so long involved the study of visual production. When it came time to develop a methodology, I simply adapted the technique of literary citation to the realm of the visual. My affinity for Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and the other Dadaists, along with the recent Pictures Generation of the 1980s (including artists like Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince)—all appropriators—were tremendous stylistic and intellectual influences in this regard. Ultimately, it is through appropriation that I’ve found the most direct line to the problems that concern me above others. Sourcing, displaying, and adapting materials from my urban environment has become both my process and my methodology for dealing with the culture, and the cultural information, I wish to critique.”
Elise Wehle “I make the art I do to pull me away from the increasingly digital world that surrounds me. Every day I spend so much time in front of a glowing screen that sometimes I forget I possess five bodily senses and not just one or two. Making art makes me conscious of my hands again, and all of my work requires time-intensive, redundant movements that remind me that not everything is as instantaneous as a click of a mouse. By weaving together paper, cutting lines, and folding shapes, I manipulate drawings, photos, and prints to create new landscapes for me to explore.”
Ellen Stagg has been a photographer since she was 16 years old. She moved to New York City in 1996 from Connecticut to attend the School of Visual Arts to get her BFA in Photography. She signed with her first photography agent at the end of her junior year of college. In her decade plus career as a professional photographer she has worked in advertising, fashion, and portraiture, shooting for all kinds of magazines, look books, stock photography, and celebrities.