Friendship’s Death
Melanie Authier, Leslie Baum, Judy Dolnick, Magalie Guérin, Melissa Leandro
June 2 – July 15, 2023
Andrew Rafacz, Chicago, IL
Press Release:
ANDREW RAFACZ is pleased to present Friendship’s Death, an exhibition of work by Melanie Authier, Leslie Baum, Judy Dolnick, Magalie Guérin, and Melissa Leandro in Gallery One and Two. The exhibition opens Friday, June 2nd and continues through Saturday, July 15th, 2023.
The title of the exhibition, Friendship’s Death, is inspired by the 1987 film of the same name, in which a robot from the distant galaxy of Procylon was sent to Earth as an omen and oracle of high celestial intelligence. Her mission is to examine the human condition and offer insight into the inevitabilities of the future. At the conclusion of the film, she leaves only a recorded message containing a five-minute sequence of abstract visuals—a diary of her experience, which the audience is left to decode.
In this exhibition we are invited to similarly decode each artist’s respective visual language, connecting to the ways in which they communicate complex ideas through abstraction. This exhibition hopes to operate as a sojourn to another place, creating moments for the viewer to move through a wide bandwidth of geographical time and space, by way of a select group of multigenerational artists, connected by their investigation of shape and color, and the impossible object.
Melanie Authier’s new works continue her interest in mercurial seasons and the synchronous possibilities of their painterly depictions. Her multi-layered scapes – interior, land or otherwise – represent an ever-present dramatic tension deeply rooted in our human pyche – chaos and control, the synthetic and organic, the technological and the natural. They capture the feeling of being caught between worlds – the known and the unknown, the infinite and the microscopic – while investigating the confines of art history.
Leslie Baum presents a recent group of works entitled: garden in a vase. This series tracks time and is a meditation on the enduring inevitability of change and death, through floral abstraction. The paintings selected for this exhibition are part of a larger body of watercolors and were part of the artist’s daily practice to stay present during stretches of recent isolation. Baum’s practice is iterative— creating mysterious versions within versions from piece to piece—all the while abstracting nature and flower forms even further. The artist’s documentations are at once familiar and alien, evocative of the ephemeral nature of life itself.
Judy Dolnick’s paintings from the late 80’s and 90’s combine spirited mark making and an investigation of expressive color to depict abstracted worlds derived from her imagination. Rhythm and gesture play a critical role in her paintings as she shifts in scale between precise forms and activated gestures. As an action painter, her work is imbued with bright daydream fantasies that come out of her like a squeeze of toothpaste! Over her 60-year career she has presented a multitude of perspectives of these familiar and imagined worlds as ‘she pulls her images apart from each other in order to investigate their meaning in isolation.’
Magalie Guérin is a master of recurrent shapes, rotating and flipping central forms into new compositions. The artist’s process of moving between many paintings while building a new body of work is reflected in the familiarity of place through color and texture. Her work embraces a poetic ambiguity, which is both unsettling and intriguing, blurring the line between definitive object and it’s abstraction. It is in this liminal space that Guérin’s paintings moor a sense of underlying structure, at once organic and mechanical.
Melissa Leandro creates vibrant textile works that represent a deep and thoughtful examination of her life experiences. With her newest works, she continues traditional and non-traditional methods of stitching, quilting, weaving, cyanotype, batik dyeing and foil transfers, often working from her drawings as a starting point. She uses analogue and digital methods of making: programming machines, jacquard looms, quilting and sewing machines, and additional styles of looms and hand sewing techniques. The works become abstract representations between mediums, that represent abstract relationships between family, her cultural identity, and the ecosystems she builds around her…
Read the full press release and view installation photos here: https://andrewrafacz.com/exhibitions/group-exhibition/
Photo credit: Andrew Rafacz gallery