Reductive May 15 Through June 10, 2012

JEFFREY LEDER GALLERY JEFFREY LEDER GALLERY

PRESS RELEASE

Contact: Dina Muenzfeld [email protected] May 2012

Reductive May 15 through June 10, 2012

Opening Reception: Tuesday, May 15, 2012, 6 - 8:30 pm

The Jeffrey Leder Gallery is pleased to present Reductive, a curated exhibition including 16 visual artists, on view from May 15th through June 10th, 2012 on two floors of the historic brownstone located in the heart of Long Island City.

Reductive bridges geometric abstraction, figurative painting and photography in contemporary art. Featuring both emerging and mid-career artists, the exhibition combines approaches to formal simplicity in various media and styles. The artwork selected is informed by reflections on color, scale and substance. Tranquil surfaces are intended to create a sense of intimacy, quiet sensualities the beholder can connect to. Sheer fields of color and open, iconic signs allow interaction between the art objects and the eye of the beholder. Nadege Morey’s Black Cross (2009) epitomizes the show, intending to “connect to the viewer using straight lines, basic shapes and symbols that most of us can relate to.”

On the one hand, the exhibition features austere geometric compositions, a vocabulary commonly understood as Minimalism. Jason Hoelscher’s paintings for example are inspirited by classical geometry like the Golden Section as well as the his idea to create “a pictorial space that combines an abstraction of Renaissance depth with a representation of modernist flatness”. On the other hand, the majority of art on dislay overcomes a stylistical classification as Minimal. Reductive uses the Minimalist idea of art to speak to the viewer’s feelings. “No illusions. No allusions” is the request of minimalist artist Donald Judd to allow experiential experiences to connect the artwork with the beholder. Compositions seek out simplicity and reduction in order to eliminate any evocation or psychological reference. Symbolic language is evaded and the gaze directed on issues of color, scale and space in order to make each work as strong as the thoughts of the spectator.

Claire McConaughy’s representational stills of women portrayed from the back were chosen for their formal organization and palette. Just as hard-edge geometry engages the eye through it’s arrangement of planes and colors, so do McConaughy’s still lifes call for introspection: “Each scene looks into itself and creates an inner life for the painting, therefore, the sitter’s identity and thoughts become the result of the viewer’s interpretation”. Stephen Celuch’s marine landscapes and dark interior scenes display a literal reduction of subject matter on a small canvas: “It is an excercise in mindfulness and awareness recalling the experiences without pondering them, making the work more about feeling than representation”.

Jeffrey Leder Gallery 2137 45th Road, Long Island City, NY 11101 917-767-1734 [email protected] jeffreyledergallery.com /11 Jeffrey Leder Gallery 2137 45th Road, Long Island City, NY 11101 917-767-1734 [email protected] jeffreyledergallery.com /11 JEFFREY LEDER GALLERY

In his Montauk series he traces light through color with gestural impetus, extending the exhibition’s scope to painterly abstractions. Capturing daylight also informs Yusuke Nishimura’s art. His Dayscapes are multilayered monochromatic photographs of a day’s changing sunlight on light sensitive paper. He creates a series of transparencies that seize the various light situations, their “colors being obtained photographically, (…) indexical to the time observed”. Here, the ultimate Reductivism is achieved through an absence of the artist’s hand.

Dina Muenzfeld, April 2012

Caitlin Teal Price (b. 1980) was born in Chicago, IL, and grew up in Washington, DC. She received her BFA in photography from the Parsons School of Design in 2002, and her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2009. She has exhibited both internationally and nation wide and her work is in the collection of the Robert V. Fullerton Art Museum in San Bernardino, CA. Her work has been featured in publications including The New Yorker, The Washington Post Magazine, Details, Vogue, Vice, Nylon, Capricious magazine, Sony Music and Universal Pictures. Caitlin currently lives and works in Washington, DC.

Claire McConaughy is a painter living in Brooklyn, NY. She earned her BFA from Carnegie-Mellon University and her MFA from Columbia University. Solo exhibitions include: Art Resources Transfer; Carol Schlosberg Gallery at Montserrat College Art Gallery; and The Deutsche Bank Gallery. She has had numerous group exhibitions including: Against the Tide, Two Coats of Paint.com, online exhibition curated by Sharon Butler; Portraits, Storefront Gallery, Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY; Twice Born: Beauty, Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts, curated by Shelley Bancroft, Boston, MA and Selections 45, The Drawing Center, New York, NY.

“Unlike typical portraiture, the view is from the back leaving space for multiple interpretations. Each scene looks into itself and creates an inner life for the painting, therefore, the sitter’s identity and thoughts become the result of the viewer’s interpretation. Clothing and environment are often simple, but have motifs or colors that contribute to the narrative. A dominant element in the painting is the hair that is either tangled, knotted or silky and becomes a seductive element that creates psychological metaphors.”

Dan Weihnacht earned his BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and an MA in Art Education from the University of New Mexico as well as an MS from the University of Florida. He has had successful one person shows at the Dorsch Gallery in Miami, FL and has been included in numerous group shows. The work of Dan Weihnacht reflects his interest in creating resolved compositions from the basic elements of art. He explores relationships of particular colors in the context of rectangles in juxtaposition. In the process of composition, the color relationships determine the size, shape, and positioning of the rectangles. The goal is to arrive at a simple, peaceful, and harmonious visual statement.

Jarrod Beck is an artist with a background in architecture and printmaking. He has been a resident artist at the Fine Arts Work Center, Lower East Side Printshop, Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, Robert Blackburn Print Workshop and the Land Arts of the American West program. Beck’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Village Voice and the Austin Chronicle and is included in the Judith Rothschild collection of contemporary drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Beck earned an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and a Master of Architecture degree from Tulane University.

Jeffrey Leder Gallery 2137 45th Road, Long Island City, NY 11101 917-767-1734 [email protected] jeffreyledergallery.com /11 JEFFREY LEDER GALLERY

Jason Hoelscher was born in St. Louis, MO, and lives and works in Savannah, GA. His most recent one person exhibit was held in Berlin, Germany. He has exhibited various group and solo shows in the United States as well as in Hong Kong, Stockholm and Paris.

“Just as the early modernist painters had to deal with the perceptual changes wrought by the invention of the camera, I believe that painters today have to address contemporary changes in perceptual processing speeds, information intake and attention span, and make these changes our own. Beyond the initial gestalt read, however, there are elements of the paintings that reward additional attention: the use of classical geometry like the golden section; interplays between illusionism and literality; self-reflexive strategies regarding the work’s status as a mediated aesthetic object; and the creation of a pictorial space that combines an abstraction of Renaissance depth with a representation of modernist flatness. I do not consider my paintings to be strictly representational or non-objective; to the extent that they can be considered “abstract”, the process of abstraction proceeds from elements that are already abstract, if not virtual, to begin with.”

Joyce Siegel is a working artist with a studio in Long Island City. She recently had a solo show at the Shag Gallery in Chelsea, NY, and works with the Pierogi gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Joyce began as a self taught artist and much of what she has learned has come from her interaction and observation of great art. While living in London, Joyce became fascinated with paintings, sculpture and especially drawings. She scoured the galleries and museums in London and New York. She developed her techniques at the The New York Studio School, The School of Visual Arts and Anderson Ranch. Her work is in private collections throughout the United States. Joyce Siegel was born in New York City where she currently resides. She received a B.S. in Economics in 1982 from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and worked on Wall Street for 10 years. Joyce Siegel has been exploring the contradiction between spontaneity and control in her paintings. Her work is process oriented and focuses on the creation of the painting. She develops each piece in a spontaneous fashion.

Lisa DiClerico is a New York born artist currently living and working in Long Island City, Queens. Her career as a restorer of antique furniture and objects heavily influences her work. She received a BFA in Restoration from the Fashion Institute of Technology in 1999. Her studies included hands on training in the techniques of 13th century fresco restoration in Florence, Italy. Her background also includes painting, sculpture, ceramics and studio furniture making. Her artwork is currently focused on mixed media painting and has been exhibited most notably at the 2011 Industry Art Show.

Marjorie Morrow lives and has worked as an artist in New York City since 1969 and divides her time between Manhattan and her Catskill mountain studio. She is a graduate of Miami University, Oxford, OH with a BFA in painting and printmaking and attended the Blossom-Kent Art Program at Kent State University under the guid- ance of Richard Anuszkiewicz. Morrow’s paintings and prints have been exhibited nationally and internationally.

Jeffrey Leder Gallery 2137 45th Road, Long Island City, NY 11101 917-767-1734 [email protected] jeffreyledergallery.com /11 JEFFREY LEDER GALLERY

Michelle Arcila was born in New York in 1980 and raised in Costa Rica. She graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 2002 with a BFA in photography. She is currently living and working in NYC. Arcila has exhibited her photographs in Poland, Australia, Belgium, Norway and New York. Her work can be found in numerous private collections and has been published in Vogue Korea, Time Out NY, Metro Pop, Les Inrockuptibles and Downbeat. She’s also photographed and served as art director for numerous record covers.

Nadege Morey grew up in Normandy and moved to the United States at age 25, searching for new beginnings and blank canvases. Now, living in New York, she has elaborated a visual vocabulary over the last three years that achieves a striking dynamism with stark, minimalist compositions. Her visually captivating canvases feature two strong acrylic trones and collaged dictionary pages arranged into geometric forms and patterns. From the simple standpoint of visual pleasure, there’s a great deal of enjoyment to be taken from Morey’s patterns, bold colors and linear forms. In addition to her works’s visual allure, though, Morey morks interesting departures from, and dialogues with minimalism. She continues this aesthetic tradition, but adds the dimension of collage and text. In doing so, she not only evokes Kazimir Malevich and Sol LeWitt - whose striped, colorful geometrics she opens with - but also Jasper Johns and Picasso - for their central incorporation of text. Morey tests the limits of collage and minimalism but juxtaposing them. Her black, red and yellow acrylic forms confound distinctions between movement and stasis, background and foreground, depth and surface. Meanwhile, the dictionary pages figure alternately as backdrop, figure, or another indeterminate form in the dimensional conundrum. Even more intriguing than thse plays with perspective and depth, Morey’s dictionary pages introduce an entirely new experience to minialism. After all, if that artistic tradition is predicated on the complete absence of identifiable images, pasting page upon page of definitions into that environment constitutes a farily radical move. Appearing as abstract forms from a distance, the details of Morey’s collages are full of completely literal, representational imagery. This dharp contrast between the large-scale an minute forms in her works makes them all the more powerful. Taken at different levels she seems to deal in monochrome abstraction, minialist collage and dramatic text art. However one reads Morey’s work, though, the process is enjoyable and engaging. (ArtisSpectrum, Vol. 21, May 2009, p. 58.)

Sam Martineau was born in 1973 in Springfield, Ohio. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He earned his BFA from Cleveland Institute of Art, Ohio and his MFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson. Selected one-person exhibitions include Paintings/Collages, StudioMiko, Brooklyn, New York 2009; Slip Down Easy, Brooklyn Fireproof, Brooklyn, New York 2005. Selected group shows include A Lettuce Slaughter In The Woods, Real Fine Arts, Brooklyn, New York 2010; Outside The Time Zone, Camel Art Space, Brooklyn, New York 2009, Solid Green, David Krut Projects 2005 New Yorks’s Finest, Canada, New York, New York.

Stephen Celuch: “I like immediate works, relying on quick decisions and sure brushstrokes, where the consequences of these decisions and actions provide an exciting uncertainty. It’s an exercise in mindfulness and awareness, recalling the experiences without pondering them, making the work more about a feeling than a representation. The nocturnes are middle of the night scenes. Mirrored reflections of light from a window, cast on the wall beside my head while lying sleepless. A contemplative time in odd silence. An awkward time to be awake and aware. The Montauk series are simply of the beach in Montauk, RI. When I saw Willem de Kooning’s retrospective at MOMA, and his Montauk series, I was fascinated that the colors he saw were not the same as mine, and wanted to make my own Montauks. They are all of the same beach in the same location, just viewed at different times. A main concern of mine while painting is in making meaningful marks on the canvas. A single brushstroke can be wondrously detailed and complicated by itself. The direction, the angle of the brush, the amount of tension, all have a role to play in what it says. I like it when a simple brushstroke has a strong voice. I like to think the best way to say something is with a couple choice words.”

Jeffrey Leder Gallery 2137 45th Road, Long Island City, NY 11101 917-767-1734 [email protected] jeffreyledergallery.com 10/11 Jeffrey Leder Gallery 2137 45th Road, Long Island City, NY 11101 917-767-1734 [email protected] jeffreyledergallery.com JEFFREY LEDER GALLERY JEFFREY LEDER GALLERY

Susie Reiss studied painting at Yale University, earning her MFA in 2000. Her work is represented in both the White Columns Artists Registry (New York, NY) and the flatfile at Artspace (New Haven, CT). She lives and works in Harlem with her family. Her elegant layered abstractions evoke a sense of seismic landscape. Informed by a keen sense of color and texture, each work evolves from a process of layering and peeling away skins of fabric that are either left in place or leave their trace like a memory on the surface of her substrate.

“I am motivated by the desire to see something that vacillates between recognition of image and readabil- ity of form through color. Though I consider myself a painter, I find that I am usually working in media other than paint: works made with collaged fabric, watercolors and prints. Each of these processes informs the other and I use them to work through ideas. One thing they all have in common is the way that I use shapes and translucent color. In the paintings, the fabric is layered and frequently removed; the traces become integral building blocks of a new piece, and the elements removed are used in sculptures.”

Wei Jia lives and works in both New York City and Beijing. He received his BFA from the Central Academy of Arts in Beijing and his MFA from Bloomsbury University, Pennsylvania. He had numerous solo exhibitions with Schmidt/Dean Gallery in Philadephia as well as at Cheryl McGinnis, NYC. Among his collectors are the Utah Museum, the National Museum of Chinese History, Beijing and The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. His work reflects the cross cultural differences evoked by living and working in two exceedingly disparate cultures. Art histori- cal traditions become the foundation of the paintings. “After Rothko” is a series fusing Xuan paper from the Jing Village in China with the vibrant color juxtapositions of an American Abstract Expressionist artist.

Yusuke Nishimura was born 1981 in Okoyama, Japan, and lives and works in New York. He received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts, NYC and has exhibited in group and solo shows around the world. His collectors include the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne and the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town and he has held residen- cies in Berlin and Milan.

“Depending on the season, the weather, and time of day, the sun emits different colors of light due to the refraction and the distance from the sun to the earth. Each day’s gradual shift in the color temperature is subtle yet unique. Each photograph is the result of my observation of light throughout a day. I set up a piece of paper by the window as the sun comes up, take a picture on transparency, patiently wait until the color of daylight changes, take another picture, and continue this process until the sun goes down. The result is a series of monochromatic transparencies. I start by scanning the transparencies of the daylight color. I compose 40 x 30 image on a blank file whose vertical axis represents the entire time from sunrise to sunset during the day. I layer each monochromatic image on top of one another, and apply a gradation mask so that each image gradually appears and becomes 100% visible at the corresponding time when it was captured. Oddly, the resulting image looks as if it is a painting, although the way I compose an image is different to that of a painter. The colors I apply to my work are obtained photographically, so they are indexical to the time they are observed.”