PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Exhibition: April 3 - June 1, 2019 Reception April 3, 7:00 - 9:00 pm Please contact gallery for High Res images Marcia Wood Gallery 263 Walker St SW Atlanta, GA 30313 Media Contact; Marcia Wood 404-827-0030 [email protected] Free and open to the public Hours: Thur - Sat 12 - 5 p.m. or by appointment http://marciawoodgallery.com/ Marcia Wood Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition curated by David Humphrey and Kate Javens, of diverse works by eight nationally and internationally known artists inspired by the theme “Bed”. Bed Curated by David Humphrey and Kate Javens Opening Reception April 3, 7 - 9 p.m. Exhibition April 3 - June 1, 2019 The theme of the show, Bed, explores a place of resting--historically, culturally, even geologically--it's about sleep, a physical bed, a flower bed, death, soil, home,...so much. Written, Bed is a beautiful word and so simple-- almost a ruse for its meaning. The artists are interpreting the word independently. David Humphrey and Kate Javens, curators. Exhibiting Artists Melissa Brown Ariel Cabrera Montejo Sarah Faux Sharon Horvath David Humphrey Kate Javens Nicolas V. Sanchez Didier William Melissa Brown creates paintings and animations that explore what is otherworldly about ordinary experience. Her paintings collage disparate techniques: photo screen print, airbrush, and observational oil painting in order to present a multi-registered view of reality. Solo exhibitions and two person projects have included: Melissa Brown and Jamie Bull at Dodd Gallery at University of Georgia in Athens (forthcoming), Going AWOL, Biggins Gallery at Auburn University, Between States, Derek Eller Gallery, Tennis Elbow, the Journal Gallery, Brooklyn, Past Present Future at Magenta Planes, Paper Fortune at CANADA, in New York City. Internationally she has mounted solo exhibitions at Kenny Schacter, ROVE in London and Roberto Paradise in Puerto Rico. Her paintings, prints and animations are included in ‘Providence’, at the Museé International des Arts Modestas, France. Her work has been shown at Mass MOCA, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, P.P.O.W, Socrates Sculpture Park, High Dessert Test Sites, Art in General, Sue Scott Gallery and Bronx River Art Center, to name a few. She staged How to Win the Lottery at the Nuit Blanche in Toronto 2009, a performance that attempted to collectively win the lottery with thousands of other people. She was awarded the Joan Mitchell Grant for painting in 2012. Her work is in the permanent collections at the Whitney Museum of Art and the New York City Department of Education. She is represented by Derek Eller in New York, New York. Melissa Brown, Morning Shunga, 2019, flashe, oil and acrylic on aluminum panel, 35 x 30 inches Ariel Cabrera Montego was born in Camagüey, Cuba in 1982. He was educated at the Fine Arts Academy of Camagüey, Cuba and the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), Havana, Cuba. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He has exhibited in galleries and art fairs in Cuba, USA, Mexico, Colombia and throughout Europe. Cabrera’s exquisite oils, watercolors and drawings take the Cuban archive as a point of departure to explore the divisive historical accounts from Cuba and those from abroad to examine ideas of fiction and truth. Using traditional impressionist techniques to emulate the historical period of Cabrera’s source materials, Cabrera recreates theatrical scenarios inspired by the historical periods like the Interwar Period (1879-1895) and the Cuban War of Independence (1895-1898). His imagined subjects are anecdotal heroes, not depicted as the heroic characters like the traditional representations of heroes in the Cuban colonial paintings by Juan Emilio Hernández Giro, Leopoldo Romañach and Armando Menocal among others, but as those with basic human instincts. They have carnal, ludic and sensual desires. Cabrera lives and works in New York City and graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) Havanah, Cuba. “As an art student in Cuba, I was constantly exposed to historical memorabilia, collectibles and artworks from other periods of time.These were relevant to me as they were rare and truthful testimonies from the past. They stored information that differed, in many cases, with the official history I was taught at school – the government’s version of the struggles for independence in Cuba. That version was the result of a unilateral doctrine that justifies the political ideology in the Island. I felt motivation for revisiting history -this time from the perspective of an artist. I chose traditional painting techniques to create works whose stories contrast with the established literature on Cuban history. In my paintings, I come up with actions and narratives that are alternative to Cuba’s mainstream history, hoping that my images could also legitimize Cuban men and their doctrines.” Ariel Cabrera Montejo, Wet Campaign (from the series La Tregua Fecunda), 2019, oil on canvas, 66 x 54 inches Sarah Faux lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and received her MFA in painting from Yale University in 2015. She received a joint BA/BFA from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design in 2009. Faux’s work has been featured in exhibitions at Stems Gallery (Brussels, Belgium), Capsule Shanghai (Shanghai, China), Thierry Goldberg Gallery (New York, USA), ltd los angeles (Los Angeles, USA) and the RISD Museum of Art (Providence, USA). Faux has been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo (New York, USA), Tilleard Projects (Lamu, Kenya), and Oxbow School of Art, (Michigan, USA). Focused on the body, Sarah Faux merges abstraction and figuration in her paintings and works on paper, exploring every crevice and plane of the human form, while pushing beyond the perceived boundaries of her medium. She works intuitively, using dye and oil in various combinations to create a rich assortment of surface effects. The bodies in her compositions rarely appear whole. Rather, Faux fragments them, painting a torso, a hand, an extended arm, a back, crossed legs, and genitalia, which alternate between coming into focus and receding into abstraction. Materials and gestures drive her practice, as does her desire to establish a visceral connection between viewers and her compositions: “My dream would be to… recreate an out- of-body experience, and to have somebody experience a painting as…this visceral part of themselves and another entity.” Sarah Faux, Heavy Bloom, 2019, oil on canvas, 54 x 48 inches Sharon Horvath grew up in Cleveland Ohio and moved to NYC when she was 17, receiving a BFA from the Cooper Union and a MFA from Tyler School of Art. She lived for years abroad in Rome and Amsterdam and currently lives and works in Queens, New York. Horvath is Professor of Art in Painting and Drawing at Purchase College, SUNY and was inducted into the National Academy Museum in 2016. Horvath received a Fulbright Research Fellowship to India for 2013-14. Other distinctions include a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, the Anonymous was a Woman award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Painting, two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants, a Prize for Painting from the National Academy Museum, a Mid-Atlantic NEA Regional Fellowship, an Elizabeth Foundation Grant for Painting. Horvath exhibits with Lori Bookstein Projects, NY , Victoria Munroe Fine Art, NY Pierogi Gallery, NY, The Drawing Room Gallery, East Hampton and the Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown, MA. Sharon Horvath, Mother Baseball Series, 2007, ink and dispersed pigment on paper, 19 x 25 inches David Humphrey received a BFA from Maryland Institute, College of Art in 1977 and a MA from New York University in 1980. He has shown nationally and internationally and he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, purchase award, among others. His collections include the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Goetz Collection, Munich, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum of Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others. Humphrey wrote a column for Art Issues from 1989-2002 and has written extensively on art for exhibition catalogs and art periodicals, including Art in America and Flash. An anthology of his writing, Blind Handshake, was released in 2009 by Periscope Publishing. Humphrey is an instructor at Columbia University in the MFA program. Humphrey has shown at Marcia Wood Gallery since 2014. Humphrey’s paintings, sculptures and drawings have been known for their "surreal sexiness, postmodern snap, and painterly discrimination". Figuration and landscape are combined with abstract forms, and diverse painting practices co-exist to hatch implied but ultimately incomprehensible narratives. "There’s piquant visual humor in all of Humphrey’s paintings, but it serves as a sociological or psychological (and frequently sexually- or racially-tinged) hook rather than a smarmy snare-drum punch line, to jump-start deeper inquiry. With clear intent and laser- like focus, Humphrey does precisely what a painter ought to do: he makes you look hard and keeps you thinking even harder.” Jonathan Stevenson, Two Coats of Paint. David Humphrey, Waiting, 2019, acrylic on printed vinyl, 84 x 60 inches Kate Javens was born in Missouri and spent her childhood in Japan, Mexico, and the bicoastal United States. She attended the Pennsylvania State University and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Javens is a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Painting Fellow, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts Disciplinary Winner in Painting, and a three-time MacDowell Fellow. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, the Palmer Museum of Art, the Telfair Museum of Art, the Blanden Museum of Art and the Connecticut College Print Collection.