Jean-Pierre Roy
September 9 - October 7

RARE Gallery opens its 13th season with an exhibition of new paintings by Jean-Pierre Roy titled A Rational Spectacle, marking his second solo show with the gallery, and his first at its new space on West 27th St. The exhibition runs from September 9th through October 7th.

Roy's work finds conjunction with Thomas Jefferson's statement that "the light which has been shed on the mind of Man through the civilized world has given it a new direction from which no human mind can divert it." This ideology was born of the post-Enlightenment age when the exaltation of rational thought brought about not only profound social and political change, but also radical change in the aesthetics of the optical. Now in an age when the geopolitics of global energy needs clash with the constraints of a changing planet, Man's divergent thought systems seem poised to alter the civilized course of the human mind of which Jefferson spoke.

In this context, Roy re-examines the iconic Romantic tradition of Luminance as a symbol of the revelation of human knowledge. Turning his eye from the apocalyptic dystopia of his last series Landmarks, he seeks a horizon filled with human drama of a different kind. Massive engineering platforms lower devices into the earth, and cloud formations dance to the pull of unseen forces, as the nature of light itself is redefined by our explorations into the unknown of our own making. The divine luminance of the natural world of Cole, Bierstadt, and Friedrich has been reborn out of an age of particle colliders, Bose-Einstein condensates, and entropic reactions.

Roy fuses the duality of the analytical processes of the pre-cinematic scientists/artists of the 19th century (Church/Friedrich) with the fantastical grammar of the 20th century's motion picture maestros (Scott/Spielberg). He seeks a greater understanding of the material forces that make the world through the very act of unmaking it. With his new body of work, Roy emphasizes that we have moved beyond the given natural world and seek to coax a deeper truth from reality by creating new conditions to explore. It is this idea the artist uses to embody a new "light," a new luminance, that might hold us to Jefferson's "new direction" and beyond.

The artist's solo exhibition is running concurrently with Fit, a group show at the recently opened Allan Nederpelt Fine Arts Intl at 60 Freeman St. in Brooklyn. In Fit (September 10 - October 17) Roy will exhibit his monumental painting Landscape or Questioning . . . (2009), which measures nearly 20 feet in length.

During 2008 and 2009, Roy exhibited at The Torrance Art Museum in California (solo show); the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, NY; The Art Students League of New York; The Puffin Foundation in New Jersey; The Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago; and The Firehouse Gallery in Burlington, VT. One of the artist's paintings owned by the Zabludowicz Art Trust is reproduced in Signs of the Apocalypse/Rapture published by Front Forty Press in 2008. This hard-cover volume features images by over 60 artists accompanied by writings and essays that explore artists' ideas about the end of times.

Daphne Arthur
Oct 14 - Nov 11

RARE Gallery is pleased to announce a one-person exhibition of new multi-media works by Daphne Arthur entitled Beyond Boundaries. The show, which runs from October 14 through November 11, marks the artist's solo debut and first exhibition since graduating from the Yale University School of Art in 2009.

Arthur's work, which analyzes archetypes of society and culture through a deconstructive lens, can be described as a rebellion or resistance to the traditional articulation of space-related art and its subjects and themes. The generic figures in her analysis express a subversive reaction to generally accepted or received points of view on sexual mores, religious expression, and cultural identity. Arthur's characters exist in a fictional and fantastic world in which their gestures are playful and reflect a freedom from day-to-day constraints that the artist suggests are a result, at least in part, of our daily lives being "surveilled and governed."

Complementing Arthur's exploration of complex psychological spaces where emotions, feelings, familiar experiences, and the assimilation of vast quantities of personal information are in constant flux, is her manipulation of traditional views of politicized space. By fusing the two-dimensional with the three-dimensional, she defies the typical separations between painting and sculpture, and between these two disciplines and drawing, collage, and photography, choosing instead to immerse the viewer in a fluid, shifting holistic environment that emphasizes context over form.

In confronting the expansive issues of social and cultural identity, Arthur's method is still very personal. Her Venezuelan and Trinidadian heritage certainly has contributed to her focus on identity, yet she eschews labels and rejects cultural categorizations. She views both as precursors to the stereotyping of processes, identities, religions, and life styles, which in turn limit, narrow, and flatten the multi-faceted complexities we all intrinsically possess.

Preferring to experience the world through "an uncensored scope," Arthur chooses to view people and their experiences not through limiting comparisons but rather in terms of a relative purity that does not assume or dictate a path that must be followed. Her art asks us to ask ourselves what it means to be human, posing the question and challenging us to find our own answers.

Arthur received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007, and her MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 2009. She has participated in several group exhibitions in New York City and Chicago. In 2009 she was named an Al Held Affiliate Fellow of The American Academy of Rome. Her show at RARE is her first one-person gallery exhibition.

Francesco Longenecker
Nov 18 - Dec 23

RARE is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Francesco Longenecker. The show, titled Animated Landscapes, runs from November 18 through December 23, and marks the artist's second one-person exhibition with the gallery.
Longenecker's paintings reveal fragmented landscapes and architectural forms that appear to be simultaneously growing and decomposing, continuously morphing before the viewers' eyes like jigsaw puzzles in a state of constant flux. Similarly, his multi-layered ink & graphite drawings demonstrate a chaotic interchangeability of positive and negative space that results in a frantic visual chase where images recede just as they are being perceived.

Animated by multiple perspectives, the artist's paintings convey shape-shifting qualities. They offer Technicolor swamps and gardens populated by implied structures that alternate between deep and collapsed space. Plant-like armatures rise and melt into one another, frozen in some spaces and thawed out in others. Backgrounds and foregrounds spill into each other. Objects and the landscapes in which they are embedded appear to have been shredded and woven back together to create composite terrains, at once familiar and yet inscrutable.

Constructing visual tableaus that uncannily resemble Rubik's Cubes or Transformer action toys in mid-transformation, Longenecker conjures up images that are on the verge of becoming recognizable but have not quite reached a state of full comprehensibility. He thereby challenges viewers to piece together the imagery of his artwork, while at the same time allowing them to discover new descriptive qualities for his entities and their environments.

For this artist, image and process are intimately joined together. With each painting, he starts with a generalized notion of "landscape," frequently inspired by images of National Parks garnered from vintage postcards and stereoscopic slides. Through a process of adding, subtracting, and interweaving, he eventually arrives at an image that is so closely bound up with his process that the two become inseparable, with the end result left tantalizingly open-ended. As Longenecker states, "Half the time I am fitting the painting into my idea of a landscape, the other half I am changing my idea to fit what is happening with the application. It's a lucid process leading to arrival at an unforeseen landscape, like an expedition of Lewis and Clark." His process gives us room to understand the nature of reality as we try visually and mentally to work backwards, through a reconstructive process, to the original imagery that may have been the inspiration for the artist's fantastical new worlds.

Longenecker received a BFA from Kendal College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, MI, in 2005. In 2007, he earned his MFA from the New York Academy of Art. Longenecker participated in several group exhibitions in 2009-10 in New York, Detroit, and St. Barths. He is the recipient of the New York Academy of Art 2007 Chairman's Travel Scholarship Award, and The New York Academy of Art Merritt Award (2006-07).

Jimmy Joe Roche
Jan 6 - Feb 3

RARE is pleased to announce the second solo show at our gallery of video & installation artist Jimmy Joe Roche, a seventh generation Floridian living and working in Baltimore. The exhibition, titled Under Pressure, which runs from January 6 through February 3, will feature four new videos, a hand-cut paper wall sculpture, and a mixed media floor sculpture.

Roche takes a polymathic approach to creating work by utilizing several different media to share his perceptions of American culture and the dreams, hopes, and fears of its cast of characters. He weaves within his work elements of his personal mythology, experimental ethnography, and Op art intensity. His multi-media installations inhabit an acidic, psychedelic space that, along with his video alter egos, communicate feelings of fractured identity as well as a stylist anarchy often found in the viral videos posted on YouTube.

The artist's videos, an amalgam of media and pop culture iconography for which Roche is the conduit, depict various alienated characters who have been plucked from the American cultural landscape and who represent diverse fringe aspects of American society. They seem disoriented, possessed, and frenzied.

Roche's fictional figures spring from very personal insights and experiences for which his videos serve as a contextual journal. This body of work mimics reality and reflects broader cultural truths by virtue of Roche's deft exaggeration and dramatization of the traits of his protagonists. The artist describes his performed character studies as "fringe characters, people who are on the outside of American culture, looking in the big-box window - both totally American and foreign at the same time."

The mandala-like paper sculptures crafted by Roche demonstrate a strong visual and psychic kinship to his videos, resembling vibrant, mutating organic forms that seem to portray a stripped down, fractured anatomy. He expresses his strong spiritual connection to America's cultural landscape through these painstakingly hand-cut, obsessively painted, and intricately woven assemblages that serve as conceptual talismans of the collective American unconscious.

Roche received a BFA from the Film Conservatory at S.U.N.Y. Purchase College in 2004, and an MFA from the Mt. Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2008. His videos have been screened internationally at many venues including the Royal Academy of Arts/London, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, J. Paul Getty Museum, Incubate Arts festival in Holland, ROJO@Nova 2010 in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Baltimore Museum of Art.

In 2008 Roche took his first solo bow at RARE. In 2010, his second one-person exhibition, American Ectoplasm, took place at the Philip J. Steele Gallery, Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, in Colorado. He was recently invited to be an artist-in-residence at ROJO@Nova 2011 in Rio de Janeiro. His work appears in numerous publications including Beautiful Decay; the New Museum's Younger than Jesus: Artist Directory; the Spanish arts magazine, BELIO; and 100 New Artists, a book by Francesca Gavin scheduled for release in March 2011.

Jim Wright
Feb 10 - March 10

RARE is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Jim Wright entitled Tolerable Barbarians, which opens February 10 and runs until March 10. This marks the artist's fourth solo show with the gallery, having previously exhibited here in 2003, 2005, and 2007.

With his new series of six paintings, Wright enthusiastically explores the concept of originality by looking to art history, re-contextualizing and juxtaposing its imagery vis-à-vis his own. He questions contemporary trends in art sampling while accentuating the importance of the artistic process. Through his own eclectic painting process, the artist attempts to emphasize and intensify human and metaphysical experiences, seeing them as a road to achieving meaningful artistic expression. Wright questions the validity of the current propensity to "beg, borrow, and steal" from the "old and new masters," which has resulted in a form of aesthetic self-cannibalization that caters to presumed expectations and results in art as mere entertainment.

To make his point, Wright purposively references previous generations of famous artists, incorporating facsimiles of their styles and subject matter into his unique painting process/style to give them relevance to contemporary events and issues that have influenced his life. His work melds together art historical styles, famous cultural events, and fictional scenes and characters. Figures from Van Gogh's landscapes merge with fictionalized pastoral settings and with modern cultural allusions such as David Lynch's Blue Velvet. The events of the Rolling Stones Altamont Raceway tragedy are depicted with Hell's Angels intertwined with artistic monsters cribbed from de Kooning, Bacon, and Guston. This marriage of imagery, style, and content is Wright's way of underscoring how important it is for today's artists (including himself) to learn the importance of looking to the past as well as to the present, of examining one's inner life as well as reaching outward to the world-at-large, to gain meaningful expression in their work.

Wright amplifies his process, medium, and subject matter so that his paintings appear to be "amped up" - it is his way of railing against the banality of expression, fighting against the attenuated, bypassing the utterly derivative. He plunks down what he borrows right in the middle of scenarios that are meaningful to him, showing respect for connections to an aesthetic past while breaking new ground for his own expressive impulses, many of them rooted in music. So much of Wright's painting is influenced by a life spent immersed in music and the life-affirming benefits it offers. From an early age he participated as a musician in subcultures of rock 'n roll and country music, which gave him a glimpse into a way of life that was both nurturing and idyllic in many ways. Music became a starting point for his paintings in which he depicts invented alternative societies indulging in various cultural pursuits that stand as antidotes to a closed off, bottled up, and stuffy world.

Further highlighting his quest to paint against the grain, so to speak, Wright makes work in a highly original way. Using paint but not a brush, he squeegees acrylic medium into hand-cut templates of various shapes and sizes that he has attached to thick glass or plastic sheets. Once the paint has dried, Wright peels it off the sheets and attaches it to wood panels, creating paintings step-by-step in much the same way one would construct a collage or model. He often gives sculptural dimension to his surfaces by layering his shapes in silhouette one on top of the other, building them up in places to more than an inch above the panels' surface.
Wright received his BA from the University of Vermont (Burlington) in 2000, and his MFA from Hunter College (New York) in 2004. He most recently participated in group shows at Tremaine Gallery, Lakeville, CT (2010); RHYS Gallery, Boston (2008); and Black and White Gallery, Brooklyn (2007). In 2004, his work was included in the The Young Americans group show at Hof & Huyser in Amsterdam; this was followed by a solo exhibition in 2006 at Galerie Schuster/Scheuermann in Berlin. His paintings and works on paper were exhibited in a two-person show in May 2007 at Galerie Schuster in Frankfurt.

Christina Shurts
March 17 - April 14

RARE is pleased to announce a new series of paintings by Christina Shurts in her New York solo debut entitled Luxury Soup. The show, which opens March 17 and runs through April 14, also marks her fifth one-person exhibition.

Shurts' latest work embodies a nostalgic longing for getaways and vacationlands of both a recollected past and an idealized future. She transforms familiar archetypes like childhood tree houses, seaside amusement parks, oceanfront boardwalks, and long-deserted beach resorts and vacation cottages into alternate realities that are subtly apocalyptic yet enticing, seemingly abandoned but inviting. Demonstrating an uncanny knack for capturing the "calm before" or the "calm after" the so-called storm or utopian moment, Shurts translates the debris of her own history into grand instances of yearning not beholden to the twin pillars of time and place.

The imagery in Shurts' paintings is derived from memories, relics of her childhood, personal photographs, decor magazines, and films. They serve as a treasure chest of resources that allows her to mine and investigate the philosophical issues to which nostalgic longing gives rise. After all, what is this phenomenon - a chance for true regeneration or a mere daydream to escape the doldrums of everyday living, or perhaps even an appeal to the darker side of human nature? The artist's deployment of familiar physical constructs is complemented by her use of unusually keyed colors, thin tints and washes, and tear-like and rain-imitating drips that suffuse her paintings with an aura of yearning for other times.

Shurts received a BA from the University of California at Irvine in 2001, and obtained her MFA from California State University at Long Beach in 2010. She has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, and London, participating in solo and group shows at various venues including the Torrance Art Museum, Pacific Design Center, Gatov Gallery, Lawrence Asher Gallery, LA Municipal Art Gallery, LOFT Gallery, and the Saatchi Gallery in London. Within the last year her work has been included in two New American Paintings annuals (No. 87 & No. 91).

Dionisios Fragias
April 21 - May 19

RARE is pleased to introduce a series of new sculptures and tapestries by Dionisios Fragias in an exhibition titled Cyclical Tales of Mother's Unmentionables. The show, which opens April 21 and runs through May 19, marks the artist's second one-person exhibition at the gallery.

Fragias' work reflects the dichotomy between the boundless possibilities of human beings' vision and the societal ramifications and dark realities resulting from our endless pursuit of knowledge and progress. He references ancient mythology and symbols and blends them with elements of modern technological advancement to communicate that Man's relentless progression has unforeseen negative manifestations and consequences.

The artist updates while paying homage to centuries-old myths and the lessons they teach. Icarus at the Peak of His Arc (Empires), 2010, recapitulates the tale of the young Icarus' flying too close to the sun with hand-fashioned wings made of feathers and wax and receiving his deadly comeuppance. Fragias imparts a contemporary edge to the fable via a suspended, large-scale, die-cut aluminum military helicopter transformed by exaggerated human and bird-like features.

Icarus takes on the appearance of the charred frame of a war machine with limbs, wings, and three sets of chaotic rotor blades straining to remain intact. The screaming profile of a man, cut out in negative on one side of the fuselage, represents the panic-stricken Icarus, stripped of his hubris, at the moment he realizes he has exceeded his capabilities. His subsequent downward spiral symbolizes the frustrations of society as it reaches its own civic and technological wall.

Similarly, Colorspace Black (Trojan Horse), 2009-10, is a sculpture laden with symbols and metaphors. A physical, oversized representation of a digital colorspace palette found in art & design computer programs, this work sits on two stacks of children's art books at the front end and a copy of Sun Tzu's The Art of War at the back end. Stripped of color, the black monolith resembles early stone tools or weapons as well as a contemporary version of the Trojan Horse, ready to open up where its two halves meet as if to allow an army to pour out.

Complementing the sculptures, Fragias' small series of tapestries, titled Culture Clash, bind together imagery and status symbols from today's inner cities, street-smart youth sub-culture, and hip-hop vernacular with ancient Far Eastern sensibilities and techniques from Nepal. In the outsourcing of American sub-cultural iconography, the weaver has thoroughly duplicated what he has been given in his own traditional craft. Through this amalgamation of cultures, Fragias simultaneously exposes the need to weigh one's own identity and be empathetic to unfamiliar cultures while questioning global shifts that favor the imposed or forced import/export of outside culture.

Fragias received a BFA in painting from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York in 1999, and also studied painting and sculpture at Pratt Institute and Queens College. His work is included in Pergament, a group exhibition traveling to various European cities in 2011. He participated in Team Work at Allan Nederpelt Gallery in New York in 2010, The Studio Visit Exhibition at Exit Art in 2006, and Greater New York 2005 at MoMA PS1.

James Davis
May 26 - June 23

RARE is pleased to announce Indian Summer, an installation of various sculptural works by James Davis. The show runs from May 26 to June 23, and marks the artist's third solo exhibition with the gallery.

Indian Summer references the metaphor of the late and sudden bloom of something unexpectedly, just as dry and hazy temperatures can fleetingly occur after a brutal frost. Davis' work demonstrates a similar phenomenon through the utilization of commonplace materials that are manufactured for one particular purpose but are manipulated in unforeseen ways to evoke the beauty of Nature.

Davis masters his materials to replicate that which cannot be man-made. In his hands, hardware store items such as fluorescent lights are transformed into soft-edged sunsets, casino dice into blazing infernos, and carpet fragments into desolate moons. Through his tongue-in-cheek reproductions, he allows us new and unexpected ways to appreciate Nature's bounty, while also revealing hidden beauties in low-grade, industrial-type products employed to mimic it.

By combining "hardware store science" with references to past artistic movements, Davis raises philosophical issues concerning the relationship between Man and Nature, particularly in terms of how humans define and perceive natural beauty. For example, using little more than fluorescent lights, color filters, and some tarps, Soft Sunset (2009-11) takes cues from the Luminists, the Hudson River School, Rothko, James Turrell, and Dan Flavin in its imitation of what we have come to expect of a perfect sunset.

101 (2010) touches upon the very concepts of creation and destruction by projecting a simulated fireball onto a wall by means of filtering light through scores of arranged casino dice, revealing that the line between these two polarities is indeed blurred. In this sculpture as in others, the artist's materials are "symbolic" to the work in that they are subtle expressions of its meaning.

Davis received a BFA in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA, in 2001, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, ME, in the summer of that year. He obtained an MFA in sculpture from Ohio State University in Columbus, OH, in 2003. In 2009, Davis had a one-person exhibition (Full Spectrum) at the University of Memphis Art Museum. His work has been in group shows in Chicago, New York, Richmond, and San Francisco. One of his large-scale installations, Shower (2008), was acquired by the Tishman Speyer Art Collection and is on exhibit at Tysons International Plaza in Vienna, Virginia.

Christopher Rodrigues
June 30 – August 12

RARE Gallery is pleased to announce ". . . all of you on the good Earth," an exhibition of Planets, a series of otherworldly photo-collaged digital images by British/Canadian artist Christopher Rodrigues. The show, which runs from June 30 to August 12, marks Rodrigues' solo debut at the gallery.

The exhibition's title directly references the Apollo 8 crew's 1968 Christmas Eve address that was broadcast live from the Command Module during lunar orbit as the Earth came into view over the Moon's horizon. Much like the televised images beamed back to Earth during the mission, Rodrigues' focus is on a planetary view of nature, where the entire solar system is home to isolated, Eden-like environments, inherently sick places, and those made uninhabitable because of human interference.

With his Planets series, of which nine of the nineteen images are being shown at RARE, Rodrigues seeks to promote the healing of our planet. Each world focuses on a different stage our planetary landscape has passed through or can potentially inhabit. While a small group of planets portrays a balanced setting of water, land, and atmosphere, others reflect a manipulation of these components to create more aqueous, gaseous, or green realms, as well as ones marked by pollution, waste, and scarring. Some planets are more elemental, hardly formed at all, seeming to mimic the birthing process of stars, pure and unadulterated.

". . . all of you on the good Earth" connects the artist's evolving concept of landscape depiction with the environmental issues that concern him. Rodrigues' artistic methods have progressed over the years from traditionally focused painting, drawing, and collage to the utilization of digital imagery and Photoshop which have allowed him to create a unique, pop-up book aesthetic that resembles, yet breaks with, traditional practices for making art. His process is one of searching the Internet for images from which he can borrow pixels of color, manipulating the pixels in a painterly fashion using Photoshop to generate a library of elements (e.g., trees, flowers, rocks, water, clouds), and then assembling them in a collage-like manner to build his planets.

The Planet series of "photographs" honors nature while celebrating technology, an important concern in an age when humans are struggling to find a balance with the planet that sustains them. Rodrigues believes that through the proper use of computers we can organize and facilitate solutions to a fair share of today's global crises. According to the artist, while computers have been vehicles for greed that are partially responsible for many of the problems of our time, such as pollution, over-industrialization, and war, they can also be tools for positive change and evolution.

Rodrigues studied art at the University of Toronto from 1994 to 1995 and from 1999 to 2001, and at Ontario College of Art & Design from 1995 to 1996. He exhibited twice in 2011 at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art and the Vivarium Gallery, a window-front gallery he co-founded in Vancouver. In 2010, Rodrigues showed at Port Moodie Arts Centre in Vancouver, the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, the Hunterdon Art Museum in New Jersey, and The Rymer Gallery in Nashville, TN.