Fran Hill Gallery Shows "Story-Telling" New York Artists

Written by Ronald Callaghan Thursday, 26 January 2012 23:30

Toronto, Canada.- The Fran Hill Gallery is pleased to present "In The End A Good Story Is All That Remains", on view at the gallery through February 19th. The exhibition features the recent work of eight “story telling” New York City based artists, each one unique in their focus, concerns, and manner of presentation. While much art on view today is about spectacle and requires 3 seconds to both digest and forget, the art and artists in “A Good Story" re-awaken the very act of seeing as they linger lovingly, as well as imaginatively – and so will you – on the wonders of everyday life, the so-called intricate workings of the world around us. The age of the artists in this exhibition range from the young and emerging, to mid-career and old master, the latter in a neo classical sense.

A few of the highlights are Ernest Concepcion’s conflict-based World War ll paintings. Which bring to mind early black and white war films from the late 40s, the twist being the addition of Max Ernst-like surrealist interventions mixed with scenes from the artist’s own life. Mary Hrbacek’s anthropomorphic tree-portraits, from her series Entwined, fuse human and tree anatomy into a hybrid essence whose varied tree forms – hollowed out, hallowed, haunted, and inhabited – accentuate the unity of all life. Rendered in Dutch Baroque style, Heidi Johnson’s paintings are filled, from top to bottom, with the visual history of just about every species and specimen imaginable. Her work parodies the anxiety, as well as the exhilaration that is triggered by an overabundance of information that comes to us through the computer, the print industry and media. Lori Nelson’s narratives, with their mixture of fairytale magic and psychological facts, are miniature worlds. Not unlike Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine, Nelson’s figurative paintings  consist of a solitary person, deep in thought, surrounded by a world that is too much for them. The intimate paintings of Jason Stopa depict landscape as a site of mysterious and phenomenal occurrences. His enigmatic washed out scenes, which focus on a time of day or season, mine the intersection between memory and reality. Scott Walden’s color photographs, in shades of Caravaggio, document the architecture as well as the people who frequent the bars, legion halls, and community centers in a once wealthy but now economically depressed region of rural Newfoundland. Underscoring the fragility of the oceans’ half-billion year old ecosystem, Ejay Weiss’ series of seascape paintings, taking us back to our very beginnings, as well as our possible ending, express how paint both mirrors and recapitulates the evolving world as a harmonious and self-sustaining idea. Combining gestural marks with a unique type of curved perspective, Steve Zolin’s work investigates the structure of space and reality. His explorations flow from painting to drawing and back again, in an ongoing process of artistic evolution.


Edward Rubin (Curator) is a New York based writer, curator, visual artist and consummate world traveler covering art news here and abroad. An active member of the prestigious International Association of Art Critics, his writings have appeared in such magazines as Art & Antiques, ArtUS, dART International, Canadian Art, ArtNexus, Flash Art, Hispanic Outlook, NYArts, and Sculpture Magazines, as well as online at www.artesmagazine.com.  His photographs and collages have been exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and at numerous New York City art galleries. Currently his work, part of an exhibition titled NYC/International Perspectives, has been traveling throughout Russia, Germany, Hungary and France for the past two years. His recent exhibition, Anne Ferrer: Billowing Beauty, curated at The Lab Gallery in New York City (May 13- June 3, 2011) was nominated for the Best Show in a Commercial Gallery 2010-2011 by AICA, the International Association of Art Critics, USA. The Fran Hill Gallery at 285 Rushton Road, Toronto represents artists including; Steve Armstrong, Inez, Robert Chandler, Tien Chang, Gillian Frise, Michael Gerry, the estate of Gerald Gladstone, the estate of John Howlin, Robert Nowacki, Steve Rockwell, Leon Rooke, Rochelle Rubinstein, Brian Saby, Blair Sharpe, Lanny Shereck, Michael Warren-Darley and Y. M. Whelan. Visit the gallery's website at ... http://web.mac.com/blair.sharpe/Info/Fran_Hill_Gallery.html

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