Front Room Gallery is proud to present “Pain Relief “ by Joanne Ungar.  This solo exhibition features pigmented waxworks which embed evidence of current available methods to relieve physical or mental suffering. All the artwork in this show contains boxes for products that deliver pain relief, items for either numbing ourselves or for altering our reality. Among these items are alchohol, OTC medications, Rx medications, confections, cosmetics, and digital toys. These poured wax paintings by Joanne Ungar are composed with the geometric forms of recycled packaging, and layered and infused with pigmented wax.  Ungar’s complex sense of color transforms base patterns through multiple luminous strata of graded hues, overlaid with controlled density to either obscure or reveal the accumulated layered color. Her luminous wax paintings are created with refined, purified beeswaxes and commercial grade paraffins with very high melting points, creating work that is archival and stable.

Sensodyne03 I wax and painted cardboard on wood I 11″ x 9″ I 2017

Neosporin I wax and painted cardboard on wood I 8″ x 7″ I 2018

Wacom Stylus Holder I wax and painted cardboard on wood I 9″ x 7″ I 2018

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Joanne Ungar is an alchemist. Her studio is a science lab. A visitor to her studio will meet Joanne, with her friendly self-deprecating Midwestern demeanor, and then immediately will be overwhelmed by the stovetop coils, high tech ventilation, vice wrenches, plywood molds, complicated presses and saws, and the carcasses of discarded experiments orderly stacked and categorized. Ungar’s father was a scientist. When she was growing up he talked about how art and science were really one and the same thing: a methodical exploration of ideas crossed with joyous creativity and some random surprises.  Built on these origins and continuing into an intense studio practice Ungar states: “I often set up “experiments” with variables and a control group in order to solve a problem of opacity or pigmentation, for example. I also like to push my materials beyond my understanding of them: seeing what happens when they melt; seeing what will stick to what and for how long; what happens to them at stupidly high temperatures. I am ridiculously methodically organized, and in addition to cataloging each piece, I sometimes catalog it through its various versions/changes.”  This highly dedicated and rigorous studio practice creates astounding results that have transformed modest materials into ‘gold’.

Ungar is originally from Minneapolis. After studies at Oberlin College in Ohio she moved to New York City and earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts. Joanne Ungar is a New York Foundation for the Arts NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship program Grant recipient. Ungar has exhibited extensively in New York and nationally. Ungar currently works in Brooklyn, New York.

Joanne Ungar “PAIN RELIEF” Front Room Gallery March 1 – March 31, 2019
Joanne Ungar
PAIN RELIEF
March 1 – March 31, 2019
Front Room Gallery
New York, NY

FRAMING SPECIFICATIONS

METRO FLOATING FRAME

Profile: 122
Type: floating frame for 3/4 – 1″ paintings
Wood and Finish: maple with clear water based finish
Purchase Option: joined frame

Document is presenting their second solo exhibition of the photographs of Geraldo de Barros.  The exhibit will be of a selection of earlier photographs the artist took between 1947 and 1954.

The Fotoformas of Geraldo de Barros (1923-1998) were created from the late-1940s through early 1950s, largely in São Paulo. As fitting this period of intense urban growth and industrialization, de Barros’ series of photographs captures a city in flux. But this was not a heroic, productivist vision of a mechanized city. Instead, the Fotoformas present a strangely heterogenous array of subjects: a torn and stitched canvas loosely hung across the picture plane, a graffito of an angel, spiraling geometries of iron and glass, a woman’s bare derrière, balloons caught in wires against a clouded sky.

EMBODIED EXPERIMENTS — Unlike New Vision photographers such as Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy, de Barros treated the camera not as an extension of human vision, but as a manifestation of human embodiment. De Barros’ body was central to his photographic process. De Barros’ Fotoformas were rarely the result of instantaneous, mechanical snaps, but were composed from sequences of images produced as he physically rotated his heavy camera and exposed the same object(s) multiple times on a single negative. Turning his camera in his hands, de Barros took repeated images of model airplane parts, chair caning, or doors or shutters left ajar on the same negative, to create a number of Fotoformas in 1949.

Geraldo de Barros, Untitled (Tatuapé, São Paulo), 1948, 20h x 24w

Geraldo de Barros, From the series Fotoformas (São Paulo), 1949, 20h x 24w

Geraldo de Barros, From the series Fotoformas (São Paulo), 1949, 20h x 24w

Geraldo de Barros
March 1, 2019 – April 1, 2019
Document
Chicago, Illinois

About the Gallery

DOCUMENT is a commercial gallery located in Chicago that specializes in contemporary photography, film and media based art. The gallery has organized more than 40 solo exhibitions since its opening in 2011 and actively promotes the work of emerging national and international artists. Operating conjointly as a professional printmaking studio, DOCUMENT facilitates the production of works by artists from Chicago and the US.

Framing Specifications

METRO GALLERY FRAME
Profile: 102UT
Type: Ultra Thin Gallery Frame
Wood & Finish: Walnut with clear finish
Purchasing Option: joined wood frame with matching splines
Custom Wood Strainer: 3/4″ wood frame strainer

“Colors of Lake Tahoe” is a collaboration of Bay Area artist Deborah Lawrence Schafer and the Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC).

Upon noticing unmistakable changes to the area when the snowpack on the surrounding mountains all but disappeared in 2015, Schafer became curious about how the drought was affecting the color of the Lake and contacted the team of scientists with the Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC) at the University of California, Davis.

“My primary interest is in the capacity for weather and environmental conditions to transform landscape and its relationship to time—and how this reflects life’s transience,” says Schafer.

Scientists with UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC) began regularly measuring the Lake’s color in May 2012 having tethered hyperspectral radiometers to the NASA-JPL Buoy TB3 (39°06’37”N 120°04’31”W) which were anchored 500 meters deep. Until storms damaged the equipment in 2016, spectral measurements were made at 12 meters and 5 meters during daylight hours.

Schafer created the artworks, a celebration of the Lake’s color, and the area’s scenery, flora and fauna, using spectral measurements of Lake Tahoe taken by TERC scientists.

Reflecting the shifting ecology and conditions experienced by the planet at large, each artwork is overlaid with an original handmade graphite sketch.

1407271200, (NASA-JPL Buoy TB3) with black bear, Colors of Lake Tahoe series, graphite, and oil over archival digital print on cotton paper, 48″ x 48″, 2018

1507141345, (Emerald Bay) with Castilleja, Colors of Lake Tahoe series, graphite, and oil over archival digital print on cotton paper, 48″ x 48″, 2019

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born in 1970 in San Antonio, Texas, Deborah Schafer has a BA in Visual Arts from Princeton University, worked at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  She also curated exhibitions of Latino and Latin American artwork at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in Sonoma, California, and El Museo del Barrio, in New York City.  After more than a decade, she left her career in the arts in 2005 around the time when her son and parents met untimely deaths.  These events solidified her interest in the ethereal, but broadened her interest to include biotechnology.  Thereafter, she began helping a doctor-inventor bring new medical devices to market and eventually began painting once again.  Today she continues working on both art and biotech projects.  She is a Mexican National and U.S. citizen and currently lives and works in the Bay Area and coastal Maine.

“Colors of Lake Tahoe”
Deborah Lawrence Schafer
February 14, 2019 – March 22, 2019
Sierra Nevada College
Incline Village, Nevada

FRAMING SPECIFICATONS

METRO GALLERY FRAME

Profile: 101
Type: Standard Gallery Frame
Wood & Finish: maple frame with pickled white finish
Purchasing Option: joined wood frame with matching splines
Custom Wood Spacer: 1/2″ wood frame spacer
Custom Wood Strainer: 3/4″ wood frame strainer
Custom Frame Backing Board: 1/8″ archival coroplast cut to size