SELECTS 2024
January 4 – 26, 2024
Reception: Thursday, January 4, 6 – 8pm
FIRST STREET GALLERY is pleased to present the SELECTS 2024 juried exhibition, curated by Artist and Curator Jill Sarver Rossi. SELECTS 2024 highlights the exceptional work of nine artists, encompassing a spectrum of contemporary practices from painting and drawing to printmaking and wall sculpture. The exhibition opens at 6pm with the Reception on Thursday, January 4, and runs through Friday, January 26, 2024.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
Harvey Bayliss (FL), Robert Bunkin (NYC), Miguel Colón (NYC), Jacqueline Donadeo, Peter Joslin (VT), Elena Peteva (RI), Nancy Rouse (NYC), Qin Shen, (NYC), and Annie Zeybekoglu (MA).
IN THEIR OWN WORDS:
Harvey Bayliss
I find beauty in the Florida swamp that surrounds me. A quiet ballad of life and death, decay and regrowth. The swamp is quite alive, consuming its own death, and ever-changing, a perfect place to contemplate my own neurological regrowth.
Robert Bunkin
These paintings are part of a series I call “in situ.” They are portraits of fellow artists done from life in their studios.
Miguel Colón
In my painting process I try to make myself available to what I call God, or what may also be referred to as the reality and truth of the moment. In this way I am not so much dictating a theme or a pace, but ushering into being what I feel has been given to me on an intuitive level.
Jacqueline Donadeo
I am inspired by mundane, day-to-day connections to people, objects and atmosphere surrounding me. I work from direct observation, photos, invention or any visual reference I feel will support my interests, to describe environments revealed in the meeting of form, color and tonal space.
Peter Joslin
Color, pattern, and design are consistent elements of my paintings. Close observation of the natural world is the primary focus of my work.
Elena Peteva
My drawings investigate contemporary individual, social and global states through allegorical representation. The subjects function as subtle but charged signifiers in the creation of a net of meaning – drawing in the viewer to slow down, look closer, decode and reflect.
Nancy Rouse
I recreate static that I hear as I struggled to pull the messages forward to try and comprehend the abstraction. I want to convey to my viewers visually what it was to experience sounds as a deaf artist to interpret texture for vibrations in an altered juxtaposition.
Qin Shen
The Fat Series is a close conversation, in which I observe and intervene in the memories and traumas by reconstructing the objective fatty meat in approaches of drawings and etchings. The boundaries of the constantly conflicting states of judging by appearances and values as a “qualified” female dissolve at the moment they collide with each other.
Annie Zeybekoglu
I make a conscious effort not to work from intent, but rather to invest myself in the materials completely and the emotional and physical response they elicit. I am fascinated by process and decay, the rearrangement or dissembling of patterns and the rhythms that occur when repetition is disrupted.
See works from the exhibition.
Gallery Hours: Wednesday–Saturday, 11am to 6pm
