Playground: A Photographic Installation by Tulu Bayar

May 2 – May 25, 2013

Reception: Thursday, May 2, 6-9 PM

Amos Eno Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Turkish-born American artist Tulu Bayar, which features an ongoing photographic work presented as an installation, Playground. For the project, Bayar explores her fascination with street culture, which she believes, is central to understanding the everyday activities that resonate universally. Playground features her photographs of others performing the ritual of taking photographs in most visited touristic landmarks in New York, Beijing, Paris, London, and Berlin. Bayar aims to “magnify the extraordinary in the ordinary” by sharing the facial expressions and gestures of the subjects behind their own visual recording device. There is an exchange between private and public, and individual and social that reveals universal qualities of contemporary culture.

Bayar holds an MFA in Photography and Electronic Media from the University of Cincinnati. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the US and abroad, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, France, UK, Germany, Turkey, Denmark, and China. Bayar has received numerous artist-in-residency grants and fellowships, most notably William Sackett Fellowship from Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Camac Centre d’art artist-in-residency grant funded by Tenot Foundation in France and the Center for Photography at Woodstock artist-in-residency grant funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts. Bayar’s work is included in many private and public collections. She teaches photography and multimedia courses as Associate Professor at Bucknell University.

 

Walt Swales: Gone Fishing!!!

April 3 – April 27, 2013

Receptions:
Thursday, April 4, 6-9 PM & Saturday, April 6, 2-5 PM

Amos Eno Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent works by Walt Swales. The phrase “gone fishing” universally provokes a myriad of pleasurable thoughts and feelings.  It connotes an escape from pedestrian reality into one in which binding adult parameters are relaxed, if not dismissed, and the child in us is liberated and permitted to exploit issues and activities indigenous to play. It’s an environment that is indulgent and exploratory and one that solicits rules outside the norm. The show embraces this notion that art is adult play.

The works exhibited in Gone Fishing!!! present the union of two traditions in the history of sculpture: metal casting and the manipulation of ready-mades. The bronze castings are abstracted from molds crafted from deer skulls, forms in nature, and replica human skulls. Waxes are extracted from the forms and then manipulated and assembled into works on an expressionist basis. The finished pieces are ultimately contradictory, humorous, absurd, and inventive as the associations between the natural forms and commonplace objects compete or distill into relationships which are harmonious. Ultimately, it is Swales’s offbeat humor that conducts the dynamics between the two traditions. Sometimes the marriages between the disparate parties are harmonious. Sometimes divorce is imminent. And just as Swales suggests that art is adult play, he also notes the common observation that it does mimic life.

Walt Swales is a graduate of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he received an MFA in sculpture. Following his studies, the artist has exhibited his work throughout the Untied States, in institutions such as Montclair State University and the Beacon Arts Union. These exhibitions have led to Swales work being featured in The New York Times, Sculpture Now, as well as several accolades in his medium.

STEPHEN MARCH: Surveillance and other recent works

March 6 – March 30, 2013

Artist Reception: Thursday, March 7th, 6-9 PM

Amos Eno Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent works by Stephen March.  This, his first solo exhibition presented by Amos Eno Gallery, features paintings from his recent Surveillance series, an extension of his Almost Forgotten News works.  Also included are a number of individual works connected to other continuing series in his oeuvre.

Spanning more than four decades, March’s work is known for addressing contemporary political, social, and spiritual issues and events, especially in the context of crisis.  March has been, and continues to be, interested in creating visual art that can transcend the physicality of the material surface and be a vehicle for emotional and intellectual contemplation, as well as a metaphor for the fragility of human existence during his lifetime.

The Surveillance series of paintings are “appropriations” of the pixilated surface of a television monitor, which has recorded fleeting images directly or indirectly related to criminal activity that has temporarily made national headline news.  The paintings consist of multiple layers of translucent paint applied with either a brush or drywall knives and emphasizes the ambiguity and sense of mystery inherent in the source images, now clouded by memory; like a garbled or muffled announcement heard over a public address system.  As with the cases connected to the appropriated images, much information remains unknown or unresolved in these paintings.

City Creatures:  New Work by Sunyoung Seo

February 6 - March 2, 2013

Artist Reception: Thursday, February 7th, 6-9 PM

        Amos Eno Gallery is pleased to present City Creatures, featuring a new installation by Sunyoung Seo. Ms Seo was born and raised in an urban environment and grappled with the stressful feelings of city life, which brought out in her a range of emotions from smugness to despair. Seo believes that city people are ironically eager to get away from city life and get relief from the anxiety that it creates, while at the same time retaining the driving ambition that is part of a fast paced city climate. The installation City Creatures is an examination of the contradictions that exist in this modern progressive age. Seo approaches this topic in a playful way by using imagery that resembles toys, such as stuffing and bright colors, which speak in a universal way to both children and adults.
       
Sunyoung Seo received her MFA from C.W. Post in Long Island, N.Y. in 2009. She also attended the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York, and studied toy design in 2010. Previously, she earned her BFA in Korea in 2003, and has exhibited extensively in the United States and Korea.