Group Exhibition: What Makes Us?
December 4 – January 4, 2015
Opening Reception, Saturday, December 13th from 4 to 8pm.
Amos Eno Gallery is pleased to present What Makes Us?, a group exhibition featuring Amos Eno members, Anthony Cuneo, Meredith Starr, William Richardson, Jason Rondinelli, Sam Jones and Susan Camp. The exhibition will feature six works that interpret the physical and psychological building blocks of life. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, December 13 from 4 – 8pm at the gallery, suite 120 at The Loom, located at 1087 Flushing Avenue in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
On the molecular level we are a bundle of cells that grow and divide. What Makes Us? does not attempt to make sense of this random order, but rather focuses on the combination of elements that make life possible.
Cuneo’s painted panels experiment with alternating patterns of circles, hexagons, and gridded dots to find order through the basic act of image-making. These geometric patterns react with the delicate cellular forms of Sam Jone’s borosilicate glass sculptures that use shadow to rest between natural and artifice. With industrial forms comprised of steel plate, angle iron, I beam, H beam, bar stock and other components commonly found in heavy construction, William Richardson’s physically grounds these esoteric ideas with floor-sculptures that can be arranged in an infinite number of combinations. Throughout the exhibition the layout will change weekly.
The disciplined aesthetic of Cuneo, Richardson and Jones play with the organic forms of Susan Camp, Jason Rondinelli and Meredith Starr. Camp’s man-molded gourds note the role of human manipulation in natural growth, while Rondinelli’s mixed-media collage considers the chaotic, yet highly ordered fractals, found in nature. As an end point, Starr’s conceptual “sneeze” reflects on hypochondria and human fear of what we cannot see.
About the Artists
Born in Chicago and raised in the New York metro area, Anthony Cuneo has been ruined for productive activity since experiencing Picasso’s “Woman in Front of a Mirror” in kindergarten. Though he tried the path of virtue and civic duty in legal studies at the University of Pennsylvania, he ended up with an M.F.A. in 1981 and a satisfying career as a painter and photographer. An accomplished educator, he enjoys “passing on his own corruption” at Montclair Kimberley Academy and the Montclair Art Museum’s Yard School of Art. While he has participated in an impressive list of group and solo exhibitions, he claims—both modestly and mischievously—that he has little hope of achieving anything of societal value with his life.
Jason Rondinelli has been shown in various galleries in the New York area. He received his BFA From Pratt Institute in 2002. He attended the Vermont Studio Center in 2014 and an affiliate member of Amos Eno Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
William Richardson is a sculptor working in mild steel, Corten, iron, stainless and aluminum. He uses industrial forms comprised of steel plate, angle iron, I beam, H beam, bar stock and other components commonly found in heavy construction. These materials are joined by oxy-acetylene, SMAW, TIG, MIG or Thermit welding and then drilled and tapped for assembly. Mr. Richardson’s large permanent installations of steel work can be found at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Meredith College, the City of Raleigh Sertoma Park, the International Sculpture Center, as well as in private collections. Mr. Richardson has also exhibited large works in national competitions juried by J. Carter Brown, Dore Ashton, Donald Kuspit, Nancy Graves and Robert Maki, and is listed in the Smithsonian Information Database (SIRIS) for “The Square Root of Two.” Mr. Richardson earned his MFA under sculptor and painter Kenneth Campbell at the University of Maryland College Park and his BFA under Robert Howard at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Meredith Starr gives visibility to the invisible. Utilizing images culled from scientific data such as the patterns of aerosol droplets from sneezes, the cellular maps of viruses, and electron micrographs of secreted hormones producing passion, Starr’s work considers the body and its reactions to and memories of different stimuli. Starr creates large scale drawings, photolithographs and installations layered with video and sound to create a multi-sensory circuit in which the viewer experiences an awareness of the invisible forces inside them. Meredith Starr lives and works in New York.
Sam Jones employs artificial materials to evoke romantic visions of beauty and order, while seeking to simultaneously dissolve, disrupt, and disintegrate these illusions. Reaching beyond the rational, Sam investigates the relationship between object and image, permeating the boundaries between substance and spirit. The rational, industrial qualities of borosilicate glass are subverted by the constantly dissolving and changing form, which cannot be extricated from its shadow. I believe that this is how matter truly exists- charged with energy, straddling dimensions, poised at the edge of awareness. Sam Jones lives and works in Maine.
Susan Camp: Throughout human history we have manipulated and changed the nature of plants and in turn that manipulation has changed us: our society, lifestyle, culture and even our genetic makeup. This permeable boundary between the natural and manufactured environments where we reside has been a focus of my practice. I am interested in the impact of biotechnology, large-scale agribusiness and the mutable nature of materials and convictions. For the past decade I have been shaping gourds by constraining and manipulating them while they are growing. The resulting constructions raise questions our desire for control and permanence and the destructive tendencies of these proclivities. Susan lives and works in Maine.
