Artist Talk - Edith Beaucage, Alexander Kroll, Matt Lifson and Lily Simonson

July 14, 2010, 7 p.m.

CB1 Gallery is pleased that all four artists participating in our July painting show, "The art that dare not speak its name", have agreed to participate in the second artist talk at the gallery. Artists Edith Beaucage, Alexander Kroll, Matt Lifson and Lily Simonson will each speak for approximately 15 minutes about their work and then the second hour will be questions for the artists from the audience. Wine and cheese will be served. Please join us for this exciting evening.

Character and abstraction are linked on the canvases of Edith Beaucage in a way requiring no other narrative outside of these two elements. Reflecting emotions with paint, backgrounds often disappear and, in contrast to the characters, the “abstractions” play a variation of roles in the images, oftentimes behaving as portraits.

Alexander Kroll’s modestly scaled abstract paintings are simultaneously structural and intuitive. The layers of painterly information both highlight and obscure previous ideations leaving the viewer an artwork that is at once a highly specific painted object and a record of an activity, a subjective engagement with painterly space.

Exploring narrative through juxtaposition and psychological metaphor, Matt Lifson is interested in the cinematic element of painting, where there are paused moments that linger somewhere between clarity and ambiguity. Charged with sexuality and humor, his paintings draw inspiration from youth subculture, ritual and exploration.

Lily Simonson’s paintings of invertebrates seek to evoke transcendent states of being in which the boundaries between the self and the external world are breached and transgressed. Simultaneously anthropomorphizing the creatures and highlighting their otherworldly ambiguities, her paintings represent liminality, transformation, and human experiences of mystical and erotic ecstasy.