MARCH 2 - MARCH 31, 2024
OPENING RECEPTION: SATURDAY, MARCH 2, 5:30-8PM
new work: four artists
Darla Ebanks - John Descarfino - Kathleen Maximin - Angrette McCloskey
For John Descarfino the classic window motif, with its art-historical associations of perception and painting has offered a point of departure for his recent work. The artist considers the effect of the interplay of frames, glass, grids, screens, water, and dust on our gaze as we look through and at windows, reflecting the complexities of our ways of looking and seeing. His paintings possess some semblance of an architectural aperture—a passage or threshold - with subtle protean or shape-shifting attributes. This aperture becomes a concrete structure by which light is shaped, in effect giving light a body. Light directs the attention to chromatic nuances, and by orchestrating relationships among colors.
Darla Ebanks’ paintings are an intimate response to her emotional experiences, especially during times of disturbance and conflicts, as well as during times of joy and peace. For the viewer the dense vertical lines that stream over a seated or standing Buddha-like figure create an impression of calm and serenity, and for the artist the repetitive movement of the hand has the same effect. In one sense the artists sees her work as a collaboration with the viewer. She does not title the works, allowing the person looking at it to find their own way into it and connect with it on their own terms.
Kathleen Maximin, a largely self-taught painter, equates her painting method with music-making. “I’m creating music on a canvas, while I focus my thoughts on color.” Kathleen uses a variety of techniques and materials; the richness of her surfaces is created by thickly and spontaneously layering paint. Nevertheless, the artist shows an unerring sense of when to stop her hand, and herself, from applying yet one more stroke.
Angrette McCloskey’s sculptures in this exhibition play with the scale of landscape and geological time. By pouring industrial concrete directly onto the ground and producing highly detailed imprints, the artist’s common current series All Sidewalks Now captures ephemeral micro-landscapes of urban and rural spaces. Conceived on Choctaw Reservation Land in Roberta, Oklahoma, these pieces are meditations on displacement, land use, and land coverage. They show the softness of what goes missing in the form of a hard inversion, a vegetative negative. Viewed as horizontal, topographic ‘paintings’ these castings bring together the actual ground with the ‘ground' of a painting – that first layer of support upon which an image is built.
about the artists
John Descarfino is a Brooklyn based painter. He exhibited at the Lucas Schoormans Gallery, NYC; and participated in group exhibitions at the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; Blum and Poe Gallery, LA, CA; Galeria Espacio 48, Santiago, Spain; the Berkshire Museum, MA; Centotto, Brooklyn, NY.; South Broadway Cultural Center, Albuquerque, NM.; and the Parsonage Gallery, ME. His paintings are included in several public collections including the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark; JP Morgan Chase; and Capital Group Companies. His work was reviewed in Artnews, Artnet, The Journal News, and ArteFuse. He received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Café Royal Cultural Foundation, and the PSC CUNY Research Foundation.
Darla Ebanks is the founder/director of My Gallery NYC in Brooklyn. Born in Honduras she came to the U.S. in 1967. In her gallery she has made inclusion of the artists and the work exhibited a priority. Her work has been shown at the Julia Seabrook Gallery, Brooklyn, Aqua Art, Miami and The Other Art Fair, New York.
Kathleen Maximin was born on the island of St. Lucia and raised in St. Croix. She began drawing and painting at the age of five. As a young child she was overawed by watching a man paint beautiful landscapes of the island and decided to be an artist. Her work has been shown at Berkely College 2012, YMCA Group Exhibition 2009, Next Thursday Live Art Show 2013, Chelsea Art Exhibition, New York, NY 2017, FiveMyles, Brooklyn, NY 2022.
Angrette McCloskey is an interdisciplinary artist living in Brooklyn, NY whose work explores the body at work, landscape destruction, construction, and scales of geological time. Their installations have been previously featured in Performance Studies International conference, San Francisco’s Performance Art Institute, and the Franconia Performance Salon. They completed their doctorate at Stanford University’s Theatre & Performance Studies department in 2017, and have spent nearly twenty years as a scenographer for experimental theatre and devised performance. (angrette.com)
GALLERY HOURS:
Thursday - Sunday, 1 - 6pm, or by appointment. Please email hanne@fivemyles.org, or call 718-783-4438.
DIRECTIONS:
Take 2, 3, or 4 trains to Franklin Avenue. Walk two blocks against the traffic on Franklin. Walk ¾ block to 558 St. Johns Place. FiveMyles is within easy walking distance from the Brooklyn Museum.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
FiveMyles is in part supported by the New York State Council for the Arts, Public Funds from the New York City Dept. of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Council Member Crystal Hudson, The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, the Joseph Robert Foundation, and the William Talbott Hillman Foundation.