triad

Yevgeniya Baras - Mike Cloud - Zachary Wollard

curated by kara rooney

on view: april 29 – May 28, 2017
opening reception: Saturday, April 29, 5:30–8pm

Triad brings together the work of Yevgeniya Baras, Mike Cloud, and Zachary Wollard, all Brooklyn-based artists working at the intersection between painting and sculpture.

Baras’s densely organized bas-relief paintings act as a sum total of sentient experience. Built slowly, layer by layer, her complex and indefinable imagery, at times referencing linguistic tropes, at others the rich symbolism of dream states, can take months, even years to complete. Each canvas is a tautology, a complete world unto itself within which one can reference and reflect upon the twin states of past and present, sociologically derived archetypes and personal mythmaking. 

Such narrative structures also inform the work of Mike Cloud, whose unconventional approach to material and literary juxtapositions push the limits of painterly form. In Untitled, two triangular shaped canvases are fitted together to create a six-pointed star, a clear reference to religious and cosmic markers, while the collaged text alludes to altogether different source materials. Often working at the boundary line between polarities, Cloud employs playful punning and textural experimentation to stretch our association to loaded symbolic vernaculars: social, racial, historical and cultural.  

Whereas Cloud looks to external cues for much of his painterly output, the work of Zachary Wollard mines the more ambiguous terrain that informs poetic structure. Untitled (day) and Untitled (nightscene), both works completed at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio program (where Baras and Cloud were also 2015-16 artists-in- residence), illustrate the painter’s attunement to the collective unconscious. Wollard’s use of figuration, housed within a framework of synthetic and natural materials—tree limbs, studio rags, painting buckets and the like—morphs and bends within the slippery space-time of memory, the edges of bodies bleeding into the painter’s highly-keyed psychological landscapes. 

In the hands of these artists notions of iconography, history, language and material coalesce in startlingly personal ways. Together, their collective approaches plumb the depths of visual experience offering a refreshing take on discourses surrounding contemporary painting, communication and inner worlds. 

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 Laurie Cumbo, the Greenwich Collection, The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, and Humanities NY.