Feeling Human, a group exhibition at the Bleecker Street Arts Club includes work by Mira Dancy, Austin Eddy and Ryan Schneider. Curated by Adam Mignanelli, of Ballast Projects, the exhibition maps the figurative as a talismanic presence that engages with the idea of completeness and longing.
Ryan Schneider
Ryan Schneider, "Tree of Ghosts," 2014, Oil on canvas, 30" x 26". Image courtesy of the artist and Bleecker Street Arts Club.
Ryan Schneider, "Gift of Desperation," 2013, Oil on canvas, 60" x 48". Image courtesy of the artist and Bleecker Street Arts Club.
Ryan Schneider's oil paintings include impressively stylized line work that weaves behind and over a centered figurative image. These lines behave like creeping branch vines, causing either symbiotic or sinister embraces. Schneider's backgrounds are night-black, with dominant figures (sometimes in watery deeps) that include a one-eyed woman in a bathing suit with a crescent moon, a horned staring mask, a baboon holding a houseplant and a tree with outlines of faint avian creatures on its branches, titled "Tree of Ghosts." Schneider's upcoming solo show, Ritual for Letting Go, will open at Two Rams, in the Lower East Side of New York, on April 6.
Austin Eddy
Austin Eddy, Going Places, 2013, Caulking and ink on canvas, 14" x 11". Image courtesy of the artist and Bleecker Street Arts Club.
Austin Eddy, There is Still a lot of Work to Do, 2013, 30" x 40". Image courtesy of the artist and Bleecker Street Arts Club.
Austin Eddy's wholesome grids of black, white and gray look like depression-era movie stills, starring a cast of dapper, pipe-toting gentlemen that appear mechanical and imbued with routine. Eddy uses charcoal, caulking and ink densely patterned on canvas, and his titles include "On the Road Again," "There is Still a Lot of Work to Do," and "Going Places." They carry a sense of nostalgia or longing, and the figures act as dream-like participants in the mechanics of labor.
Mira Dancy
Mira Dancy, Psychic Invite, 2014, Acrylic and ink on canvas, 69" x 66". Image courtesy of the artist and Bleecker Street Arts Club.
Mira Dancy's paintings evoke female fertility totems, like new-wave Venus of Willendorf figures. Her paintings include some textual mantras, such as "over" and "snake pose" along with symbols such as serpents, directional arrows, dial clocks and waves, dealing with cyclical or receding rhythms, both natural and artificial. Dancy's enticing sensuous figures often appear central in lotus position, and she uses wide and vibrating brush strokes of acrylic and ink on dyed or bleached cotton and canvas.
Mira Dancy, Lover Letter Over, 2013, Acrylic and ink on dyed cotton, 66" x 48". Image courtesy of the artist and Bleecker Street Arts Club.