Field Notes at Metaphor Projects


Art Spiel Photo Story

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Scherezade Garcia, Paradise According to the Tropics/Sunburnt Jesus,  Acrylic, Charcoal on Linen, 72 x 48 inches

Metaphor Projects is an artists-run space for contemporary art and culture founded in 2001 by two working artists. Directors/ Curators: Julian Jackson and Rene Lynch have mounted more than 100 solo and group exhibitions presenting the work of hundreds of artists and spent two decades developing what they call “the social sculpture that is Metaphor.”

Metaphor Projects presents solo and group exhibitions of underrepresented artists, focusing on stimulating dialogue with contemporary social and aesthetic ideas, creating a crossroad for artists and audience, and nurturing a strong sense of community. Metaphor also presents artist talks, music and literary events and produces fundraising benefits for social and environmental causes. Rene Lynch and Julian Jackson say that they are devoted to contributing to the cultural conversation—Metaphor has always been first and foremost a labor of love, and we have built this project while remaining equally committed to our own studio practices and demanding personal exhibition schedules.

A room with art on the wall

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Installation view. Photo courtesy of Metaphor Projects

The current group show, Field Notes, is in line with this vision, It features the work of six painters who begin with a sensuous appreciation of the rhythms, colors, energy, and complexity of nature. Rene Lynch and Julian Jackson, Metaphor Project curators and gallerists say, “our contemporary appreciation of Nature is often tinged with shades of regret and apprehension as climate change shakes our foundational relationships to the expected flow of seasons, wind, fire, floods, and storms.” By providing us with reminders of the beauty and majesty of Nature, the artworks in Field Notes alert us to our place in nature and nurture our protective instincts. As Henry David Thoreau, America’s first great naturalist, said, “Truths and roses have thorns about them.”

Rene Lynch and Julian Jackson give us a brief tour of the show: For Scherezade Garcia the natural world is the setting for human dramas, with the flow of water and paint providing powerful metaphors for her narratives of the flow and disruptions of history, refugees, and colonization. Abby Goldstein’s intricate topologies reference maps. Her paintings depict meticulously detailed, almost dizzying layers of information linking natural form to human constructs—wherein a tangled patch of bramble can stand in for the dense matrix of an ever changing city.

A picture containing echinoderm, invertebrate, fabric

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Abby Goldstein, Untitled, 2022 Acrylic on Wood Panel, 16 x 20 inches

Nancy Manter has a lifelong connection to the coastal weather and ancient scoured stones of her home state Maine. Probing below the surface, her fluid paintings capture the tectonic movement of stone and water suggesting the constant flux that is the life of our planet. Karen Marston is a bold plein-air painter, often working outdoors directly confronting and addressing the world she sees. With swift sure brushwork she shows us landscapes bristling with energy but also imperiled by climate crisis. 

Nancy Manter, Come On In, 2021-22,  (Diptych) Flashe on Yupo, 52 x 40 inches
A picture containing outdoor, water, nature, wave

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Karen Marston, Tumult, 2022, Acrylic on Paper, 20 x 26 inches

Margaret Neill’s paintings register physical energy as mental process, and reveal the connection between mind and matter. Her sweeping strokes echo the sine waves that are a primary scientific construct of movement and change, while her graceful marks involve the viewer in the excitement of motion much as a swimmer feels the water. Alice Zinnes finds literary and mythic resonance in her richly rendered atmospheres. Her jewel toned canvases evince an emotional landscape that is both turbulent and densely lush where, as she has written, ‘terror coexists with joy, and loss yields to renewal’.

Margaret Neill, Legato, 2022, Oil on Canvas, 50 x 56 inches
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Alice Zinnes, Lost Tenderness in the Empty Space of Touch, Oil on Canvas, 42 x 52 inches

All photo courtesy of the artists unless otherwise indicated.

FIELD NOTES: new work by 6 painters: Scherezade Garcia, Abby Goldstein, Nancy Manter, Karen Marston, Margaret Neill, Alice Zinnes  at Metaphor Projects December 3, 2022 – January 22, 2023
382 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217
Saturday and Sunday, 11-5pm, closed for holidays December 24 – January1.