Photo Story
The Space Between, curated by Tracy McKenna at Platform Project Space, combines works in paint and fiber by Lauren Luloff, Tessa Greene O’Brien, Mark Olshansky, and Amy Kim Keeler. They all share a sense of desire to capture the elusive space in between—where the artist’s perception and hand meet your gaze.
Maine-based artist Lauren Luloff’s Last Golden Leaves is a vibrant vertical image of dyed silk depicting a landscape where flora, sky, and urban geometrics spill into each other, coexisting on the verge of cacophony. The front flowering trees or shrubs in vivid yellows, greens, and purples blur at the edges and blend into a jazzy pattern of brighter yellows, oranges, and pastel lavender. This mosaic made of squares and rectangles invokes an urban structure or an embodiment of a slipstream physical phenomenon created by the turbulent flow of air, moving upward towards a cloudy, purplish sky peppered with pink bubbles. Is it our world at the end of fall as winter draws near or the end of a sunny day before twilight?
Another Maine-based painter, Tessa Greene O’Brien, depicts a sunny landscape in oil. It is ingrained in bright yellows and greens, tinged with stripes of blues, energetic strokes of reds, and calligraphic marks. Trees and grass merge into a dense and complex ecosystem that comes to life in front of your eyes as you trace O’Brien’s staccato lines, dots, and splashes of color. Behind and in contrast to this organic growth, you glimpse a horizontal architectural structure that could read like a bridge or a building, and there is a hint of sky peering from the tree canopy. It is an ode to nature.
Mark Olshansky’s sharp wool forms conjure a different sense of growth. Zombie Ascending invokes a hybrid creature out of control in red, black, and purple zigzags and bold geometric shapes. The 94-year-old Olshansky, who is based in Great Barrington, MA, is showing this vivid needlepoint surreal abstraction in his native Brooklyn borough for the first time.
Amy Kim Keeler, who also works in fiber arts, is informed by her environment in Yucca Valley, situated in the Mojave Desert, California. Keeler creates abstractions out of cardboard and fiber-based materials. Through meticulous handmade stitches, Keeler evokes natural formations—oscillating light and sound waves, layering of rock striations, and varied patterns of clouds and snowflakes.
“Whether glancing through partially obscured landscapes, following a pixelated slipstream in the atmosphere, or diving into the interstices of fiber, the viewer finds oneself on a sensory threshold of heightened response,” says curator Tracy McKenna.
All photos courtesy of the artists and curator.
Platform Project Space, located at 20 Jay Street, #319, Brooklyn, NY, is open Fridays and Saturdays from 12 to 6 p.m. For more information, contact info@platformprojectspace or call 917-426-8121. The show runs through May 11th.