Exposure: Michelle Hinebrook & Nicki Stager December 18, 2009

Exposure: Michelle Hinebrook & Nicki Stager
December 18th, 2009 – January 17th, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday December 18th, 2009, 6-10pm
Artist’s Dinner: January 15th, 2010, 8pm - RSVP Required

Like the Spice is pleased to present Exposure: Michelle Hinebrook & Nicki Stager, an exhibition spotlighting the separate works of these two artists. Both are wholly steeped in light, but each reaches a different, yet complementary, conclusion.

Michelle Hinebrook's newest pieces explore a very specific sort of geometry. Watching each line take the long journey across the canvas, one becomes aware of how each carries a share of the piece, as though the burden of the whole is being shifted into parts, just as light can be expressed in particles. This geometrical feeling is clear in all of Michelle's pieces, even as the lines take unexpected paths. Some pieces reflect like a cut diamond, while others catch the eye like a fish in a net. The repetition of bold colors and deviously simple shapes create an exciting, fractal-like rhythm that can hold the attention in the manner of a familiar heartbeat, or footsteps in the hall. A long time Like the Spice artist, this will be Michelle's first solo show.

Coming roughly a year after her explosive Like the Spice solo show Synesthesia, Nicki Stager continues her conceptual exploration of color and light. Nicki's all-new photograms have a feel of the glossy about them, and they wash over the viewer like a wave. In this show, her smaller cube-shaped styles continue, but all arrive newly created, and with the additional beauty that comes from experience. Against these works, Nicki showcases her enticing new larger pieces, cubes at new sizes, which have pushed Nicki to work against greater thresholds. All of these "Stager-grams" consist of simple colors and objects, assembled and drawn through the use of her unorthodox darkroom techniques. In this way, Nicki's colors become greater than they would normally appear, and it is easy to be fooled into thinking her pieces glow from within.

Like wave and particle, Nicki and Michelle make for ideal companions, starting from the same, simple cardinal points and ending up wildly different, offering results which together cross the spectrum of their light.

Michelle Hinebrook has exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery (New York, NY), Pratt Manhattan Gallery (New York, NY), McKenzie Fine Art (New York, NY), David Klein Gallery (Birmingham, MI), the Museum of New Art (Detroit, MI), Like the Spice Gallery and galleries and museums throughout the country. In addition to her studio practice, Michelle Hinebrook frequently lectures about her work and teaches studio courses at the College for Creative Studies, Pratt Institute, Cranbrook, Western Carolina University, and Nurture Art.

Born in 1978 Wellsboro, PA, Nicki Stager holds a BS and MEd in Art Education and a BFA in Graphic Design and Photography from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. She has exhibited with Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York and Gallery 908 in Reading, Pennsylvania. Her work has been featured in Harper’s and Art Review Magazine. Stager has been teaching photography since 2002 and was recently awarded a Fullbright Teacher Exchange.

Official Website: http://www.likethespice.com