Have You Seen the Horizon Lately? July 17, 2008

Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?
Like the Spice curates at...
Leo Kesting Gallery
812 Washington St.
New York, NY 10014

July 17th – August 3rd 2008
Opening Reception Thursday July 17th 7-10:00pm

Have you seen a horizon lately?
If you have, watch it for a while.
For you never know,
It may not last so long.
-Yoko Ono

Like the Spice is proud to present Have You Seen the Horizon Lately, an exhibition featuring contemporary landscapes by Rachel Beach, Liz Brown, Anna Druzcz, Allison Edge, Dean Goelz, Nora Herting, Eric LoPresti, Ross Racine and Nicole Stager and hosted by the always-on-the-cutting-edge Leo Kesting Gallery in the meatpacking district.

Landscape art has historically had more to do with artists and the cultures they live in than with the actual lay of the land. Today, as natural landscapes are further than ever from our day-to-day lives, landscape art is even more tenuously connected to any sense of a natural pristine beauty. Landscapes today are phantasmagoric representations of communities, ecologies, memories and consumer fantasies. Most places we spend our time in are either haphazard mishmashes of the architecture of necessity or environments purposefully designed to encourage our consumption.

The artists in this exhibition combine the fantasy of and longing for a place we belong with a deep understanding of the near impossibility of finding it. Dystopian visions of landscapes in ruins, works depicting the sublime horror of battlefields, fantasy suburban developments with nonsense layouts and abstract memories of what nature was like populate this show. There are also moments of levity. A spaceship presides over a stuntman’s ring of fire in the desert, a duck-human hybrid contemplates nature and we get a peek of Space Mountain as we stroll through Tomorrowland in a technicolored photo-memory.

Rachel Beach was born in London, ON Canada in 1975. She received her MFA from Yale University in 2001 and her BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax, Canada in 1998. Beach’s works have been described as “tough, precise and disciplined with a hard edged cheeriness.” Liz Brown [b. 1977] earned her MFA from the Mount Royal Graduate Program at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2004. Her subjects are amusingly romantic, assembled from the ideal world that is delivered by traditional media. Born in 1979 in Poland, Anna Druzcz studied photography at Ryerson Polytechnic University in Toronto and earned her Master’s degree in Fine Art Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her recent works are digitally composed photographic landscapes cobbled together from organic and synthetic sources. Allison Edge [b. 1975] received her BFA in painting from the University of Georgia and her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (2000). Ms. Edge captures idealized beauty, influenced by fashion, advertising, Pre-Raphaelites and growing up in the 80’s. Dean Goelz was born in New York in 1978. He graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2001 with his BFA. His sculptures present the play between the inherent awkwardness and elegance of existence. Nora Herting [b. 1978] received her BFA from the University of New Mexico in 1999 and her MFA from Ohio State University in 2005. Nora is interested in the photograph as social document and performance. Eric LoPresti [b. 1971] received his BA in Cognitive Science from the University of Rochester in 1993 and his MFA from the Mount Royal Graduate Program at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2002. His imagery alludes to hidden forces, the world that exists beyond our control. Born in Montreal (Quebec), Canada, Ross Racine lives and works in New York. His freehand digital drawings combine the familiar opposites of handmade and digital, organic and mechanical, subjective and technological, physical and virtual. Nicole Stager has earned her M.Ed, BS and MFA degrees from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. For the past seven years she has been making images on the threshold between photography and painting.

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