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13: GC Group Show

Opening: Saturday January 8, 6 - 9 pm
Exhibition Dates: January 8 to February 6

Reception for Prospect 5 Closing Weekend: Friday, January 21, 5 - 8 pm




Good Children Gallery is excited to present 13, a group exhibition of current gallery members. The show will feature a special reception on Friday January 21, during the closing weekend of Prospect.5, a citywide contemporary art triennial.

The gallery has published a new catalogue to accompany this exhibition. A free PDF of the book can be downloaded here. Physical copies are available for $20. Purchase one at Good Children or contact us at info@goodchildrengallery.com.



Prospect.5 Catalogue Essay
by Eve O'Shea

The members of Good Children Gallery draw viewers into their respective worlds in a myriad of ways.

By crafting illusions, simultaneously emerging from and receding into their surfaces, Brian Guidry's paintings gesture toward three-dimensionality through pictorially realistic mark-making while subverting this perspective through attention to the medium's flatness. This relationship is perceived in his application of paint, which offers subtly cracked-looking facades that undercut and overlap each other. As he transmits patterns into abstract configurations which glow like hushed and luminous geometries, Guidry leads the eye across, beneath and around the picture, while maintaining a shimmering and unexpected light.

The Good Children render slips in time by way of otherworldly underwater photographs taken by Michel Varisco, in which current realities seem merged with those perhaps in the past or future. Reminiscent of mythological fields, these cryptically illuminated landscapes are majestic, harboring unusual furnishings, nodding to traditions of portraiture and to the existential.

Through construction, destruction, and subsequent reparation, Dan Charbonnet displays the experience of the painting and unravels it. Delicately overlapping complexions mirror and echo each other as he emphasizes the repetitive, meditative qualities native to the processes of the medium. These variations in color and consistency glimmer and bounce out of the grid, agitated by rips and gaps in the canvas, while their rapport maintains the composition's underlying discipline.

They foreground presence and awareness, Valerie George documents her personal history through celebrative performance, creating iterable and malleable pieces that reflect on the simultaneous recurrence and fluctuation of her experience, while Generic Art Solutions draws out riddles and rhythms within our surroundings, using humor as a tool to divulge their hypotheses. Commonplace matter and belongings are rendered anew through recontextualization and altered to provoke novel interpretations, visually conjuring the crossover between mental and physical stimulators of memory.

These ideas are made visible in Grant Benoit's sculptures, wherein the constitutions and veneers of domestic locales, showing signs of wear, are constructed into models that conceive patterns and personalities based on their original environments. These novel shapes are reminiscent of but adjacent to what they signify, avoiding a clear referent, instead gesturing toward prior identities while summoning diverse imaginaries. Wendo Brunoir borrows the language of the quotidian, generating work that merges with and initiates concurrent and conflicting motifs.

Such a tendency is also found in Luba Zygarewicz's creations, in which items such as ropes and tea bags hang from the ceiling in intricately deliberate arrangements. These substantive accumulations bring to one's attention a conception of time that is cumulative rather than linear, as these relics are viewed all at once as evidence for moments spent. Transformed into monuments, her assorted possessions begin to exist within the space as diagrammatic images while retaining their status as concrete objects.

Documentation of the everyday is arrived at, as well, in Scott Andresen's inventions. Carefully arrayed veils leave openings for stitching in the background to be observed, transfiguring the fabrics into hybrid fibers. Out of this positioning comes several facets: an emphasis on the oscillation between flatness and dimensionality, prompted by the new affiliation to the backdrop, and a symbolic diffusion into a new set of potential meanings. Consideration is drawn to the stitching, tactility and substance of the textile rather than its use, value, or application. It resembles a geological formation, a flag caught in midair, or a fragile yet sturdy memento.

In John Alleyne's collages, processes of fragmentation are engaged through miscellaneously decaying surfaces that call forth papered and graffitied walls, contemporaneously chaotic and calm. These compositions consist of repeated emblems which function both as derivations for multilayered landscapes and as references to their origins. Narratives are conceived from communal sources as the print oscillates between representation and abstraction. Relatedly, Carrie Fonder uses farce to reveal relationships of exchange, focusing on the remnant of a concept such as "the green", a term whose connotations expose an unperceived reality when refracted materially and digitally.

Christopher Saucedo utilizes this technique by gingerly varying pigmentation to devise an interlaced scenery wherein the shape of the teardrop, specifically a blood drop, is both magnified and played down, assembled and exceeded by the symbols that constitute it, which remain discrete, continuously maintaining their differentiations both in color and form. This feature is emphasized by the three-dimensional optical perspective that is generated by the variation in hue and the use of textile. In Southerly Gold's practice, dissolution from the source by translation into photography and collections of varied objects which, in connection to each other, constitute new constellations, allow the onlooker to comprehend new histoires of Louisiana.

Jessica Bizer's installations lead the spectator to a chaotically blissful location. Her projections onto physical surfaces fabricate textures that interact with what is being screened, building a diversified scene that oscillates between the imagined and the corporeal while suggesting flora and fauna, as well as dream visions and apparitions. Joshua Bennett's assemblages provoke similarly unearthly perceptions, sensually guiding the observer towards his own spiritual domain.

Refracted within the context of each of its members' work, the Good Children allow us to receive their variant visions in unison with each other. As we measure the pulse of our reactions to their manipulation of ideas, we learn about the singularity of each of their personal terrains via these thoughtful and celebrative investigations.