Cinders Gallery Presents:

Temple of Blooom
July 10 – August 8
Opening Saturday July 10th 7-10pm
Hisham Akira Bharoocha, Kelie Bowman, Sherri Hay, Mark Warren Jacques, John Orth, Hilary Pecis, STO, Jessie Rose Vala

The Temple of Blooom is an installation that combines paintings, drawings, collages, murals and sculpture to create our own type of a sonic-visual sanctuary as envisioned by each artist. Exploring places of worship, rituals, shrines, sacred objects and congregation, this place of spiritual assembly is based not on any religious faith but on the faith of our loose-knit community of artists, performers, experimenters, and musicians.

Each artist brings a different energy to the show from Hisham Bharoocha’s meditative mandala style mural painting to Hilary Pecis’ cavernous and intricate collages; paintings of people made entirely of wondrous flowers by Kelie Bowman and a golden paper mache shrine to the gods of plants by STO. Abstracted portraits recall ethereal masks in John Orth’s works on paper while Mark Warren Jacques explores cosmic patterns and forms in his paintings. Sherri Hay’s small, intimate sculptures of plant people lure you in to their majestic world and Jessie Rose Vala’s haunting black and white pencil drawings explore transformations between humans, animals, and the powers of nature.

During the course of the show, the temple will be a space for sonic and visual explorations by some of our favorite artists, including many from the show. Check our website for updates on these weekly intimate engagements of live music and performance.

CINDERS GALLERY
103 Havemeyer st.
Brooklyn, NY 11211
718-388-2311
www.cindersgallery.com
Wed-Sun 1-7pm

Cinders Gallery Presents:
Fruiting Bodies
Brian Chippendale
June 4th – July 3rd 2010
Opening Reception Friday June 4th 7-10pm

“What lies behind the Black Hole, does Disney truly know? When the chips are finished and the human brain is no less the floppy disk of yesterday, who’s to say what it will take to survive. All I can do is copy down the instructions I am given, sharpen them into a knife and stab the asshole barking orders.” -Brian Chippendale

And stab and stab and stab. The sweat from stabbing has pooled into an overflowing rainbow-hued river that we are happy to present to you as Fruiting Bodies, the new solo exhibition by Brian Chippendale. Layers upon layers of silk-screened prints and drawings on paper form dense magical landscapes where moments from another world are frozen in time. The energy of this fantastical otherworld is infectious. You just want to go there and hang out with these characters and frolic in fields of mushrooms and butterflies, eat some strange plants, barter for peanut butter and maybe fight some cat-headed warriors.

A familiar breadcrumb trail of humankind’s existence is present in the form of guns, gas guzzling vehicles, and garbage. Cap N Crunch, Aleve pills, and the Legend of Zelda are equally as inspiring as wars, real estate developers, oil spills, and disasters. There are utopic moments of stillness amidst the visual chaos. While loose narratives are formed in some pieces, others simply offer an exciting sense of play with abstract forms, textures and colors. Brian’s hyper busy mark-making achieves a similar barrage of rhythms akin to his drum playing in the band Lightning Bolt, obsessively filling up all available space.

Brian Chippendale comes to us from Providence, RI, where he has resided since 1991. As a co-founder of now legendary art warehouse Fort Thunder, Brian has been an important part of the underground music and art scene that sprouted out of the Fort and other similar collective-living spaces. In addition to art and music, Brian is known internationally for his innovative comics and has just finished a new 800 page comic called “If N’ Oof,” to be published by Picturebox this Fall. Brian has also shown his visual art at the Macro Future Museum in Rome, the Deste Foundation in Athens and the RISD Museum as part of Wunderground: Providence 1995 to the Present. This is his first solo exhibition at Cinders.

CINDERS GALLERY
103 Havemeyer st.
Brooklyn, NY 11211
718-388-2311
www.cindersgallery.com
Wed-Sun 1-7pm

facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=130786633601031&index=1

Come to Cinder’s Gallery:

Teahead Scraps

Ric Ocasek

March 26th – April 25th 2010

Opening Reception Friday March 26th 7-10pm

Teahead Scraps marks Ric Ocasek’s first art exhibition in New York and features never before seen drawings selected from a body of work that spans the last 30 years. Like the music of his beloved rock band The Cars, his drawings are unabashedly pop- and yet unlike his music’s super sleek veneer, these works are a bit more raw and unedited, revealing meditative moments of a Zen-like drawing practice. Never intended for public view, these works on paper are fluid and unselfconscious abstractions made with colored pencils,
pens, and markers. Ric’s spontaneous, rhythmic mark-making is completely musical and explores repetition and patterns with psychedelic colors and sinuous lines.

While The Cars as a band were perhaps the perfect embodiment of pop art and pop music (Andy Warhol even directed an amazing Cars video), the art of Ric Ocasek can easily be seen as another extension of this union by one of its pioneers and constant practitioners.

Ric Ocasek is an artist, musician, writer, and former vocalist and guitarist for The Cars. He has produced countless records during his career including seminal releases by such pioneering bands as Suicide and the Bad Brains as well as pop sensations such as Weezer and No Doubt. He currently lives and works in New York.

facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/event.php?eid=108352999183059

website: http://blog.cindersgallery.com/2010/03/teahead-scraps-by-ric-ocasek-fri-march-26th/

Superconcious Futureritual
R. Nicholas Kuszyk
February 12th – March 14th 2010
Opening Reception Friday February 12th 7-10pm

Peer into a parallel universe through R. Nicholas Kuszyk’s paintings and you will see a prisma-colored society of robots acting out the various roles of mankind’s existence. There are densely layered hyper metal war massacres with robots’ innards being yanked out of torsos, raining bits of robotic parts across a sea of retired machines. Glowing orbs float above the action spewing out jumbles of wires while magical rays of light blast out of holes in the ground as robots ceremoniously gather around. The scenes are sci-fi fantastical while transcending possible elements of kitsch in favor of exploring humankind’s complex conundrums.

There are peaceful moments amid the visual chaos: automatons endlessly toiling away at menial tasks, groups calmly working together, building structures, sharing everyday mundane moments, and saving one another from on the job peril. You can sense the comforting peace of their rituals and while there is not a human in sight, the seemingly expressionless robots unveil a myriad of emotions that we all can draw personal parallels to.

R. Nichoals Kuszyk is a prolific painter, muralist, and recent author of R.Robot Saves Lunch, published by Penguin Books. He has previously shown at McCaig Welles Gallery in Brooklyn, and most recently at Michael Rosenthal Gallery in San Francisco.

CINDERS GALLERY
103 Havemeyer st.
Brooklyn, NY 11211
718-388-2311
Wed-Sun 1-7pm
www.cindersgallery.com

This is what’s going on at the Cinders Gallery Thursday, August 6th, 7-10 p.m. I have a prior engagement to pick up some pants that I’m getting hemmed (!) but I’m thinking I should stop by and check out this show along the way. Maybe you should too?

Blok and Elisita Punto met at a music show in their hometown of Santiago, Chile where they ended up painting a mural together in an empty lot. Since then they’ve become fast friends, hanging out, traveling to the desert and collaborating on art.

In his first show in the US, Blok will feature drawings and paintings created in Chile over the past 2 years. Long-limbed characters dressed in hot pink shirts and tennis shoes are caught in a dream like state; floating, bending over, or reaching for something in the distance. His murals are like discovering colorful little secrets worked into the scenery: bold fluid lines with muted and flat colors create figures that you want to hug and get to know and that stick with you long after you’ve come across one.

Elisita Punto’s abstract paintings and collages have a rhythmic quality similar to music compositions while also exploring optical illusions with geometric shapes and colors. Indigenous patterns from Andean culture provide an inspiration for these abstract works that reinvent themselves in the modern world while revealing our timeless obsession with repetition and shapes.

Ha ha. I went to prom at Sexy Gazebo, hosted by Cinder’s Gallery for Armory Night, March 7th 2009.