March 28 - April 21, 2012
Earthly Delights is an exploration into the seductive nature of the apocalypse. Based loosely on Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights", the works of Oscar de Las Flores, Kim Keever and Christy Langer are integrated in this exhibition to explore human, animal, and landscape in a fantastical, prophetic and tangible take on the world we live in.
Both menacing and enchanting, the works in this exhibition comment on our complexities negotiating our relationships within in an increasingly unnatural and complex world, pointing to past and current transgressions.
Kim Keever's large-scale photographs are created by meticulously constructing miniature topographies in a 200-gallon tank, which is then filled with water. These dioramas of fictitious environments are brought to life with colored lights and the dispersal of pigment, producing ephemeral atmospheres that he must quickly capture with his large-format camera.
Keever's painterly panoramas represent a continuation of the landscape tradition, as well as an evolution of the genre. Referencing a broad history of landscape painting, especially that of Romanticism, the Hudson River School and Luminism, they are imbued with a sense of the sublime. However, they also show a subversive side that deliberately acknowledges their contemporary contrivance and conceptual artifice. Keever's staged scenery is characterized by a psychology of timelessness. A combination of the real and the imaginary, they document places that somehow we know, but never were. The symbolic qualities he achieves result from his understanding of the dynamics of landscape, including the manipulation of its effects and the limits of spectacle based on our assumptions of what landscape means to us. Rather than presenting a factual reality, Keever fabricates an illusion to conjure the realms of our imagination.
Kim Keever lives in New York City and has exhibited extensively in museums and galleries throughout the United States and abroad. His work is currently on exhibit at the Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, New Jersey in the exhibition Deconstructing Nature and was most recently featured in Otherworldly at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. Public collections include the Metropolitan Museum, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia, the Nassau County Museum of Fine Art, Roslyn, New York, the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington D.C. and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.
Working mainly with traditional pen and ink on paper, Oscar de Las Flores generates masterful figurative works, elaborately layered, that incorporate grotesque imagery with the beauty of sinuous lines. His drawings depict figures, both real and imagined, that tell the story of an unending battle between society's powerless and powerful. With a dark sense of humor that is Flores' own, his work also shows the influence of generations of artists, integrating the grace and detail of early masters with the imagination of the Surrealists.
Oscar de las Flores is a Canadian artist born in El Salvador during Central America's most unstable political period. Its portentous history of the continent transpired and permeated his work since its beginnings: The occult pleas of the downtrodden, the forgotten migrants ever more invisible, the dramatic developments that corruption carries along. Canada, with its multifaceted and expanding universal cultural hybridization also contributed to the development of his visual vocabulary, its hues and histories of diversity and hope.
As a child De las Flores had the opportunity of living a pivotal part of his childhood in Mexico, as a war refugee, it was here that he had the possibility of absorbing the spellbinding and hypnotic flux of this ancient, complex and often paradoxical culture. Mexico's culture essence as well as its pictorial legacy, greatly contributed to his development as an artist, so did classical literature, popular history, and art history, with a predilection for the baroque and expressionism. Oscar has searched through those identities to define a vision that is sensible to occult fragile existences, violent and dangerous realities, absurd social practices etc. with a care to detail. Oscar has traveled extensively to discern these actualities; his work has also been exhibited widely, primarily in print and drawing biennales and exhibitions.
Christy Langer's sculptural work is inspired by her interest in the embellishment that can occur during the marriage of gradual ingestion and manipulation of reference. Each work, although deviated, are reconstructions of previously existing models; the artist utilizes these animal forms to illustrate the disparity between reality and remembered experience. As the works evolve into an aesthetic state closer to realism while simultaneously referential origins based in truth degenerate, the boundaries between reality and falsity become blurred and permeable.
Raised in Dryden Ontario, Christy Langer moved to Toronto in 1999 to study at the Ontario College of Art & Design. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in 2004. She has since worked in Toronto as a prop fabricator, sculptor, art director, and production designer parallel to the development of her fine arts practice.
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