"By Way of Our Hands"
Curated by Lauren Anderson with help of Erin McElroy

Opening Reception: October 26th, 2007, 6-9pm. Viewed by appt. through Nov 9th

It felt dire that our first show would speak to process, history and materials.  We know that we are here in this space by way of our hands, by way of tedium, and by way of a faith in our ability to actuate the making of something from nothing.  We are thinking about how progression is cyclic and how histories are revisited – both the histories of makers before us and the histories of our materials.  We found the simple overlap between the intuition of material and the intention of the artist to be integral and awesome in the work of Ruth Laskey, Ali Naschke-Messing and Jason Kalogiros.

Ali Naschke-Messing’s threadworks are a testament to the intricacies of communication and connection.  She creates spatial interpretations of conversation lingering between mouth and ear, making tangible the distance between speech and understanding.  Her most recent work explores the simplification from words to line, evoking the channeling of text into sound. www.alinaschkemessing.com

Jason Kalogiros is tracing a path through the chronicles of both photographic process and the makers and inventors of photographic history. He works predominantly with homemade pinhole cameras, or eliminates the camera entirely, entrusting his images to time and light.  The resulting images are fervent with loss and longing, haunted by spectors of ancestors, offering the viewer a simultaneous look through and into the eyes of not only Kalogiros himself, but his photographic predecessors. www.jasonkalogiros.com

Ruth Laskey’s work excises a historically exhaustive additive painting process.  Scraping back layers and centuries, she exposes the painting as a whole object, contradicting the hierarchical notion that accepts the foreground of a painting with higher regard than the background, which is purported as a mere means of scaffold for the paint. In weaving the background and stitching the foreground, she eliminates the separation and subsequent ranking of importance, entwining the two elements into each other. www.ruthlaskey.com