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4/1/2008

Romancing the Skull

Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica

Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to present Romancing the Skull in the main gallery. This group show will feature the work of Allison Schulnik, Angela Fraleigh, Ken Weaver and Mike Peter Smith, artists who all address the grandest and most universal of themes, love, sex and death.

Working on an appropriately epic scale, they confront the interference of death in life, of humor in sex and of hatred in love; accepting and expressing that there is a constant confusion, that nothing is pure, be it through their subject matter or merely their use of uninhibited paint. Each artist's work ranges from the subtle to the confrontational; Fraleigh's intimate and realistic figures are shrouded in abstract swirls of paint, allowing them to succumb to hidden trysts whilst the viewer is left to image the indeterminate details. In contrast to this careful voyeurism, Weaver's bold works act as a parody of 21st century aristocracy, where sex and death have become blasé past times and wealth and opulence are vulgar and crass.

Smith's skulls act as tangible reminders of our fate, skirting the line between natural and fake, utilizing both the realistic and the hardly imaginable. Similarly, in her unsqueamishly titled What Awaits You, Schulnik's organic paint reveals a nightmarish scene of the afterlife; an endless sea of skeletons, the most central of which stares directly out at the viewer, holding their gaze and reminding them that nobody is excepted.


Project Room

Mark Schubert
January 5 - February 9, 2008

Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to present new sculptures by emerging artist Mark Schubert in the Project Room. In creating his sculptures Schubert transforms familiar quotidian objects into alien forms; twisted lawn ornaments and yard furniture are skeletons from which bulbous forms bulge and rigid shards thrust in all directions. Each work takes shape as though the result of some divine apocalyptic tantrum, as if a greater force has flung these objects together, fusing them and creating a new being far beyond the craft or control of human hand. The hard plastic of lawn chairs and the chemicals of foams and polymers are rendered organic and of indeterminable texture and density, a sensory confusion. Schubert's work retains an unavoidable aggression in its distortion, although the materials he uses and the pastel paints he applies mean they are paradoxically playful and firmly grounded in notions of Americana, however warped. Schubert's work walks many fine lines, blurring the edges between painting and sculpture, transience and permanence, appeal and disgust, and always threatening to teeter either way.

Smart and intuitive [...] these works have the slap-dash solidity of great jazz improvisations.
R.C Baker

Schubert received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI before completing Graduate Coursework in painting at the University of Iowa, IA. He has exhibited widely on the East Coast and has been included in group shows internationally, this will be his first solo show on the West Coast. Mark Schubert lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 5th, 5-7pm

Mark Moore Gallery
2525 Michigan Avenue, A1 Santa Monica, CA 90404
Tue - Fri: 10 - 6
Sat: 11 - 5

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