Elisa Contemporary Art is pleased to present our new gallery exhibit, 25 Under 26. This group shown features 25 artworks from US and International artists all priced under $2,600. The exhibit opens on Thursday, October 19 and runs through December 14 at the Riverdale NY Gallery.

According to owner Lisa Cooper, "This is the first time we have created a price based exhibit at the gallery. My goal is to share with people that art is accessible at every level and there is such a range of styles, types and creative visions to resonate with a diverse group of art buyers from the first-time buyer to the experienced collector. I continue to strive to make art accessible and welcoming to all to experience living with artl".

The exhibit features architectural inspired works on paper and paintings by our international artists. Highlights include cityscapes by Colombian artist, Alexis Duque; new imagined mixed media urban environments by Turkish artist, Yasemin Kackar-Demirel; Vallejo California street scenes captured in watercolor paintings and acrylic on wood by Armenian-American artist, Ferdinanda Florence and interiors by Marfa artist, Martha Hughes.

Nature inspired artworks include Botanical works on paper created with coffee, graphite and acrylic by California artist, Sara V Cole, small high gloss landscapes by Canadian artist, Marie Danielle Leblanc and two dreamy landscapes by South Carolina emerging artist, Ann Wood Mezian. Mezian was recent winner selected by Elisa Contemporary Art in the " Healing Power of Art" competition presented by Manhattan Arts International. Elisa Contemporary Art is pleased to be debuting the artwork of this new emerging artist. The exhibit also includes three distinct styles of photography. The Blur series by Connecticut artist, Allyson Monson shot on the West Coast, Bronx photographer John Conn's series from travels to Antarctica and Cuba, and the Candala series by Georgia artist, Paula Brett.

Works on paper are also featured in the show. They include the Europa series by LA artist, Stephanie Cate based on her fascination with the Planet Europa, the 6th largest moon of Jupiter and the moon with the greatest potential for life, a new Pop Art woodcut by Texas artist Mitch McGee and a monoprint by Connecticut printmaker, Roxanne Faber Savage.

Paula Brett’s broad body of work incorporates various combinations of media dealing with ideas such as created identity, coincidence, ritual, and transitory spaces. These limited edition photographs are Mandalas made from pieces of Candy. According to Paula, “The mandala symbolizes the law of the universe and since man is also a microcosm of the universe, many cultures believe that the mandala also symbolizes the human soul. Mandalas serve as collection point for universal forces…My intention with these candalas is to arrange everyday sweets into a pattern which becomes scared, where delicious turns divine, the enticing now exquisite.” Paula holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts & Media from Columbia College Chicago. She resides in Atlanta.

Stephanie Cate is an abstract painter based out of Los Angeles, California. She spent most of her childhood in France, before relocating to Los Angeles, California at fourteen. She attended Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, receiving a BFA in painting. Being surrounded by the history and architecture of France as a child and the grand decaying beauty of former centuries left an early impression on her that still influences her work to this day. Stephanie's work is in public and private collections including Kelly Wearstler, Renee Zellweger, Annabeth Gish, Mr. Avi Amiel (President, Art Collector Int’l Magazine), Rasa Center for Yoga (Oregon), Wynn Tower Suites (Las Vegas)

Sara V. Cole has a deep and profound obsession with the natural world. From insects and birds and humans to botanicals and root systems, weather patterns and migrations and the effects of systems upon each other, Cole spends countless hours imagining these as visual symbols layered on top of each other -- sometimes as many as 100 times in one painting.

Cole has placed work with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Bi-annual Auction, Hilton Hotels, the Microsoft Collection, Stanford University, the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, the Ritz Carlton in Laguna Niguel, the Grand Hyatt in Atlanta, Iberia Bank in Louisiana, and De Anza College in CA. Cole is in private collections including Actress Sela Ward.

John Conn got his start as a Marine Combat photographer, and later earned his BFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His work has appeared in: New York Times Sunday Magazine; Time/Life Books; IMAX Films; LensWork Magazine to name a few. His iconic Subway series shot between 1970 and 1982 in New York City is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of the City of New York, The New York Historical Society and Hoboken Historical Museum.

In 2010, John Conn spent 45 days in Antarctica and Patagonia, traveling and hiking to capture the land and seascapes. He spent over 20 days journeying over 3,200 nautical miles in Antarctica before heading to Patagonia for the second part of his expedition. In 2014 John began a series of treks across the US photographing Americans, similar to what Robert Frank did in the late 1950’s. In 2015/16, he spent a month in Cuba photographing the people and surroundings.

Alexis Duque was born in Colombia 1971, he currently lives and works in New York. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The University of Antioquia, Colombia. The Colombian artist introduces architectural features that are characteristic of the Western Civilization, from ancient Greece and Rome: columns, capitals, and niches. They are symbols of the bygone ruling culture and the aesthetic model of the European colonizers, now an integral part of daily life of the populations of Latin America.

His work has been exhibited in numerous venues including: at El Museo del Barrio, The Bronx Museum of Art; The Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), Long Beach, CA; Champion Contemporary, Austin, TX;, Galleri Oxholm in Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2015, he was awarded the 2015 Immersive Artist Residency at The Phoenix Institute of Contemporary Art.

Ferdinanda Florence was born in Washington, DC, and grew up in Arlington, VA. A second-generation Armenian-America, Ferdinanda has explored in her research the role of place in artistic expression. In her artwork, she uses industrial sites in her home city of Vallejo CA to explore issues of place on a more personal level.

According to Florence, "I am interested in the concept of liminal—or threshold—spaces, and how the slippery boundaries between inside and outside can act as metaphors for life’s unresolvable paradoxes. My paintings represent a personal exploration of loss and longing for something untenable and possibly irretrievable. Almost all of my subjects are industrial or commercial areas, rather than private residences. They are "home" to no one, but I am drawn to them, and find in them something personal and familiar." Her work is in public and private collections.

Martha Hughes lives and works in Marfa, Texas. She received her B.F.A. from the University of Texas, Austin. Inspired by the artwork of children and outsider artists, Hughes paints grid-based scenes using reductive, geometric blocks of color. She frequently depicts unsettling or impossible spaces.

According to Hughes, “Paintings in the Scenes series are of everyday, prosaic interiors and landscapes, with ambiguous, vertiginous spaces that reflect my sense of never being quite at home in the world. The look of this series was initially partly influenced by children’s tempera paintings – colorful, flat and simple. I often find inspiration from glossy interior design and architecture magazines, with their carefully staged photographs of impossibly pristine, beautiful houses, gardens, and pools.”

She has been exhibiting her artwork since 1987 throughout the US including a recent exhibit group show in Santa Fe featuring her work alongside, Chuck Close, Agnes Martin, and Sol LeWitt. Her work is in private collections.

Yasemin Kackar Demirel was born in Istanbul, received her MFA in DeKalb (IL), and currently lives in New York. Her work is a fragmented and reconstructed journey through the places she has lived and traveled, both real and imagined.

According to Yasemin, her latest series: “Explores the rise and fall of places through physical and emotional conducts. I like to work with random juxtapositions of places in nature and the urban environment and re-present them in puzzling and surprising contexts. Shifting between abstraction and representation, I explore and experiment with the push-pull effects between the concepts of longing vs. apathy, insecurity vs. comfort, order vs. chaos, unfamiliarity vs. belonging and stability vs. ephemerality.” Yasemin has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in the US and Turkey. Her work is also in the Ipek-Ahmet Merey Foundation in Istanbul, Turkey.

Marie Danielle Leblanc, was born in Trois-Rivières (Quebec) and has lived and worked in Montreal (Quebec) since 1990. Her paintings transform landscapes into poetic worlds. Her deeply saturated palettes bring new life to the sea, land and sky. And she transports her viewers to timeless and imaginary landscapes.

During her travels, she likes to write down her thoughts, make a note of the weather or the name of a place, take pictures and collect images. Leblanc’s travel diary is an ideal instrument for her. She has participated in twenty solo exhibitions, and more than fifty group exhibitions. Her work has also been shown and collected throughout Canada, and in New York, Paris, Sydney, Mexico and Tokyo.

McGee's own artwork came from the style of Pop Art legend, Roy Lichtenstein. According to McGee, "Lichtenstein with a Red Bow was the first piece that started me down this rabbit hole. Roy Lichtenstein took comic strips and repositioned them as lithography. In an almost tongue-in-cheek fashion I wondered how I could take one of his pieces and recreate it in another medium. The easy answer for me was wood. I grew up working with it and, combined with my graphic design background, it left me with a new medium and expression that I think really works." From that start, Texas artist, McGee began to create his own style and establish his unique voice.

His artwork has been exhibited throughout Texas since 2001 and in New York with Elisa Contemporary Art since 2012. His work is public and private collections throughout the world including TV journalist Serena Altschul, and the Feld Family.

Ann Wood Mezian was raised in eastern Pennsylvania and in New York City. She was deeply influenced by both the farming vistas of her childhood, and Manhattan’s vibrant art museums. She lives in the Lowcountry region near Charleston, South Carolina, and the Southeastern U.S. has been her home for more than twenty five years. As a volunteer for historic preservation and land conservation efforts, the beauty and significance of those places profoundly influences her art.

Allyson Monson is one of our new gallery artists. Her creative vision transforms color and ordinary objects into painterly images. According to Allyson, "Don’t adjust your eyes, this is how I see it. My formal training in interior design has led me down a path that I cannot stray from, which is why my work evokes light, texture and color. Interestingly movement has snuck up on me in my work. It keeps me guessing and on my toes. I am always trying to perfect something that requires no perfection. I see everyday objects differently, beyond the naked eye. Very often I am not seeing the final image until I load it. It is those moments that my heart skips a beat, full of joy with what I have created."

Allyson studied at the University of Rhode Island and the Studio Arts Center International in Florence, Italy. She currently lives in Fairfield County, CT with her husband and two children.

Roxanne Faber Savage was born in Boston, Massachusetts and currently lives and works in Connecticut and NY She is an award winning multidisciplinary artist with printmaking as her primary medium. Roxanne creates works on paper and other substrates, pushing the boundaries of traditional printmaking. Her graphic imagery of swimmers, powerlines, and birds is developed through a mix of skill and intuition, using print, photography, and drawing techniques.

Her art works are held in private and corporate collections. Roxanne earned her BFA with honors, Pratt Institute and MS Ed., Queens College.