K. Imperial Fine Art is pleased to present a summer group show celebrating new work by Ruth Freeman, Ellie Fritz, and Melissa Oresky.

Ellie Fritz: My work is a hybrid of drawing, painting and printmaking processes. The abstract compositions combine charcoal, dry pigment and various printmaking techniques, as well as spray paint. These works evolve through processes of physical interactions working with two extremes: the weight of impression and the levity of erasure. I am interested in exploring and pushing the boundaries of unexpected materials in my work. My interest in paper as the main support has developed as I have explored both its possibilities and its limitations. The ways in which paper responds to materials such as paint and charcoal allows for a sensibility of improvisation and blurs the boundaries between strength and vulnerability.

Melissa Oresky: I am curious about the indistinguishability of thought from matter, and human from non-human being. We are all certainly different, but where exactly do “we” end and “they” begin? I’m fascinated, especially by landscape experience, and over the past several years plant life and its contingencies have occupied my full attention. The more attention I give to plants the more empathy they elicit, and the more ideas they yield. I make collage-based paintings and drawings with plants in mind. However, “in mind” always also means “in body.” Plants make themselves with light in body, with water in body, and with chemicals and minerals in body. And being in body also means to be in process, in context, and in time.

It’s funny how paintings are regarded as out of time, though they are made so completely within it, and are so much about it. When completed, they are held at full pause, setting off cascades of cognitive experience in an observer. Their total stillness only amplifies dynamic potencies. Their stillness reveals the accreted polyrhythms of intentioned form and material, performing vegetal/human/material habits on a surface that so readily becomes virtual space, while reveling in viscous, woven layers of growth and decay. These plant-paintings are by nature impure, and against purity. Their motivations are entirely both selfish and selfless, mindful and mindless, cloying and resistant. They take me too far, elegance inevitably marred by accident. They are always leaking out and breathing in. They make complexities that winnow themselves to well-worded clarities and inevitably collapse back into the formlessness of compost. Their myriad, respiratory surfaces are veils upon veils and skins within skins.

Ruth Freeman: My work is meant to express a visual, abstracted awkwardness, a quirkiness that has haphazardly infiltrated our everyday visualization, discernible in everything from motion pictures and cartoons to our built environment. This awkwardness originates from an unrelenting need to achieve highly realistic imagery through digital mapping, lighting, and animation. Ironically, these motivations have created a strange new visual reality, one that with its hyper-realistic nature, leaves less room for the imagination. My paintings play on these ideas and glitches, utilizing the same physically obsessive processes of perfection and detail that parallel the digital functions we use on a daily basis. By emulating the computer through physical gesture, time simulation, and application of bright colors similar to backlit screens, I place myself in a strategic position to differentiate between virtual and real. Perhaps viewers expect to see something that can’t possibly be created in real space – that intended awkwardness – a digital regurgitation.