Organized Chaos

The cultural iconography of New York City through urban photography by David Stock
May 25 - June 25, 2023

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 27, 4-6 pm
Artist Talk: Sunday, June 11, 4:40 pm
 
Brooklyn, NY - 440 Gallery is pleased to present Organized Chaos, the gallery’s fifth solo exhibition of David Stock’s urban landscape photography. Stock uses the dense visual layers and varied cultural iconography of New York City as raw material for colorful prints made with pigmented inks on fine art paper. The work’s deep engagement with New York’s eclectic built environment gives rise to personal emotional responses, social observations, and flashes of humor.

The tension between objective portrayal and subjective intent powers Stock’s work. His pieces not only capture the raw subject in front of the lens, but they also elicit equally raw responses from the viewer. In Stock’s own words, “When I find the right balance of representation and abstraction, the complexity of the city begins to evoke the complexity of my beliefs and emotions within the confines of the picture space. Tangles of coaxial cable become my own tangles; when the wires dance, so do I.”

Stock’s considered, meticulous printmaking process plays a key role in bringing the photographs to life. While his prints exhibit classic photographic qualities, they display an attention to graphic design and a personalized palette that is more often associated with painting.

After studying with photographers Aaron Siskind and Arthur Siegel at Harvard, Stock exhibited his work at the Panopticon Gallery and the Fogg Museum in the 1970s. In addition, Stock was a member of the prestigious Polaroid Photographers Program and Collection. After moving to Los Angeles in 1980, Stock exhibited at the California Museum of Photography, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Palos Verdes Art Center, the Kerckhoff Gallery at UCLA, and the Angels Gate Cultural Center, among many other spaces. He has also shown his photography at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, and at museums and galleries in Denmark, Brazil, and Mexico. Stock’s images have been widely published as magazine portfolios and covers in both print and online media.

A long time labor and political activist as well as an artist, Stock lives in Jackson Heights, Queens.

IN THE PROJECT SPACE
On the Way to Abstraction

Leigh Blanchard  •  Amanda Michele Brown  •  Robin Roi

On the Way to Abstraction is a group show contrasting the work of three artists, Leigh Blanchard, Amanda Michele Brown and Robin Roi. Each artist uses their own distinctive process to examine how formal visual means can be used to translate aspects of our lived experiences. Abstraction can be the result of a broad array of inspirations, but whether the image is derived from completely subjective sources or had its origins in realism, it is the choices made through the creative process that give it meaning.

Leigh Blanchard begins with a “scanogram” that is then subjected to a series of alterations that push the boundaries of photography and the digital image. Through Blanchard’s process of crafting visual harmony and dissonance, the work has been ripped, painted and collaged both physically and digitally, transforming the original scanned image into something else entirely. The final prints are abstracted digital pieces that have an intricate texture and also unmistakable evidence of the human touch.

Amanda Michele Brown anchors her watercolor work in metaphor as she uses negative space to suggest the gaps that manifest in our memories. She constructs each painting by building layers of color where each addition partially obscures the one that came before. This process is reminiscent of the way we structure our own histories. As Brown states, “These pieces represent the holes that develop in the catalogue of our experiences and how we try to fill the space that remains.”

Robin Roi uses blind contour drawing to create the abstracted domestic scenes in her work. This technique requires one to look directly at the subject while the hand executes the drawing blindly in one continuous line. By creating her work in this manner, Roi achieves unpredictable results that emphasize abstract eccentricities. “Sometimes the objects are abstracted so far as to be unrecognizable, and yet there is an unpredictable charm, hard to achieve any other way,” explains Roi. The resulting works, which are composed using colored pencil, watercolor, and pen and ink, create a flattened space that beckons us to enter as we locate seemingly familiar objects.