Oh, to Leave a Trace
Zepster Gallery is pleased to present Oh, to Leave a Trace on view July 12 - August 31, featuring Gabi Dunayski, Phoebe Kong and Lauren Krasnoff.
The exhibition takes its show name from a chapter in the book Ninth Street Women, by Mary Gabriel. Gabriel chronicles the lives and careers of five ambitious women who revolutionized postwar art in the United States. Each dared to enter the male-dominated art world of the era and pursued her own profoundly original vision. These women have left their literal mark on history through art. Dunayski, Kong, and Krasnoff emphasize mark-making and material which is more a physical trace that can be seen. The name connects the then with the now and how traces can be felt generationally whether or not they are visible.
Gabi Dunayski passionately engages with the deconstruction of biblical motifs and religious recollections through her expressive work in painting, drawing, writing, and performative films. Dunayski continues to search and explore new mediums and materials to interact with. Her art delves into the impactful effects of PTSD on memory and the somatic system, utilizing distortion and layered compositions to vividly convey the intricate interplay between personal recollections and external stimuli. The dialogues within her work touch on psychological, philosophical, and political dimensions, provocatively exploring perverted themes in Western Christianity.
Phoebe Kong’s phantasmagoric compositions depict creatures that attack and fixate on one another and themselves–blurring distinctions between victim and assailant, self and other, voyeur and subject, and most notably, creature and human. Kong’s caricature-filled universe weaves elements of corporeal realities into fantastical, imagined compositions – uncovering scenes from an unfolding, polychronic epic. Her subjects are acutely aware of one another to the point of paranoia, endlessly searching for an unknown threat that may or may not lie within the compositional soup of lines, limbs, and faces.
Lauren Krasnoff depicts crowds of figures and a translation of energy through paint. The work celebrates the physical and gestural action of painting. Formal qualities such as color, texture, and brushstrokes make up each landscape of bodies and capture the connectivity of the crowds. The compositions are built by rapidly applying paint and moving it around with rags or large brushes. Krasnoff treats oil paint as a drawing tool, wiping it away, scratching lines into thicker areas, and creating a language of mark making that brings the material to the forefront. The speed and rhythm of the brush translates in the figures. The initial paint application is quick and almost frantic, mimicking the energy of a crowd that is out of control. Individual figures are carved from an abstracted sea of bodies, while others dissolve into emotive brushstrokes. With a slower speed and a bit more control, certain features become legible, while others are left as an indecipherable blur.
Selected Works
