Chuck Agro: The Joy of New Shoes, 2004 enamel on backed canvas, 24 x 24" Chuck Agro Cheeseburger in my Big Fat Greasy American hands Megan O'Connor O'Connor Millree Hughes Figure 3 Cynthia Broan Gallery is pleased to announce a new exhibition format which will now present two concurrent solo exhibitions plus a featured video. The gallery will also be showing an all-new lineup of artists this season, organized with our new program director, Michael St. John. We encourage everyone to visit the gallery every month, as Mr. St. John has programmed a broad range of exhibitions by over twenty new artists, creating a loose conversation within each monthly series of shows. We begin the season with three artists who use caricature in their portrayal of personal experience. Chuck Agro, "Cheeseburger in my Big Fat Greasy American Hands," presents a cast of familiar characters in this loose, graphic series of paintings and and drawings. Like Picasso and Lautrec, Chuck Agro observes and records the people of his life, thereby recording his life of friendships, desires and failures, building a community of experience. His people reveal the emotional gravitas of a human life, the frailty and complexity of a unique personality. They are candidly portrayed as sensitive, complicated, awkward or anxious. While Agro evokes the viewers' empathy with his quirky crew, his wry caricature of them reinforces his own subjective appreciation for his "embarrassing, beautiful friends". Megan O'Connor also creates caricature of her personal experience, but through an expressionistic lens. Her eponymous solo debut, "O'Conner," creates a haphazard make-believe world of dreams and wishes. California sunsets, ice creams cones and the patron saints of votive candles are strewn together with portraits of Eminem, Frida, Jesus and Mary. Drawings are nailed to the wall, paintings are leanings against pedestals and on shelves, and heroic toiletpaper figures seem to barely hold it together.The dreams and fantasies of awkward Catholic childhood are resurrected, reinvented, with raw creative urge and frenzied inspiration. Like Karen Klimnick, O'Conner creates an expressive world of festival, fantasy, desire and loss. O'Connor's world retains evidence of its making, the residue of the process connecting the viewer to the experience of constructing one's own fantasy, and the experience of "O'Conner". Megan O'Conner received her MFA at NYU in 2006. In the video room, Millree Hughes presents "Figure 3" (2006), a short digital animation which blurs the line between social and abstract life. The heavily hand-drawn cels are layered and often self-obliterating, the images fleetingly perceived as flashbacks of a wild night out: smoking, socializing, hooking up, blacking out, having fun and making mistakes in a condensed cycle of desire and uncertainty. Millree Hughes' solo exhibition "Figure" will be on view at Michael Steinberg Fine Art, September 7 - October 14, 2006. Exhibition: September 7 - October 7, 2006 Gallery hours: Tues-Sat 10 am - 6 pm Cynthia Broan Gallery 546 W. 29th St. USA-New York, NY 10001 Telephone +1 212 760 0809 Fax +1 212 760 0810 Email contact@cynthiabroan.com www.cynthiabroan.com |
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