The Process of Seeing
Group Exhibition featuring: Emily Bartolone, Meghan Borah, Saskia Fleishman, Melinda Laszczynski and Jessica Simorte
Opening Reception Saturday NOvember 18 4:00-7:00p.m
November 18 - December 30, 2023
Galleri Urbane is pleased to present The Process of Seeing, a group exhibition featuring five women artists. Seeing implies looking, but also perceiving, reevaluating. The phenomenon is ubiquitous: a first glance offers only a glimpse; a second brings depth. Though they differ in their approaches and aesthetics, the artists in the exhibition provoke, invite, and reward the changes in perception that occur when one lingers to reconsider. They question sight and make room for our looking and for the shifts that can occur thereby. In this way, they equally ask us to reflect on how we see and present ourselves in our nested relationships to others, to nature, or to form and color itself.
Installed images:
Watch:
Take a closer look at the exhibition with a video tour
Emily Bartolone
A hush surrounds the abstract, anthropomorphized paintings by Emily Bartolone, which simplify in order to delineate precise relationships of shape, color, and scale. Playful and coy, they feature amorphous forms that interact in the picture plane. Color awakens optical experiences and humor sings throughout. “I make paintings that are still formal but have these underlying examples of relationships. These simple shapes, rounded off, nestled next to each other, can feel human,” Bartolone says, and they draw the viewer into their play.
Emily Bartolone obtained her BFA from the University of Dayton and her MFA from Kent State University. She is currently working and living in northeastern Ohio where she is the Curator of the Malone Art Gallery at Malone University, Canton, OH. Her work has been seen in publications such as Art Hole Magazine, London, ENG, and Okay Cool Magazine, New York, NY. Within her career, she has shown at Project Gallery V, New York City, NY, the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH, The Contemporary, Dayton, OH, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, Pittsburgh, PA, the Oceanside Museum of Art, San Diego, CA, and the St. Louis Artists’ Guild, St. Louis, MO, among others, including an upcoming solo exhibition at Studio M within the Massillon Museum, Massillon, OH, in 2024.
Meghan Borah
Meghan Borah’s works on paper challenge the viewer to a game of nuanced seeing, as the female-presenting figures in her dreamy compositions melt into the background and vice versa. Tapestries and the works of Nabi painters such as Bonnard and Vuillard linger as companions in Borah’s mind. “I like to play around with this in-between space, where something can be read as flattened or in a scene,” she says, and the viewer must decide if the world of the painting is illusionistic or flat, if flowers and animals frolic with their humans or frame them. Expressionless faces invite the viewer to imagine internal states and participate in an act of deciphering the ambiguity of being.
Meghan Borah (born 1990) lives and works in Chicago, IL. Borah earned her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2017, Borah was a nominee for the Edes Fellowship at SAIC, and was a grant recipient and resident at The Vermont Studio Center in October 2018. Borahs work has been featured in publications such as New American Paintings, ArtSlant, Chicago Magazine, Time Out Chicago and Stay Cool Mom Blog. Borah has exhibited in group and solo shows at Goldfinch Gallery, Chicago, Untitled Miami, the Dallas Art Fair. Galleri Urbane has represented Borah's work since 2020.
Watch:
Get to know Emily Bartolone, Saskia Fleishman and Melinda Laszczynski through this video interview
Saskia Fleishman
Chiffon is the fragile substrate stretched like canvas in Saskia Fleishman’s ethereal work that addresses the notion of landscape. It bears images captured in transitory moments, when the light coalesces in an instant. See-through portions float into being from the chiffon, while each painting contains cutout shapes that allow the viewer to see into a different time and place, as though through a gateway or portal. “I think a big part of my work is questioning what I’m seeing at all times,” she says. Viewers are invited to reconsider their own landscapes, their own reality. Organic in form, Fleishman’s ceramics, which are painted with underglaze and bisque-fired, possess the same feeling of flux and transitoriness.
Saskia Fleishman (B. 1995, Baltimore, MD), graduated Rhode Island School of Design in 2017 with a B.F.A. in painting. She has been an artist in residence at The Jentel Foundation, Tongue River Artist Residency, Vermont Studio Center, Wassaic Project, PADA Studios, ChaNorth and Trestle Studios, and a curator in residence at Otis College of Art and Design. Saskia’s work has been exhibited at Red Arrow in Nashville, TN, Pentimenti Gallery in Philadelphia, PA, Dinner Gallery in New York, NY, Unit London in the UK, Goucher College in Baltimore, MD, The Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, VA, and Silo 6776 in New Hope, PA, among others. In addition, her work has been featured in Make Magazine, ArtMaze, Root Quarterly, Friend of the Artists, and Galerie Magazine. Fleishman is based in Philadelphia, PA.
Melinda Laszczynski
Surfaces seem to delight in playing myriad visual tricks in Melinda Laszczynski’s highly tactile multimedia works. She presents a riotous dazzle of material textures, embedding glitter and dried paint skins or spray paint and crushed glass. Her work is an ongoing investigation of feminist theory, which seeps into the choice of colors—pinks and holographic rainbows—and materials; thick globs of paint harken to baking—the smear of frosting, the decadence of confectionery. Her works have the density and depth of constellations, the kinetic dynamism of an eruption.
Melinda Laszczynski received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Houston and her BFA in Painting from the Cleveland Institute of Art. She is a Professor of Studio Art at Houston Community College. Laszczynski was a resident in the 2016-2017 Lawndale Art Center Artist Studio Program, the Spring 2021 Artists-in-Residence program at the Printing Museum, El Sur in Mexico City, and the Vermont Studio Center. Laszczynski has shown her work extensively across Texas. Recently, her work has been at exhibited at the Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, Gallery at UTA in Arlington, Point of Contact Gallery in Syracuse, NY, and Survival Kit Gallery in Cleveland, OH. Her work has also been exhibited at Pablo Cardoza Gallery, Galleri Urbane, Pulse Miami, and the Amarillo Museum of Art 600 Sculpture Biennial. Laszczynski’s work is included in the collections of UTSW (Dallas), Toyota (Dallas), and Lester Marks (Houston). She lives and works in Houston, TX.
Jessica Simorte
Graceful and balanced, Jessica Simorte’s compositions explore the psychological dimensions of space through abstractions and interiors that are suggestive rather than specific or referential. Architectural and flat in their field of space (though they deftly evoke deep space), they explore the way color impacts mood. Simorte is interested in drawing the eye to the edge, to neglected boundaries: “The margins of the paintings are really essential. Forgotten spaces. Corners of rooms. Edges of walls. I always wish that that would be more interesting in a lot of paintings. There’s so much we could do with the edges,” she says. Meanwhile, an ephemeral quality arises from the lightness of paint layers, like veils, that absorb into unprimed canvas.
Jessica Simorte completed her MFA with an emphasis in painting at the University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning in 2014. She is currently living in Texas where she coordinates Sam Houston State's University's WASH Program and teaches within their new MFA Program. She has shown regionally, nationally, and internationally and has been included in numerous publications including multiple issues of New American Paintings, Art Maze Mag, and Maake Magazine. Most recently she was named a "noteworthy artist" in New American Paintings issue #162. Significant exhibitions include solos at Galleri Urbane in Dallas and Virginia Commonwealth University, as well as inclusion in shows at Big Medium in Austin, CICA Museum in Gimpo, South Korea, and Trotter & Sholer in NYC.
Acrylic on panel
16h x 12w inches.