Colormania

Paul Corio

Robert Otto Epstein

Ken Weathersby

Flat Files: Vincent Dion, Sara Eichner, and Alyse Rosner

Color, both harmonious and challenging, packs a potent punch of emotion, humor, and intuitive intelligence. Odetta says “bring it!” Paul Corio, Robert Otto Epstein, and Ken Weathersby deliver with verve.

Odetta’s Flat Files are curated to tie in with every exhibition.

Vincent Dion, Sara Eichner, and Alyse Rosner have created new works that bring you into a more intimate encounter with artists working with high color through miniatures and works on paper.

Paul Corio

Paul Corio is a painter who lives and works in New York City. He has shown his work at many New York City galleries, as well as in galleries in London and Paris. He has written criticism for Abstract Critical, Henri Art Magazine, On Verge, and Painter’s Table, and the self-published No Hassle at the Castle. He holds a masters degree from Hunter College, and is a part-time faculty member at the Parsons School of Design. The artist is represented by McKenzie Fine Art in New York City.

Corio’s work is about color - more specifically, the use of disciplined color sequences in order to articulate space and to create the illusion of light and atmosphere. He sometimes uses systems (over and above the sequential use of color) and other times he simply improvise using color sequence as a basis in order to create a compelling image.

He uses geometry almost exclusively as a generic figuration that allows the color to come to the fore as the picture's true content.

Robert Otto Epstein

Robert Otto Epstein's grid figures combine elements of his portraits and abstract paintings. Epstein first sources his portraits in Google searches of celebrities in fashion, sports and Hollywood. He then takes these images to Photoshop where he deconstructs the image by placing colorful squares over the existing model. Once completed, this transformed gridded model becomes an instructional map for his paintings. Epstein draws a grid by hand on his surface then paints each unit, square-by-square, row-by-row, bottom up the surface.

Epstein’s gridded portraits are humorously rendered quantifications pieced together with representational signals for a smile and a pose, and vibrant clothing built of the same coded system as the abstracted backgrounds his models pose in front of. Strategically placed units of color delineate what is rendered as figurative and nonrepresentational.

Robert Otto Epstein studied philosophy and political science at the University of Pittsburgh and law at the University of Durham in the UK.

He has shown widely in the US and Europe: The Hole (New York); The Drawing Center (New York); Morgan Lehman Gallery (New York); Geoffrey Young Gallery (Great Barrington, MA); Jeff Bailey Gallery (Hudson, NY); Jack Hanley Gallery (New York); Hionas Gallery, (New York); The University of Hawaii (Manoa); 99 Cent Plus (Brooklyn, NY); Mulherin + Pollard (New York); Harbor (New York, NY); Ada Gallery (Richmond, VA); Pierogi Gallery (Brooklyn); Outpost Artist Resources (Ridgewood, NY); Lorimoto (Ridgewood, NY); LIU Brooklyn (Brooklyn, NY); Voorkamer Gallery (Lier, Belgium); Kenise Barnes Fine Art (Larchmont, NY); Schema Projects (Brooklyn, NY).

Robert has been featured in a number of publications, including: The New York Times, Vice, Elle Magazine, L Magazine, The Jealous Curator, Design Sponge, The Chronogram, The New Criterion, Brown Paper Bag, Pattern Pulp, Juxtapoz, Little Paper Planes, Make Space, Dwell Studio, Roll Magazine, and The Wild Magazine.

Epstein’s work is in the corporate collections of Facebook, The Big Human, and Fidelity Investments to name a few.

Epstein has curated a number of exhibitions in NYC. ROE currently lives and works just outside of New York City.

Ken Weathersby

Ken Weathersby’s abstract paintings play with and against conventions of paintings’ structure by cutting out, displacing and inverting parts. Recent works have been embedding photographic images that juxtapose elements--sculpture, human or animal bodies, photography that are foreign to the abstract arrangements. The inserted figures are physically inside the works, but stand apart from the painted compositions. They gesture and look. As in a film, relationships emerge that conjoin unlike things across the plain. Color functions as color, but also to reveal, intensify or suture these structural breaks.

Ken Weathersby has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, with notable solo shows at Minus Space (New York), Pierogi Gallery (New York), One River Gallery (Englewood, NJ), NIAD Art Center Gallery (Richmond, CA), Some Walls (Oakland, CA), and the John Cotton Dana Gallery, Rutgers University (Newark).

His work has been included in group exhibitions at the National Academy of Art Museum (New York), Honey Ramka (Brooklyn), Odetta (Brooklyn), 57w57Arts (New York), Parallel Art Space (Ridgewood, NY), Mixed Greens (New York), Aljira Art Center (Newark), the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Gallery (Morristown, NJ), Barbara Walters Gallery at Sarah Lawrence College, the Visual Art Center of NJ (Summit, NJ), Seven (Miami), Toomey Tourell (San Francisco), and I.S. Projects (Leiden, Netherlands), among many others.

Weathersby has received numerous awards and residencies, most recently the Individual Artist Painting Fellowship by the Mid-Atlantic Arts Council/NJSCA (2016).

His work has been written about in Hyperallergic, the Huffington Post, Brooklyn Magazine, the New American Paintings blog, Two Coats of Paint, Painter’s Bread, and elsewhere.

Weathersby holds an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art.

He was born in Mississippi and has lived in the New York City area since 1990.

Vincent Dion

Vincent Dion is an artist working in several styles and media simultaneously. He is currently concentrating on painterly abstractions executed in water-media on paper that mimic various printed techniques, the process and results of which are intended to reconcile and affirm creation that is both peaceful and energetic.

The printed appearance of these hand-painted works on paper is secondary but mandatory to the apprehension of the introspective presence of the hand. Dion’s use of luminous color becomes his essential means to ascertain form through memory.

He has been featured in exhibitions at The Aldrich Museum, The Barnum Museum, Real Art Ways, The Art in Embassies program, and is currently featured in Volume 7 of the West Marin Review 2016.

Sara Eichner

Sara Eichner wants to create a space where point of view cannot be fixed. Optical games stand in for her struggle to comprehend the complexities of seeing. Using simple drawing tools and paper, she creates a grid of converging lines in perspective to establish a basic unit of pictorial space. That bound unit: lines and perspective; becomes the foundation for building complexity. Variables such as repetition, color, incremental rotation, inversion, concentration and dispersion are applied. Properties of the initial unit are subverted and transformed.

Perception is slowed — and space for contemplation created — by a play between solidity and transparency, mass and lightness, concentration and diffusion. A build up of marks aggregates into optical mixtures and resolves into patterns created by processes of rotation and layering. These patterns and binary relationships emerge slowly and networks of lines converge and disperse creating multiple visual paths through fields of structured accumulation.

Sara Eichner has exhibited her work in New York City and nationally with solo shows at Sears-Peyton Gallery (New York), PPOW Gallery (New York), McDonough Museum of Art (Youngstown, OH), and Pentimenti Gallery (Philadelphia, PA). Her work has been included in group shows at galleries such as McKenzie Fine Arts (New York), Bronx Museum of Art (New York), International Center for Printmaking (New York), ArtSpace (New Haven, CT), Westby Gallery at Rowan University (Glassboro, NJ) and the Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas (Austin). Sara has received awards such as a NYFA grant for painting (2000), and a Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Residency. Her work is included in numerous collections such as Wellington Management (New York), Credit Suisse (New York), US Department of State (Washington, D.C.), MediaMath (Los Angeles, CA) and Fidelity Investments (Boston, MA).

Sara holds an MFA in painting from Syracuse University and a BA from Kenyon College. She was born in Labrador, Canada, and has lived and worked in Brooklyn since 1998.

Alyse Rosner

As an art student experimenting with printmaking, Alyse Rosner that, in woodcut printing, the directness of cutting the block and the intrinsic beauty of the wood seduced her.

Ultimately, the woodblock became the painting surface, rather than a printing block. Rosner worked on a miniature scale: 5x6 inches, acrylic on raw pine. These are obsessive paintings inspired by Indian miniatures and manuscript illumination, created by layering transparent color and masses of tiny mark making. The wood grain was the incentive for how each painting began. The boards were unprimed so the first impulse was to respond to the grain as if it were a drawing.

After several years of working this way, a gallery expressed interest and requested all of the completed pieces in my studio. In a panic, about to find herself in a very empty studio, she impulsively made rubbings of the paintings. Because the work is so textured, the resulting images are often impressions of how the work feels rather than how it looks. She painted into these rubbings adding color and other elements in an effort to recreate a hint of the original paintings from memory, always with a very different outcome. A second group of painted rubbings evolved at the same time. These focused on the idiosyncrasy of end grain, knots and splits in the blocks.

This hands on physical process grew into her current studio practice incorporating rubbings, gestural painting and obsessive line drawing on yupo, raw canvas and wood. For Odetta’s flat files, she is revisiting the miniature scale, again on raw pine, this time focusing on layering and accumulating line and vivid color.

An alumna of the undergraduate art program at the University of Michigan and the MFA program at The American University, she has exhibited her work for the past two decades.

Rosner's exhibition history includes group and solo shows at The Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane (New Orleans, LA), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield CT), Rick Wester Fine Art (New York, NY), Artspace (New Haven, Connecticut), Kathryn Markel Fine Art, (New York, NY), Denise Bibro Fine Art (New York, NY), Metaphor Contemporary Art (Brooklyn, NY), The Clark Gallery (Lincoln, MA) as well as various art fairs including PULSE and Texas Contemporary.

Rosner has received awards and fellowships from The American University, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Her work was recently acquired by Credit Suisse and can be seen in the Connecticut Artist Collection, as well as numerous private collections.

Alyse Rosner is represented by Rick Wester Fine Art (New York, NY).

Colormania is the gallery’s 27th exhibition.