Summer Show

Andrea Bergart

Lauren Clay

Sheryl Oppenheim

Small Editions is pleased to announce Summer Show, a collection of works that confront the distinctions and consistencies between media. Considering art history and its relationship with craft and textiles, the works subvert patterns by unwinding or repurposing them. Bergart challenges the separation between painting and printmaking, Clay makes marks in real, three-dimensional space, and Oppenheim opens up marbling to the realm of painting. With work that resists the definition of multimedia, Summer Show : Andrea Bergart, Lauren Clay, Sheryl Oppenheim is a show of liminality.

Andrea Bergart strives to challenge the perception of pattern and repetition in relation to form: three-dimensional objects from the everyday are arranged and then processed into stamped, flat images. Materials employed include broken tile, peanuts, and dollar bills. Andrea uses a wide range of platforms outside traditional artist spaces, including cement trucks and large fabric cyanotypes to engage with new and unexpected audiences. In the studio, Bergart makes acrylic paintings which use a resist process related to traditional wax batik. Patterns often reference her experiences playing team sports on a court and her time spent in Africa.

Sheryl Oppenheim is a painter and self-taught marbler. Her work reflects the serendipitous nature of the process and applies it as an optimistic metaphor for life experiences. Oppenheim elevates the ‘craft’ of marbling by using fine art materials like paint on canvas to translate marks made in one medium to another. Engaging with the nomadic history of marbling, she plays with the concept of variable time through her largely black and white paintings.

Lauren Clay’s most recent works are bodily paper-pulp sculptures with traces of Frank Stella’s geometric paintings. Clay inscribes the body onto Stella’s figureless works by reclaiming them in wall-mounted white organs. Like a weaving with the weft undone, Clay’s paper-pulp sculptures twist and dangle off the edges. More and more, the works are becoming clumps of these forms and straying from their previous patterns.

Andrea Bergart (b. 1984) lives and works in Ridgewood, Queens. She received an MFA in Painting from Boston University, Boston, MA in 2008 and a BA in Painting, Minor Art History, in 2006 from Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include Desert Board (2016) Breezeway Gallery, Bloomington, IN and Andrea Bergart (2015) The Stephen and George Laundry Line, Ridgewood, NY. Bergart was also an artist in residence for the 2015/2016 Josef + Anni Albers Foundation “THREAD” Artist Residency in Sinthian, Senegal. Bergart published her newest zine, Scatterlings of Sinthian, with Small Editions in 2016.

Sheryl Oppenheim (b. 1983) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received an MFA (2009) from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA and received a BA (2005) from Brandeis University, Waltham, MA. Most recent exhibitions include Read Image, See Text (2016), Cranbrook Museum of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI and Space Answers (2015), Bannerette, Brooklyn, NY. Her books are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Walker Art Center, and The New York Public Library.

Lauren Clay (b. 1982) lives and works in New York. She received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking (2007) from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA and BFA in Painting (2004) from Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA. Her most recent solo and group exhibitions include Squash and Stretch (2016), Trois Gallery, Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta, GA as well as Monochromatic (2016), Asya Geisberg Gallery, New York, NY. She is currently working on a large, site-specific installation for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, to open Fall 2016.