Rhythm, Stress, and Pausing

Paolo Arao, Elizabeth Atterbury, Becky Bailey, Rhys Coren, Krista Franklin and Richard Tinkler

Curated by Kate McQuillen

Rotation 1

Press Release

Speech convinces us. Vocabulary, projection, and articulation capture the ear. Music stays with us. “Earworms,” “stuck song syndrome,” and “involuntary musical imagery” are terms to describe those sounds and songs that we can’t get out of our head.

Rhythm, stress, and pausing are aspects of sound that carry across speech and music. They are audible components that are agents of persuasion, used to drive home specific points or captivate the listener. They express emotional states where vocabulary can’t, provide focus where grammar falls short, and create anticipation within a tune.

Rhythm, stress, and pausing can also be viewed in visual terms. They are the punctuations of visual abstraction, enunciating the pictorial plane, moving the viewer’s eye to influence experience. Pattern, highlights, and negative space push and pull the viewer; repeated marks drive ideas into our head, stressing a point. Highlights of color ground us, bringing us back to a single point. The artists in Rhythm, Stress, & Pausing use these tools, both in audio and in visuals, to create works that captivate us with these elemental approaches.

Further linking these artists is a rawness of approach, a free-flowing vibe that reveals the hand and allows for chance. Cozy fabrics, earthy materials, magazine scraps, and homey, ‘70’s-era palettes create warm spaces where the artists consider family relationships, personal impulses, lovers, and friendships. In this group exhibition, fingers snap, words bite, bodies dance, and patterns bounce, all punctuated with rhythm, stress, and pausing.

Paolo Arao began his studies as a classical pianist. Now he pursues visual art, stitching together collages from found fabrics, loosely merging a soft geometry of squares, grids, and stripes. Bouncing from shape to shape, the works pulse and beat with wavering edges and funky prints. Tied to the fabrics are ideas of the bodies that once wore them, alluding to people and places they’ve been. Arao has been awarded residencies at The Studios at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, The Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Residency, NYC, The Vermont Studio Center, The Wassaic Artist Residency, The Millay Colony, BRIC Workspace Residency and the Fire Island Artist Residency. He is a recipient of an Artist Fellowship in Drawing from The New York Foundation for the Arts. His work has been published in New American Paintings, Maake Magazine and Esopus.

Elizabeth Atterbury’s rhythmic patterns span across images and forms, and shapes float and tuck around each other. Referencing personal narrative, ritual, and family history, her works move along like a story, pointed yet mysterious. Barely-there surface textures seem to repeat endlessly, creating continuums that go on beyond the mind’s eye. With her unique alphabet of glyphs and shapes, stories from different eras are merged together, creating embossed snapshots the of the twists and turns of her and her family’s story. Night Comes In, Atterbury’s second solo exhibition at Mrs. Gallery (Queens, NYC) is currently on view until January 19, 2019.

Becky Bailey uses fabric patterns and color-blocking to reference furnishings and interior spaces, generating a psychological space reminiscent of home or familiar places. In the works for this show, bodies dance as pulsing light both fills and fragments the space. In the artist’s words, “The works in this show seek to pin down the feeling of solidarity and electricity between individuals that can result from group participation in an action – a phenomena Émile Durkheim called ‘collective effervescence.’ It could happen at a show, in a yoga class, at a party, or in a church. Often facilitated by sound and movement, a feeling of connectedness with a group of strangers seems to need the right conditions. Can these conditions be orchestrated, or are they the result of chance? A certain beat, the right light, coordinating colors, bodies moving together, an idea to attach to. What is the formula for collective effervescence?”

Rotation 2

Rhys Coren’s animations employ bold shapes, wavering lines, and driving rhythms. Pulsating Super Dutchess Gallery | 53 Orchard St, New York, NY, 10002 | www.superdutchess.com lines and chords create a narrative as the forms shift slightly, slowly morphing from one concept to the next. Coren (b. 1983, Plymouth, UK) completed a Postgraduate Diploma at the Royal Academy of Art in 2016 and lives and works in London. Recent exhibitions include Rock- hard Aura and the Lost Explorer at Grimm Gallery, NYC, Old Hundred, Main Street Video at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT, Love Motion at the Royal Academy of the Arts, London, Whistle Bump Super Strut, a solo exhibition at Seventeen, London, and click, click, click-clap-click, at galeriepcp, Paris.

Krista Franklin is a poet and visual artist; her practices often intertwine with works on handmade paper. Her verbal delivery encompasses all elements described in this show title, drawing the listener close and then dropping them down, sending them through an audio spectrum of sounds, visuals, and imagery. Franklin earned her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Columbia College Chicago. She is the author of Under the Knife (Candor Arts) and the chapbook Study of Love & Black Body (Willow Books, 2012). Her work has been reviewed in Artforum and has appeared in Poetry magazine, The Offing, Black Camera, Copper Nickel, Callaloo, BOMB Magazine, Encyclopedia, Vol. F-K and L-Z, and the anthologies The End of Chiraq: A Literary Mixtape (2018), The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (2015), and Gathering Ground (2006). The poem included in this show, excerpted on the window and accessible in its full audio form via QR code (right), was recorded by the Poetry Foundation in Chicago for this exhibition. Franklin’s solo show “…to take root among the stars,” is on view at the Poetry Foundation until December 21, 2018.

Richard Tinkler’s geometric color-field abstractions point towards softer sounds, fuzzy audio spectrums, buzzy vibrations, and experiences of synesthesia. Moving in an out of a haze, with indistinct boundaries, his works have an underlying structure reminiscent of musical structure. Tinkler was born in Westminster Maryland in 1975 and received an MFA from Hunter College. He has had solo shows at 56 Henry (New York, NY) and Albert Merola Gallery (Provincetown, MA). His work has been included in group shows at Anton Kern, Kerry Schuss (New York, NY), Cheim & Read galleries (New York, NY), Regen Projects (Los Angeles, CA), the University of Nevada (Reno, NV), Thaddeus Ropac (Paris, FR) and The Maramotti Collection (Reggio Emilia, IT). His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Art In America, and Paris Review. He is currently in a group show at James Barron Art (Kent, CT), and has a solo show at LaMontagne Gallery (Boston, MA) opening December 7, 2018. He lives and works in New York City.