Tender Arrangements

Stef Halmos, Claire Lachow, Sarah Miska, Sarah Slappey, Andrew Paul Woolbright

Curated by Lauren Fejarang

Rotation 1

Press Release

grab the lipstick I don’t think we will back for a while. do you think it will last?

and grab the camera just in case for its flash 

grab the flashlight, I think it's under the kitchen sink behind the garbage, you know the black one with the rope at the end of it

grab the matches and the lighter 

where’s your water bottle I gave you for your birthday? you know the steel one that felt cold always on your hands and in your mouth

what about the chair? 

give me that back in pushing out 

you feel and smell nice like a tender arrangement 

let's stay in the gardenia planter

i don’t think it would mind 

you taste like salt in out of back mouth

i don't think it would mind

your hands feel better than they look up through current 

i think we’re safe here

Stef Halmos was born in Fort Lauderdale, FL, to a Hungarian immigrant father and a Southern belle mother. She holds a BFA from Miami University (2006) and an MFA from the California College of the Arts (2012). Her work has been shown internationally, including exhibitions at the Portland Museum of Art, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, the Chelsea Art Museum, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, among others.

Halmos has received fellowships from the William and Dorothy Yeck foundation, as well as the Murphy and Cadogan foundation, with work published in T Magazine, Blackbook, and The New York Times.

She splits her time between Brooklyn, NY and Catskill, NY, where she is spearheading the restoration and development of a historic mill into a contemporary arts building called Foreland.

Claire Lachow is an artist and writer whose work maneuvers between physical and digital environments, probing the materiality of digital objects and flatness in the material world. She fixates on cultural and political predicaments— particularly in commodification, desire, language, and identity— using a visual vocabulary influenced by Baroque art, video games, and memes. Lachow is founding member of the artist collective MATERIAL GIRLS. She received her B.A. from Oberlin College. Selected exhibitions include The Museum of Human Achievement (2018), SPRING/BREAK Art Show (2018), Local Host Gallery (2017), M2 Gallery (2015), and Schema Projects (2014).

Sarah Miska lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and r​eceived her BFA from Laguna College of Art and Design in 2007 and her MFA from Art Center College of Design in 2014. Miska has shown throughout the Los Angeles area such as Wilding Cran Gallery, Dread Lounge, LACE Gallery, Mim Gallery, UCLA New Wight Gallery and Miska recently had a solo show at grifff’s in Milwaukee, WI and has an upcoming solo show at Hernando’s Hideaway in Miami, FL in the winter of 2018. 

Miska’s work at Super Dutchess utilizes the hand as a playful flirtation with language and cartoonish fantasy. Her plastic bubble gum pink fingers welcome functionality and while remaining to be an unusable object.

Sarah Slappey lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Slappey received her MFA from Hunter College in 2016 and BA from Wake Forest University. She has exhibited in both solo and group shows in New York, Italy, London, and Denmark. In 2015, she was awarded a Kossak Painting Grant and a Hunter MFA award for Outstanding Achievement. Her work has appeared in such publications as ArtMaze Magazine, Social Life, Long Island Pulse, and Hamptons Art Hub.

Slappey’s paintings are worlds made of dark humor, delicacy, subtle horror, and vulnerability. Paradoxes within both the natural and human world ever present: softness is counterbalanced with aggression, comfort with vulnerability, banal with the uncanny, and masculine with feminine. Slappey often reduces the figure down to only hands, feet, and limbs; it is unclear if they are attached to anyone at all. Beings within the works both caress and destroy one another, and the paintings border on a razor-thin edge between sweet and sinister.

Andrew Woolbright received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in Painting. He is currently represented by Yellow Peril Gallery in Providence, RI and has participated in solo and group shows across the country, including Nancy Margolis Gallery in New York City, Vicki Projects, and InSitu Projects in Monterrey Mexico. His work has been favorably reviewed on Artsy.net, the Bushwick Daily, the Boston Globe, and the Chicago Reader, and his work is in the permanent collection of the RISD Museum.

Woolbright's paintings explore the sexual Kafkaesque of erotic relationships through his ongoing Shrinebeast narrative, a narrative that seeks to establish a borderless, non-hierarchical ecology between humans, lovers, landscapes, and animals. 

Rotation 2