October 13 - November 13, 2022

Opening Reception: Thursday, October 13, 5 - 7:30

440 Gallery is pleased to present 3:10 to Union Station, an exhibit of California landscapes by painter Janet Pedersen. This series, composed of flashe and acrylic gouache paint on panels, canvas and paper, was inspired by the artist’s train ride from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles this past January. As a young girl, Pedersen would take Amtrak from LA’s Union Station to spend the week with her grandmother in Santa Barbara. She made the trip alone, an exhilarating and fast-moving adventure for such a young child. Taking this same trip now resurrected these memories and became the inspiration and passion in Pedersen’s newest paintings.

Pedersen is drawn to industrial settings with their familiar objects: telephone poles, billboards, palm trees, walls of graffiti, constant jumbles of debris—all strong design elements in her compositions. Her brightly colored landscapes are derived from simple shapes which, when brought together on the surface, create a feeling of nostalgia. Broad brushstrokes remind us of how the landscape appears looking out from the window of a speeding vehicle. As buildings and structures whiz by, both dilapidated and new, a late-day sun blankets the view with golden light.

Ultimately, glorious blue skies crown these architectural studies, in a nod to emotional expression as seen through Pedersen’s masterly use of paint. By layering pigments with glimpses of her mark-making process underneath, she plays with space, distance and movement. Each piece recalls a fragment of memory—the artist’s and perhaps the viewer’s. We see something that is new, yet old; in the present, yet part of the passage of time; unified yet fleeting.

3:10 to Union Station is Pedersen’s third solo show at the gallery. A graduate of Art Center College of Design, Pedersen exhibits widely, and was recently selected to exhibit her dance-themed paintings by the U.S. State Department’s “Art in Embassies” program. Her work will be on loan for three years at the Residency of the U.S. Ambassador to Poland, Mark Brzezinski. Pedersen is a devoted teacher and tutor in studio art, and runs adult workshops through The Art Annex in Brooklyn. Currently, she teaches online fashion figure drawing at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

For more information contact the director, Amanda Brown, at 718-499-3844 or info@440gallery.com.

Project Space: Spaces and Places

Spaces and Places, a group show of distinct painting styles, features work by gallery artists Susan Greenstein, Joy Makon and Catherine Orrok. Each artist, whether through realism or abstraction, challenges the viewer to consider when does a space become a place? How do we recognize it, locate it through perspective, or can it be an invented abstraction that moves beyond an illusion of the real world?

Susan Greenstein‘s watercolors of lush summer scenes take us to some of the favorite locations she finds joy in. The works on paper, mostly painted en plein air, explore her multi-sensory reactions to the beauty of flowers, vivid hues and textures, delicate passages of light. Using the fluidity and transparency of watercolor, Greenstein portrays these special spaces with a depth that is achieved through energetic brushstrokes, areas of brilliant color offset by neutral tones, and a just-enough amount of detail. We are transported to the warm, sunny places that have such meaning to the artist.

Joy Makon’s watercolors depict people looking at artwork with the open spaces of The Guggenheim Museum as a backdrop. Makon’s fascination with overlapping figurative forms, ambiguity of shapes, and a little bit of storytelling comes through in these works on paper. Makon dedicates these paintings in memory of Jim Manwell. A staunch supporter of 440 Gallery, Jim rarely missed a chance to stop in to chat and offer up an opinion or some advice. Jim first saw these watercolors at Makon’s open studio in 2019. Jim went crazy over them and often asked why she hasn’t shown them at the gallery. “I never found the right place for them,” says Makon. “Until now.”

The acrylic paintings by Catherine Orrok are geometric abstractions based on a grid. Orrok’s process of painting softens the rigid geometry that she works within. Gestural brush marks highlight a discernible immediacy—Orrok’s hand is obvious in bestowing the surface with an energy that we can pick up on. Her use of color encompasses the perception of how one can define the two-dimensional space of a flat canvas. Orrok explores those qualities of individual hues that create movement and intriguing ambiguous spaces.