March 23 - April 24 ● Opening Reception Saturday, March 26, 4 - 6:00

For the third exhibition of our 2022 season, 440 Gallery is proud to present Around Town, an exhibition of landscape and still-life paintings by watercolorist Joy Makon. Joy is a painter of observed life, creating works based on locations and moments that she sees through both everyday activities and while traveling for pleasure. This collection, her second solo show at the gallery, is the outcome of a time during which the pandemic and other issues restricted where the artist could go.

Most recently, New York City and Joy’s immediate Brooklyn neighborhood became the inspiration for her work. Translated through pigment, water and paper, Makon’s richly detailed paintings capture the light, textures, and vibrant color that she found in the streets and parks that she managed to visit during this time.

“I refuse to be at a loss for subject matter to paint,” Joy says. “Walking around with my camera in hand, snapping photographs that catch my attention, is not enough. I need to slow down and observe how the light flows across a building facade, how shadows form beautifully colored shapes rippling with texture and crackling with energy, how the relationship between the horizon and the sky is a tangible thing.” Spending time close to home encouraged her to look at ordinary surroundings with a painter’s eye. Joy notes that she frequently found her subjects within steps of her front door.

Around Town celebrates scenes both well-known and intimate. Cityscapes of classic Brooklyn facades and street views at sunset are joined by vistas from Central Park and The Bronx’s Wave Hill. The most recent paintings include subjects especially close to home: An Ode to a September Garden, a still-life assembled from Makon’s garden, and Small Skies, a series of paintings of the sky as seen from her porch.

What all have in common is Makon’s desire to draw the viewer in through dynamic compositions that have both beauty and strength in presentation. With a fascinating combination of labor-intensive details and impressionistic watercolor passages, the paintings engage the viewer to consider the quotidian realism of her subjects as enlivened with an idealized, aesthetic point of view.

Project Space: Contemplations

In the Project Space, 440 Gallery is pleased to present Contemplations, a group show by Gallery artists Leigh Blanchard, Karen Gibbons and David Stock. The show features a collection of mixed media paintings, photography and digital work, centered around a definition of contemplation as the action of looking thoughtfully at something for a long time. Through individual insights and unique vantage points, each artist examines how the viewer can move from impression to intention.

In her new series of digital works, Leigh Blanchard deals with the entanglement of loss and grief. In September 2020, Blanchard found herself grieving the loss of her beloved puppy, Grover. While he passed from this world to the next, her grief did not. This series mirrors the transformative process of memory recall as a part of grief's journey. In these works titled Everything Wondrous Is Endless, new images are composed of old memories, and reflect the end states of grief, when we are finally able to experience emotions that have been put aside. The cycle of joy and grief, discovery and rediscovery, loss and love is endless. Blanchard’s digital images are created using a camera without a lens attached. The resulting images have a softness that mimics the feeling of trying to recall a memory. In the digital process, Blanchard layers several memories on top of one another until only a mere essence remains. While what is left may not be visually sharp and in focus, it maintains an acuity that is essential to the emotions conveyed in the final result.

Karen Gibbons creates mixed-media paintings that center around her vision of animals. Gibbons’s relationship to animals is rooted in history: animals symbolically portray gods, power, the supernatural and even our own animal instincts. In this work, color, shape and texture are integrated with memory, associations and symbols. Each piece becomes an “object” that is more than just a surface for illusionistic space. The result is something that seems familiar and comfortable, yet just enough out of reach to create tensions through our associations. In Gibbons’s view, animals become the perfect subject to represent these contradictions; animals embody the emotional, spiritual and physical aspects to which we respond.

One of the things David Stock loves about photography is the possibility of making images that are abstract and representational at the same time. This contradiction is fascinating to him, as these new photographs convey. He uses the camera to isolate and sort out visual elements from his everyday environment. Stock organizes colors, shadows and shapes into abstract, graphic images that seemingly appear to be a random arrangement of surfaces. Through careful, skilled digital printmaking, he then attempts to distill what he sees into a new, self-contained object. Beginning with observation, Stock arrives at, if he is fortunate, something more akin to meditation.

About 440 Gallery: 440 Gallery presents engaging art to the community through exhibitions, talks, readings and events centered around direct contact with the artist. Open Thursday - Friday 4-7 pm, Saturday and Sunday 12-6 pm, or by appointment.