Joy Makon: "What I Looked At Today"
January 8 - February 9, 2020
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 11, 4 - 7pm
Picture the face of a child in a car window, wide-eyed and hungry for eye candy: a fancy home, a vibrant landscape, a monument that catches the light in a way that makes it glow. Joy Makon still seeks with the eyes of that child on family trips, thrilled by the unexpected. The watercolors in What I Looked At Today are the result of “visiting spectacular places...the surprise of sunlight and shadows, breathtaking reflections on water, the interesting person who casually walks in front of me.”
In her first solo show at 440 Gallery, Makon exhibits paintings of outdoor locations in New York City, the artist’s Brooklyn backyard, and in Nova Scotia and France. Patiently executed in her studio over several weeks time, these realistic images do not record a location so much as capture and distill the emotional intensity of her initial riveting impression. The broad vistas and intimate scenes are painted primarily on heavy-weight Arches paper in a traditional watercolor technique that uses no white paint, allowing only the white of the paper for highlights.
Joy Makon’s work has been shown in juried and gallery shows, including the American Watercolor Society and the Adirondacks National Exhibit of American Watercolors. At the Salmagundi Club in NYC, Joy received the Thomas Moran Memorial Award for Watercolor in 2018 and the Mario Cooper Memorial Award for Watercolor in 2019. She has been recognized by the Art Directors Club, Society of Publication Designers and the Society of Illustrators, for her work as a magazine art director. She has a BFA in graphic design and photography from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, where she studied with John Moore, Stanislaw Zagorski and Joseph Scorsone.
In the Project Space: “Assembly Required”
Three artists, working in a diverse range of media, assemble fragments of content and graphic elements found in the world around them. They combine these elements in the picture space using memory, observation, and imagination to make something new. The works are rooted in everyday reality but are reassembled into new entities with lives of their own.
Gail Flanery is a printmaker whose inspiration has always come from nature. She often combines collage, chine collé, and drawing in her prints and is here focusing on exploring diverse compositional possibilities. Her choice of the color palette is often the first consideration in composing a piece.
Karen Gibbon’s work is inspired by nature and combines photography, drawing, collage and painting. Gibbons says “Listening to material and form speak for themselves is a very powerful language for me.” Her work is pared to its essence but reverberates with the full, complex, spectrum of life. Her process is unified by a gestural line or expressive brushwork. Autobiographical in content, these works resonate beyond self portraiture and channel universal experience.
Photography is often thought of as a medium that describes things, but David Stock’s photographs go beyond simple description. Shot with no physical intervention other than the artist’s eye, his photographs frame a staged moment in time. They assemble visual material from the urban environment to construct highly intentional images that stand independently as graphic objects and cultural metaphors.
