Ann Toebbe creates two-dimensional portraits of the home with fastidious attention to the mundane details of domesticity. It is her signature to present each space as a mash-up of opposing perspectives which is I find engaging but also a bit idiosyncratic.

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Mary-u-wanna aka Florian & Michaël Quistrebert at Galerie Crèvecoeur.
This show by the Guistrebert brothers was inspired by Gothic architecture and ornamentation in New York City which they state“dares formal mixes, combining gothic vertical impetuses and constructivist cuttings, medieval austerity and futuristic megalomania.”

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I spotted Mary Laube’s work in New American Paintings No. 87 (as we speak I’m catching up on a bunch of old editions). Laube was born in Seoul, Korea and is currently getting her MFA at The University of Iowa. Her work explores the mental frameworks we develop around familiar physical spaces, specifically the home.

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My work has evolved into an investigation of memory, imagination, and present experience and how these internal activities are simultaneously active. Our memories, thoughts, and emotions adjust our perceptions as we physically move from one environment to another…

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Amy Greenan lives in a “modest but endlessly inspiring” Arts & Crafts bungalow in upstate New York with her boyfriend and three cats. The artist mainly focused on figure paintings before starting her Abandoned Houses series in 2009. Her paintings are certainly sober but beautiful in their own right and really stir the imagination around the stories of these houses and the people who lived in them.

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Having grown up in what was an abandoned house when my parents purchased it, I find an irresistible affinity to these lost architectural souls. I realized, too, that the similarities between these houses and the human body and experience cannot be ignored. These places have a history in the same way we do. Memories are attached; they crumble in the same way the human body eventually does…

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January 15th, 2010 · 1 Comment