Main Gallery: It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World  Gavin Bunner  

Project Room: Mors Voluntaria and Other Misfortunes  Alison Byrnes

 

For Show Preview Click here

Taking its title from the 1963 movie about a madcap race to locate an elusive cash sum, Gavin Bunner's new show offers the same cameo-laced wackiness of the film through the artist's staging of idiosyncratically linked icons and found imagery garnered from free-associative romps on Google. Inhabiting fictitious locales, with a dash of psychedelia and a pinch of pop surrealism Bunner's ink and gouache non-sequitur narratives are whimsical and engaging, rendered with a competency that brings to mind a love child of Terry Gilliam and Marcel Dzama.  Read complete press release (here).

Alison Byrnes's offbeat paintings record scenes the artist associates with fateful episodes - the suicides of famous historical and pop culture icons. Disparate figures such as Attila the Hun and "Fantasy Island"'s Hervé "Tattoo" Villechaize, Sigmund Freud and Dana "Different Strokes" Plato, are the subjects of her momento mori micro-dramas of people whose fate is forever conjoined by their having taken their own lives. Her illustrated memorial tableaux are rendered in a child-like narrative fashion which underscores the dark humor and de-emphasizes the morbidity, much like the rhetoric of history itself which tends to flatten storylines over time.  Read the complete press release (here).

Crafts for the kiddies from 6-7:30.  Parking available on a limited basis in the Crossroads Parking Lot.

Show runs February 28 - March 28, 2009.  Gallery Hours: Friday + Saturday, 12-5 and by appt.