黑料不打烊

The Page Bond Gallery is pleased to present finding shapes as a way of orienting oneself: Paintings by Nancy Murphy Spicer and Swelter: A Group Exhibition featuring work by Isabelle Abbot, Tom Adair, Steve Bickley, Karen Blair, Robin Braun, S. Ross Browne, Judy Bumgardner, Amy Chan, Marguerite Courtney, Penelope Gottlieb, John Grant, Robert Llewellyn, B Millner, Ledelle Moe, Tim O'Kane, Ruby Palmer, Fiona Ross, Peri Schwartz, Carol Mickett / Robert Stackhouse, and Rob Tarbell opening Thursday, July 14 from 6 to 8 PM. The exhibition will run July 14 to September 2, 2016. During a 2010 artist residency in Berlin, Nancy Murphy Spicer rented a bicycle and freely explored the German metropolis, embracing unplanned detours and serendipitous diversions. She recorded her routes in the pages of a city guidebook, which she later disassembled and used as the material foundation for the present series, Biking in Berlin. The artist鈥檚 biking trajectories, coupled with painted-over images of monuments, buildings, and other details extracted from the guidebook itself, gave rise to the irregular surfaces and whimsical shapes that characterize this body of work. Built up layer-by-layer through what Murphy Spicer calls 鈥渁 sculptural process of cutting, painting and repairing,鈥� these mixed-media images have a sense of presence and tactility that encourages an intimate dialogue between viewer and composition. The connection between this series and the city of Berlin is significant: in the decades since World War II, Berlin鈥檚 spatial and political landscapes have undergone dramatic transformations, each adding a new layer to the German capital鈥檚 complex history. It is no small detail, for instance, that Murphy Spicer鈥檚 unrestricted movement across the city would have been impossible less than three decades ago due to the Berlin Wall. At the same time, any metropolis is, by nature, a palimpsest of growth, destruction, shifting borders, and鈥攁s the bike routes in Biking in Berlin demonstrate鈥攍ived experiences. The small works on paper in this series capture the dynamic, ever-evolving nature of cityscapes through the visual language of collage, transforming spatial borders, architectural details, and the artist鈥檚 own bodily movement into colorful, abstract compositions that incite curiosity and wonder.