Trade of the Season (MARQUEE PROJECTS Edition)
May 27 - June 26
MARQUEE PROJECTS in Bellport, LI and High Noon in NYC are delighted to announce their collaboration on a tandem, gallery-exchange exhibition titled Trade of the Season. MARQUEE PROJECTS will exhibit artists from High Noon’s roster and community from May 27 to June 26. In turn, next month High Noon will exhibit artists from MARQUEE PROJECTS’ roster and community from June 23 to July 31.
Both galleries were founded in 2017. Through a robust and friendly dialogue over several years, they have recognized a shared approach to programs based in material-based work and in the growth of emerging and mid-career artists. More importantly, both galleries discovered a mutual, intrinsic philosophy that support of the arts is essential for an evolving society. MARQUEE PROJECTS and High Noon are committed to fostering the idea of respectful, collaborative, non-competitive relationships between smaller galleries, focusing on the artist rather than on marketplace rivalry. The benefits will be myriad, especially providing under-recognized artists greater access to a broader audience.
High Noon will be presenting works at MARQUEE PROJECTS by Eozen Agopian, Mark Joshua Epstein, Theresa Hackett, Bobbie Oliver, Rafael Plaisant, and Armita Raafat. Collectively, the selection of artists places a strong, non-hierarchal emphasis on craft and technique within a unique lexicon of materiality that lends itself to open systems of interpretation.
Eozen Agopian’s canvases of thread, fabric, and paint apply a methodical delicacy to formalist modernism. The collaged elements merge effortlessly with a painterly sensibility to create idiosyncratic compositions combining textural surfaces and intricate embroidery. Mark Joshua Epstein constructs hybrid painting/wall sculptures comprised of different planes of foam, fiberglass, and resin. Exquisitely hand-rendered, contradictory patterns tease familiar design trends from different periods into vibrant, playful abstractions that imply a spacial collision of queerness and conventionality. Theresa Hackett combines materials including diatomaceous earth, marble dust, and paint into heavily worked surfaces. Inspired by Matisse’s aesthetic philosophies, Hackett's deconstructed landscapes use the temporal world only as a jumping-off point.
Bobbie Oliver spent many years working with Isamu Noguchi, developing a slow, deliberate painting practice that is heavily influenced by Japanese wabi-sabi principles and Chinese landscape. Oliver works in a limited palette for each painting— generally using no more than two colors per canvas. Rafael Plaisant’s works begin with a series of washes built up to include intricate, geometrical forms, combining a retro-futurist aesthetic with influences from Brutalist architecture, comic books, and indigenous patterns and symbols from his native country, Brazil. Armita Raafat’s installation-based sculpture borrows from muqarnas domes, an architectural vaulting element found in mosques. Re-contextualizing the classical forms ubiquitous to her native country of Iran, Raafat plays on the malleability of their potential, placing her sculptures in a transitional state of coming into—or going out of—being.
