Monsters, Saints, and Cool Summer Dresses
KEDAR STUDIO OF ART
585 Broad Street, 2nd fl, Newark, NJ 07102
www.kedarstudio.com p: 973-985-4284
email: info@kedarstudio.com
Gallery hours: Sat: 1-4 pm and by appointment
Press Release
Monsters, Saints, and Cool Summer Dresses
September 16 to 24th
Reception for the artist September 16, 7-11pm
Monsters, Saints, and Cool Summer Dresses showcases three limited edition See Me Tell Me projects created by Amy Young: Little Monsters III, edition of 50; Subway Saints III (mini), edition of 50; and See Me Tell Me Shifts (Graffiti) edition of 25. Together they form only part of her larger series titled See Me Tell Me.
After a 17 year hiatus spent pursuing an MA, selling art for a living, and teaching, Young has returned to art making and as of summer of 2010 she has created and placed hundreds of tiny pieces of street-art on the streets of New York, London, Paris and Seattle, documenting her exploits on her blog: seemetellme.blogspot.com/.
Her entire See Me Tell Me series is based on the following set of rules and parameters:
1st – The materials should be non artistic low-art stuff found at any office supply store, hardware store, or notions shop.
2nd – While an idea for a work might take days or weeks to work out, the actual crafting of each object must take no longer than 5 minutes.
3rd – The works are placed into the world, or handed out for free.
4th – She will identify herself only by putting her web-site address or QR code on the works.
(She hopes to elicit viewer responses, eager to know who collects a work and why.)
Amy Young’s Little Monsters series is based on the Greek, Romanesque, Gothic Revival faces and gargoyles you see on buildings all over New York, Paris, London, Rome, Venice, and Athens. Amy found (or in some cases photographed) a selection of images then made them all into Little Monsters by mounting the images on the front of clear 2” x 1” x 1” plastic boxes, darkening the backgrounds with gaffer tape and lighting them with LEDs. She then also filled them with silver beads to reflect the light and rattle when shaken.
Born out of her obsession with (and daily immersion in) the New York subway system, Amy’s Subway Saints series was also inspired by Walker Evans’ great work, Many are Called. In 1938, Walker Evans began surreptitiously photographing people on the New York City subway. With his camera hidden in his overcoat he captured the faces of Depression-era riders, each wrapped in their own unguarded private thoughts. Determined to emulate Evans and his efforts to represent portraiture in its purest state, Young also shot about 250 clandestine images in the subway. To create each Subway Saint she printed each portrait in color and assembled them into an accordion-style book, complete with goldleaf, beads, glitter, found papers and objects. Each book was then placed into a 2” x 1” x 1” clear or colored plastic box. As a nod to Evans, on the verso of each box is an image of his Contax folding camera.
The See Me Tell Me Shifts are based on the thin, simple, summer dresses worn by fashionable New York women. For the prior two series of See Me Tell Me Shifts these little dresses were decorated with patterns Amy found at museums, galleries and art fairs, which she would then heat-transfer onto the surface of paper. The imagery for this newest series however, is based on the street art and graffiti she spotted in London, Paris, Bushwick, Williamsburg, Chelsea and Soho during spring and summer of 2011. The front of each dress is made from Japanese rice paper cut in the shape of a shift or sundress. The back of each dress is a snippet from a shopping bag and provides contrasting sources – the free vs. the bought.
We invite viewers of the exhibition to participate in this series and acquire these works. You can register your acquisition on the tag beneath each work and comment at seemetellme.blogspot.com about the new addition to your collection.
Kedar Studio of Art
585 Broad Street, Newark, NJ 07102
IAC
p: 862-218-0278
Gallery hours: Thur: 6-9 pm, Fri: 1-4 pm, Sat: 1-4 pm