HIDDEN TREASURES
Megan Foster | Jack Henry
ON VIEW
Online: ongoing
In-person: by appointment
"I love not Man the less, but Nature more" ____Lord Byron
MEGAN FOSTER: NITE BRITE
Nite Brite is a series of paintings made during the height of the pandemic while under strict quarantine regulations. Influenced by liminal time and space, the series explores real and artificial reality. Platforms such Zoom, Zwift and Apple’s operating system are used to explore altered rituals and the everyday experience.
With irony and humor, Megan Foster portrays often-overinflated expectations of the way we live and how we try to better ourselves from previous generations. Her work suggests a narrative by presenting a frozen moment in time, aiming to preserve and give authority to the everyday experience. Utilizing appropriated images from art, architecture, technology and popular science as starting point, she depicts sometimes banal scenes that have the potential to be spectacular and fantastic. Foster frequently uses nature as a backdrop. Toys, hybrid plants, designer pets and naturally occurring spectacles find their way into the work as she rethinks the meaning of contemporary landscape and the technological sublime.
Megan Foster (b. 1977, based in Brooklyn, NY) earned her BFA at RISD (2000) and MFA at Columbia University (2002). Before joining the faculty at RISD in the fall of 2016, Foster taught at The City College of New York where she was the head of Printmaking and director of the MFA program. She was also master printer at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies and is the co-founder of Moonlight Editions. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Black and White Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Mixed Greens Gallery, NYC; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY; Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing, China; and the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA, among other venues.
JACK HENRY: MODERN LANDSCAPE
Henry embeds sticks, chains, rocks and cigarette packets within cement to become their compositional elements. Leaves, rebar, cans and cables are cast out of resin and bronze to be assembled into sculptures. Found paper and cardboard is collaged together to create the ground for landscape drawings. He is interested in depicting the contradictions we face as an ecologically aware society functioning within a consumerist system.
Jack Henry’s practice explores the compromised state of the environment by focusing on the spaces of untamed growth remaining in the urban landscape - where mankind’s conquest of wilderness is most evident. He portrays environmental degradation by combining found objects with plants emblematic of the city. In his Brooklyn neighborhood, wild growth is confined to empty lots and gutter spaces where he collects material from to make sculpture, installations and works on paper reflecting the compromised state of the modern landscape. |
Jack Henry (b. 1984, based in Brooklyn, NY) earned his BFA in Sculpture at the Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL (2007) and MFA in Sculpture at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD (2010). He is the recipient of several fellowships and residencies, most notably at Mass Moca Residency (2020), Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada, Earthed – Ecology Themed Artists Residency Fellowship (2019), Arte_Fits.foundation, Dorado, Puerto Rico. Art in Nature Fellowship (2019), and Vermont Studio Center, Stowe, VT. August Fellowship (2017).
