Emblemata: E.E. Ikeler and Ken Weathersby
Pazo Fine Art is pleased to present Emblemata, an exhibition curated by John O’Connor and Luis Pazo, featuring paintings and freestanding sculptures by E.E. Ikeler and Ken Weathersby.
The works included in Emblemata explore the spaces between abstraction, ornamentation, and physical, tactile reality. The grid is a primary motif for both artists. Ikeler and Weathersby are in conversation with historical and contemporary artists who have grappled with the grid’s centrality in Western Modernism. Each artist makes sensitive, rigorous, slyly humorous paintings that maintain an equipoise between the functional materials of their supports (stretchers, panel, gesso, raw canvas, tiles, resin) and a shifting and deceptively complex matrix. Ikeler and Weathersby, through their utilization of processes such as inlay, insertion, embedding, parquetry, and mosaic, create highly original artworks that move fluidly between representation, abstraction, and pattern.
Emblemata will include selections of Ikeler’s recent tiled works that embed text into their polished resin surfaces. These paintings have a substantial physicality while their patterns transport us to fantastically spaceless worlds. Also on display are a selection of Weathersby’s “Library Hand” paintings as well as his free-standing paintings. Both bodies of work juxtapose patterns with figurative sculptural references, and demonstrate the artist’s dedication and sensitivity to a work's physical construction - Weathersby builds every aspect of his paintings, from his supports to his meticulously compositions.
An exhibition catalog with text by John O’Connor will be published by Pazo Fine Art.
Artists Bios:
E.E. Ikeler received a BFA from The Cooper Union in 2008 and an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2016. Their work examines the limitations of communication through text and abstraction. They’ve had solo exhibitions at Hemphill Fine Arts (Washington, D.C.), Jeff Bailey Gallery (Hudson, NY), Mulherin (Toronto, Canada), and Kent Place (Summit, NJ). They’ve also exhibited at Essex Flowers, EFA Project Space, Abrons Art Center (NYC, New York) and Yve Yang Gallery in Boston, MA. They are the recipient of a Leroy Neiman Foundation Summer Fellowship at Ox-bow School of Art in 2016; a Yale FLAGS Award,a Helen Watson Winternitz Award and a Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library Research Fellowship (all Yale University, 2015). They live and work in Brooklyn, NY.
Ken Weathersby has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, with notable solo shows at Minus Space (Brooklyn), Pierogi Gallery (New York), One River Gallery (Englewood, NJ), NIAD Art Center Gallery (Richmond, CA), Some Walls (Oakland, CA), and the John Cotton Dana Gallery, Rutgers University (Newark). His work has been included in group exhibitions at the National Academy of Art Museum (New York), Honey Ramka (Brooklyn), ODETTA Gallery (Brooklyn), 57w57Arts (New York), Parallel Art Space (Ridgewood, NY), Mixed Greens (New York), Aljira Art Center (Newark), the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Gallery (Morristown, NJ), Barbara Walters Gallery at Sarah Lawrence College (Bronxville, New York), the Visual Art Center of NJ (Summit, NJ), Seven (Miami), Toomey Tourell (San Francisco), and I.S. Projects (Leiden, Netherlands), among many others. Weathersby has received numerous awards and residencies, most recently the Individual Artist Painting Fellowship by the Mid-Atlantic Arts Council/NJSCA (2016). His work has been written about in Hyperallergic, the Huffington Post, Brooklyn Magazine, the New American Paintings blog, Two Coats of Paint, Painter’s Bread, and elsewhere. Weathersby holds an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He was born in Mississippi and has lived in the New York City area since 1990.
Curator Bio:
John J. O’Connor is an artist, curator, and chair of Visual Arts at Sarah Lawrence College. He curated four exhibitions at the Barbara Walters Gallery at Sarah Lawrence, including two multimedia group exhibitions, and a solo exhibition of Dawn Clements’s works on paper. He co-curated a contemporary drawing exhibition with the art historian and critic Philip Glahn. O’Connor also curated Criminal’s Cinema, at Honey Ramka Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn. O’Connor has exhibited his own work nationally and internationally, and his drawings are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The New Museum, and the Weatherspoon Museum, among others.
December 4, 2021 - January 20, 2022
Opening reception: Saturday, December 4th, 2021, 5 - 8 pm
4228 Howard Ave Kensington, MD 20895
Open by appointment Tuesday – Saturday
Contact Luis Pazo:
(571) 315-5279
info@pazofineart.com
