Jason Bard Yarmosky, The Boxer, 2012
Oil on canvas, 72 x 60 inches

Jason Bard Yarmosky

“Elder Kinder”

May 3 – June 2, 2012

Artist’s Reception:
Thursday, May 3, 2012 (6-8pm)

Lyons Wier Gallery 
542 West 24th St., 
New York, NY 10011 

Gallery Hours: Tues - Sat, 11-6pm

Nearest subway: C,E @ 23rd St and 8th Ave

"After changes upon changes, we are more or less the same."
– Paul Simon

Elder Kinder, Jason Bard Yarmosky’s first solo show with Lyons Wier Gallery, pays homage to the idea that age is not a deterrent to living fully, but rather a springboard for exploration. 

Adding to his earlier works, these meticulously constructed and strikingly life-like new paintings examine the relationship between the limitations of social norms and the freedom to explore, particularly the juxtaposition between the young and old. The carefree nature that is associated with youth often gives way to borders and boundaries placed on adult behavior. As we transition from adult to elderly, these raw freedoms often reemerge. As a child you learn to walk; later in life we learn to unwalk, literally and metaphorically. However, the dreams of the young, often sublimated by the years, never really disappear.

The artist chose to explore this theme with two people very close to him, his eighty-four year old grandparents. The process of aging has always intrigued Yarmosky. "The lack of permanence in life and the inevitability of aging has always been on my mind growing up. I am also interested in how people, in both mind and body, respond to the passage of time." His paintings reveal an enduring truth. As Madeleine L'Engle
 said, "The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been."

The resulting paintings capture the intersection of the battered body and the vibrant soul. The images in this series can be seen as either humiliating or empowering. The pessimist sees the images through the lens of shame and vulnerability, weighed down by social convention. The optimist sees a sense of liberation, where an adolescent's playfulness and the freedom to dream complement the wisdom of old age.

Jason Bard Yarmosky is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York City. His paintings and drawings have been exhibited and collected throughout the United States and in countries around the world. His work has appeared in numerous publications including American Artist, New American Paintings, Hi Fructose, 20 minutos, and The Huffington Post. He is a past recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshield Award. Jason Bard Yarmosky lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Click here for exhibition preview

For more information, please contact:

Lyons Wier Gallery
542 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011
Tel: (212) 242 6220
Email: gallery@lyonswiergallery.com 
www.lyonswiergallery.com

The Sound of Silence, 2012
Oil on canvas, 72 x 48 inches

Whatever It Is, I'm Against It, 2012 

Oil on canvas, 83 x 57 inches

"Resourced: The Influence of Photography in Contemporary Art" Group Exhbition

Exhibition Dates: February 2 – 25, 2012


Artists’ Reception: Thursday February 2nd (6-8pm)

Lyons Wier Gallery
542 West 24th St., New York, NY 10011

Gallery Hours: Tues - Sat, 11-6pm


Nearest subway: C,E @ 23rd St & 8th Ave



Lyons Wier Gallery is pleased to present Resourced, an exhibition of eight contemporary artists who use photography to create and sometimes inspire their art making. Each artist appropriates certain aspects and assets afforded by the camera, creating work that is referential but independent in spirit. The featured artists are: Ryan Bradley, Mary Henderson, David Lyle, Tim Okamura, Fahamu Pecou, James Rieck, Aristides Ruiz, and Cayce Zavaglia.

Although the advent of the Daguerreotype utilized and revolutionized the principles of the camera obscura by capturing images in the early nineteenth century, the use of the camera obscura as a preparatory tool for artists dates as far back as the Renaissance when in 1490, Leonardo da Vinci wrote the first detailed description of the camera obscura in his “Atlantic Codex.”

Resourced presents a contemporary look at the influences and inspiration borne from the platforms of photography, ranging from found vernacular photography to self-portraiture. Collectively, the exhibition reveals the inexhaustible possibilities of how an artist can appropriate and re-contextualize a photographic image into a distinct conceptual perspective through various other media.

The artists’ methodology of capturing a moment or finding inspiration is as subjective as their aesthetic point of view. Some artists choose to take a traditional approach by staging studio shoots that generate self-produced photographs open for creative transformation. This can be seen in Ryan Bradley’s digitally manipulated shots of muse Adi Neumann that result in ornate hand drawn deconstructions of the female figure, Fahamu Pecou’s painted self-portrait that evolves into a parody of contemporary media, Cayce Zavaglia’s intimate and striking portrait of her daughter, Abbi, that becomes a painstaking hand stitched embroidery on canvas, and Tim Okamura’s expressive and provocative oil portrait of friends that he intuitively situates within urban environments of New York and its surrounding boroughs.

Others artists seize captured moments from the past and present for re-contextualization, thereby transforming the original source material via personal and societal prisms into another place and time. David Lyle’s use of found vernacular prints and vintage photographs are cleverly reimaged and redefined within our contemporary zeitgeist, executed in his limited use of only black paint. Mary Henderson’s oil paintings source images from photo-sharing websites that she alters compositionally into an intentional public image executed in paramount technical detail. Aristides Ruiz’s hyperrealist ballpoint drawings metamorphose extracted shots of animated New York streets into baffling renderings of urban life. And finally, James Rieck’s appropriation of commercial advertising into deliberately cropped photo-realist paintings truncates contemporary culture to its essence.

As Lyons Wier Gallery specializes in “conceptual realism”, the common ground shared in Resourced is the realist platform that photography allows and the conceptual leap the artist affords.

For more information and images, please contact:
Lyons Wier Gallery
542 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011
Tel: + 1 212 242 6220 / gallery@lyonswiergallery.com
www.lyonswiergallery.com

January Exhibition: Jazz-minh Moore "Is That All There Is"

Jazz-minh Moore

“Is That All There Is”

January 5 - 28, 2012

Artist’s Reception:
Thursday, January 5, 2012, 6-8pm

Lyons Wier Gallery
542 West 24th St., New York, NY 10011

Gallery Hours: Tues - Sat, 11-6pm

Nearest subway: C,E @ 23rd St & 8th Ave.

Lyons Wier Gallery is pleased to present, Is That All There Is, its second solo exhibition with Jazz-minh Moore.

Moore’s new series of paintings features her sister, Asia Kindred, amidst the ruins of a deteriorating cabin. The primarily naturalistic pallet is infused with distortion and bright color, causing the compositions to hover between physical and psychological space.

The cabin depicted was the first structure built on the land where the artist was born, deep in the Oregon woods. Over the years and seasons, Moore has watched the dilapidated structure fall into a nest-like geometry that she finds beautiful. The external post and lintel structure has given way to the kind of forgotten, mythical space that a teen might build her fort in; a space wherein secrets can be told and tasted, where the patchy, uneven ground is both soft and solid. It is within this context that Asia is found squatting, or absentmindedly doodling on the fallen boards with a sharp stick. The cabin and the girl are inextricably linked through overlapping compositions. In some works, such as 'The Tower', Asia is almost entirely camouflaged amidst a patterning of light and tattoos.

The idea of aligning one's own experience symbolically with gods in mythical fables is prevalent in Moore’s new body of work. The work speaks obliquely to the artist's disillusionment with monotheistic and patriarchal codes within Western culture. Throughout these paintings, physicality is dominant in the materials, subject matter and process: wood on wood, sex, cutting, and nature. The birch surfaces that inhabit the work also have a voice within the compositions.

Utilizing the wood grain as a landscape to influence her compositions, Moore leaves some sections unfinished, while others are highly rendered. The level of completion is an evolving collaboration between the artist's hand and the organic drawing ‘style’ present in the wood panel itself. Some surfaces are finished with a high gloss resin. Others are left bare. The surface treatment is reflective of the subject matter within each work.

Through a combination of tattoos on her sister's body and archetypes carved into the wood panels of the fallen cabin, Moore creates a personal pantheon of gods to reflect her experiences. These divinities, including a pair of snails in slow fornication, a blue-faced Kali, lines from a Jenny Holzer projection, a sculpture of a laughing pig with a coin-slot asshole by Matthew Weinstein, Medusa, Ouroboros, performance artists Eva and Adele, Lady Rizo, and an inextricable tangle of vines, connect as beings to Moore’s quest for a new iconography.

Jazz-minh Moore received her MFA at California State University, Long Beach, CA and BFA from Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle, WA. She has received numerous grants and scholarships including a NYFA fellowship and a grant from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation. Moore has produced solo shows in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Paris and has been featured in publications such as Interview, Whitehot and American Art Collector among others. She is the co-founder of the New York City based art collective, Gutbox, and recently participated as a contestant on Season 2 of “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist” on Bravo TV. Moore currently works and lives in New York City. “Is That All There Is” was made possible in part by the New York Foundation for the Arts.