AND THE WINNERS ARE....

Part of the Urban Garden was the opportunity to win a 2 week solo show in the Project Room of Broadway Gallery. It was a hard decision with so many amazing artists. Ultimately the winners are....


DANA MILLER


KANGAROK (Ernest Concepcion & Mike Estabrook)


KIRSTEN KAY THOEN


TOM LEE


BEDEL TISCARENO


Congratulations once again.

OPENING NIGHT

The opening was a huge success. The vibe was great, and everybody's work flowed together beautifully. Congrats to all!

BEDEL TISCARENO

Bedel Tiscareno is a painter and sculptor from Las Vegas, NV. His work incorporates historical and non-linear narratives that examine our complicity in upholding the status quo. By combining archetypes from ancient to contemporary mythologies Tiscareno creates compositions that have both gravity and humor.Bedel Tiscareno currently lives and works in New York City.
www.bedeltiscareno.com

TOMMY MISHIMA

In THE URBAN GARDEN Tommy Mishima contributed his delicate and wonderful line drawings in a collaboration with Lambert Fernando. Tommy was born in Peru and came to the US as a teenager. He received his BFA at Parsons. This is his first New York show.

LAMBERT FERNANDO

Lambert Fernando was born in the Philippines, and often draws upon his experience of changing cultures and continents as a young child for his paintings. Incorporating a mixture of everything from fabric to plaster to ballpoint pen, Fernando's paintings mirror the evanescent qualities of lost memories and experiences. Currently Fernando resides in Brooklyn with his wife and their menagerie of creatures.
LambertFernandoBlog

FLASH ROSENBERG

Flash Rosenberg uses photos, drawings, writings and performances to deliver pith, humor, interpretations and memories. Her public art mischief has aired daily on public radio, has been performed onstage internationally, and published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Daily News, the Forward, The Funny Times and Lilith. She is a freelance photographer and currently, Artist-in-Residence for LIVE from the New York Public Library.

J. MANDLE PERFORMANCE

Project: Dirty Cookies

Artist Statement

In this impossibly overwhelming world, we need the reason to stop and consider our role within it. In our daily lives, there are so many distractions that cause us to become dissociated with our surroundings that performance art can be a critical tool to re-connect us and bring us into an awareness of life’s significant parts.

Artist Bio

My artistic practice intends to create moments of pause so that audience-members may take time to contemplate their environment. Often occurring in public space, I work within a performative frame, but blend modes of fashion design, architecture, sculpture, installation, and craft.

I am the recipient of a NYFA Fellowship in Performance Art and numerous awards, including my earliest grant from Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, and later from The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art, New York State Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. I have also been awarded artist’s residencies at Guapamacataro hacienda, Yaddo, and Weir Farm Trust. I earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Williams College and a Master of Arts at the Gallatin School of New York University.

WWW.JMANDLEPERFORMANCE.ORG

SARAH CHACICH

I'm from rural Minnesota, moved here to go to grad school and work on art. In my art work I use my life as a trope of the female experience. I'm interested in loss, memory and taboo and the way these elements create tensions between what is real and what is real to me. I use painting, sculpture, video and sound to illustrate these ideas.

LAURIE SERMOS

Laurie Sermos' color photographs often deal with the visible intersection of natural and created environments. Within these modern landscape images, nature or constructed environments of nature are represented as places to be considered and looked at. The environments photographed are often places built with an intended functionality. However through the act of photography, we are able to pause and engage with these environments in a way that allows for a different kind of reflection. Laurie was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1977. She was raised in New Jersey, and there on car rides to Newark airport first became interested in natural landscapes changed by industrial structures. She received her MFA from Bard College in 2006, where she also studied in a master class with Stephen Shore. She has exhibited her work nationally and abroad. Laurie currently teaches photography at Rutgers University, and has also taught with the University of Georgia's studies abroad program in Cortona, Italy. She lives in
Brooklyn, New York.
www.lauriesermos.com

DANA MILLER

Artist Statement
I am drawn to the seductive and surreal qualities of nature, especially in relation to culture. I am interested in how we relate to nature, how we try to shape and contain it, and its ability to grow wild despite our best attempts to confine it. I use photography to explore how these layers of both wildness and containment develop in the landscape, whether urban, suburban, or exurban.


Biography
Dana Miller received her MFA from Bard College in 2005 and her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1996. She had her first solo exhibition in New York at the Jen Bekman Gallery in November 2004.
She has been written about in the New York Times, the Village Voice, Leica Fotografie International, and Art in America. Her work is held in the corporate collections of VISA New York and The Capital Group. Dana was a recipient of the Camera Club of New York's Residency program for 2006-2007. She currently lives in Brooklyn and maintains a studio in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
www.danamillerphotography.com

TOM LEE

Painting is an illusion and a real object at the same time. Through paintings I want to see the stream of collective psyche that surrounds us. I want to see life force energy everything radiating and pulsating. I want to see the incremental shifts that occur in one's mind. I want the viewers to experience different levels and boundaries of our thoughts. I am interested in accumulation of thoughts through time, something that grows in our minds.
White Columns Artist Registry

THE SHINING MANTIS

The Shining Mantis is a Brooklyn based collaboration consisting of Mike Estabrook, and Ernest Concepcion. Individually, both of these artists have an illustrious history of exhibiting in a wide range of galleries and museums in New York and abroad, but they have met in battle as The Shining Mantis on many occasions.

LORI NELSON

Lori Nelson grew up in the West but migrated with her young family to
Brooklyn five years ago where she paints in an old unheated factory almost directly
underneath the Manhattan Bridge. She draws from the jumbled architecture of industrial
Brooklyn, the parched deserts of Colorado and Utah, and the awkwardness of everyday life everywhere for her narrative paintings whose visual depth are reminiscent of the
Old Masters although the color palette echoes sweet 1950's school book illustration.
www.lorinelson.com

KIRSTEN KAY THOEN

Kirsten moved to New York in 1998 to study Eugene Lang College at The New School University and received a B.A. in Arts in Context. She moved to The Netherlands in 2001 to study photography and work with emerging Dutch talent. In 2004, Kirsten launched K Studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a photo studio dedicated in offering creative space at affordable rates. Currently, she is finishing her M.F.A at The School of Visual Arts. Kirsten’s work explores the relationship between photography and sculpture with sacred geometry as a reference. She is especially interested in the places where creative processes and spiritual practices meet.
www.kirstenkaythoen.blogspot.com
www.kirstenkaythoen.com

JAKE MESSING

Jake Messing graduated with a BFA from Parsons School of Design in 2006. His interest in the urban environment and its inherent birth and decay serves as the dominant inspiration through most of his work. The urban landscape is personified by its constantly changing and shifting facade. Throughout Jake Messings work, the narrative of the industrial landscape is explored through layers of paint and texture being built up, torn down and obscured repetitively. Images are often deleted and painted over, but their presence is not completely hidden. There is a play between interior and exterior and growth and decay, both in terms of imagery, text, and meaning. Jake Messings' work has been shown in galleries across the United States. His paintings are held in private collections through the United States and Europe. He presently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York where he is endlessly creating new bodies of work.
www.jakemessing.com

CYNTHIA BITTENFIELD

Cynthia Bittenfield is currently working on her MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts in NYC.


This series is an exploration of a neighborhood in Queens, NY. I was struck by how people tended and cared for the postage stamp sized front yards and their attempts to humanize an urban environment with potted plants or other décor. In most cases, there was a pride of ownership that was apparent.

Having started this project in the winter, I saw the gardens in a state of decline, dead plants left in pots, garden tools leaned against the house, fragile fig trees wrapped in plastic or carpet remnants to protect them from the elements. These casual configurations become impromptu sculptures. As spring came, I ventured from the front yard to the back yard. Evidence of renewal is apparent as the land is turned under to prepare for planting. In this series, I¹m interested in exploring the desire to own land and the need for nature in an urban, concrete landscape.
www.bittenfield.com

MATTHEW SCHENNING

Over the past few years I have found myself drawn to the continuously evolving landscape that surrounds my friends and family. From vistas that are reachable by car to a garden oasis in the middle of Brooklyn, the way that we experience the natural world has been shaped by us. We are constantly altering the world around us to suite our current needs. In my work I search for pause. A moment when things seem to stand still in the middle of all this chaos.
Born in Baltimore, MD and currently living in Brooklyn, NY. I use a large format camera to photograph everything from landscapes to portraits.
www.schenning.com

MEET THE ARTISTS

In the days leading up to the opening of THE URBAN GARDEN, each of the artists will be highlighted on this blog. Stay tuned!

THE PRESS HAS BEGUN

THE URBAN GARDEN
Curated by Jade Doskow
March 1-15, 2009

Photograph © 2009 Dana Miller












Broadway Gallery is pleased to announce the group exhibition The Urban Garden, which will open on Sunday, March 1st, and close on Sunday, March 15th, with a reception for the artists on Thursday, March 5th from 6-8 p.m.
In this exciting group show, 16 artists---both solo and collaborative---explore the complex notions involved when nature and urbanity meet head-on and collide. Using a variety of media, from photography to painting to conceptual installation to drawing to video, these artists all consider this seeming paradox from within their own lives as city dwellers.
While Frederick Law Olmstead helped create city parks in the 19th century, contemporary times have called for more earth-conscious ways of considering nature from within the urban environment besides the contained oasis of a public green space. Whether it's a houseplant straining against a window, the tiny concrete yard of a Brooklyn townhouse, or the chaotic overgrowth of the textures of the city---pipes, wires, people, buildings---the idea of green and gardening has never been more prevalent in the collective consciousness.
The artists featured in The Urban Garden include:
Cynthia Bittenfield
Sarah Chachich
Kirsten Kay Thoen
Tom Lee
Julia Mandle Performance
Jake Messing
Dana Miller
Lori Nelson
Flash Rosenberg
Matthew Schenning
Laurie Sermos
Bedel Tiscareno
Ernest Concepcion & Mike Estabrook
Lambert Fernando & Tommy Mishima

ACCEPTED ARTISTS

Congratulations to the accepted artists of THE URBAN GARDEN!

All updates regarding the show can always be found on this blog.

ACCEPTED ARTISTS:

Cynthia Bittenfield
Dana Miller
Laurie Sermos
Matthew Schenning
Sarah Chachich
Ernest Concepcion
Mike Estabrook
Flash Rosenberg
Tom Lee
Bedel Tiscareno
Jake Messing
Kirsten Kay Thoen
Lambert Fernando
Tommy Mishima
Lori Nelson
Julia Mandle Performance