Facture Fracture: Sam Branden, Kadar Brock, Shayna Miller, Jack Arthur Wood

CHART is pleased to present Facture Fracture, a group exhibition featuring new paintings by Sam Branden, Kadar Brock, Shayna Miller, and Jack Arthur Wood. The works in Facture Fracture explore the potential of manipulated painterly surfaces as a way of communicating abstract ideas, demonstrating how accumulated influences and affects can only be pared down so far, and how future evolutions are inherently built on that which came before. The exhibition will open with a reception on Wednesday, June 26, from 6–8pm, and will remain on view through Friday, August 23.

The four artists  on view incorporate processes of selective accretion and excision in their work. Whether it’s through building up layers of fabric or paint, then trimming, sanding, or scraping, in each of their unique methods, layers of visual information are aggregated into larger constructions, often with revealing peeks at the foundational structures that lie beneath. Drawing from influences as varied as religious or personal histories, to their own neighborhood streets or current events, these artists subvert the typical methods of painterly application and manipulate their surfaces to reflect the complicated world in which they live.

Sam Branden infuses his paintings, often created from found and sourced fabrics, with a visual essence derived from surrounding urban environments. Influenced by the frenzied pace of his Brooklyn neighborhood, Branden incorporates elements of the city’s stimuli into his own artistic language. Bold fields of bright colors populate the works, reflecting both the neon lights of New York, as well as its incongruous coalescing that makes a certain kind of magic. Hand-sewn collisions of canvas resemble street maps or subway tracks, with sections of gauzy, transparent spandex revealing the underlying substrates below.

Jack Arthur Wood uses strips of stained and patterned fabrics to create suggestive, sculptural compositions. While the collaged elements appear at first to be strictly symmetrical, closer inspection reveals their impressionistically assembled nature, as swaths of color give way to cut out organic shapes or dangling canvas strings. This subtle emphasis on materiality amplifies the prismatic qualities of the paintings: sections of interrupted gradients radiate with an intense incandescence.

Kadar Brock’s works are created from accumulations of mark-making and erasure. Painted images and text—often specifically drawn from the artist’s past—once completed are sanded, primed, and scraped to the point of near-removal, only to then be covered up by another layer, which is then subjected to the same measures of physical effacement, inevitably creating gouges and scars on the surface of the canvas. Emblematic of the ways in which our own personal histories are built—ever shifting reflections and constructions accumulated over time—Brock’s process abstracts the information that had previously been at the fore, leaving behind traces of a slowly and painstakingly assembled chronicle of an individual’s acts.

In a counter-construction, Shayna Miller builds tapered forms that jut out and engage the viewer in their space. Nooks and notches occasionally also operate around the edges of the canvas, lending a singular character to each of the artist’s suggestive works. Often at the very peak of Miller’s mountainous formations are peculiar pustules that augur a transformative element: these protrusions are on the precipice of change, with paint, and its surface effects, portending that radical shift.