Essex Flowers is pleased to present works by Eric Amling, Josh Jefferson, Rebecca Gilbert, Joel Morrison, and David Schoerner. This is a show of artists dealing with images and photographs in a fundamentally material way. Traditional collage reveals the choices of the artist and the sources of their material, in direct contrast to the way that digital tools obscure both gesture and provenance. Whether by cutting them up, turning them over, or covering them with objects, the artists in this exhibition remind us that pictures occupy a physical space in the world.

Eric Amling presents what he calls ‘leisure collages’, composed of pictures culled from the backgrounds of pornographic magazines, creating layered images of abstracted satin sheets and buffed leather divans. Props and decadent furnishings become obscured and flattened, the nude women removed, only the textures remain, broken into sharp and contrasting planes.

Having worked with collage in numerous ways, Josh Jefferson’s latest works avoid printed material entirely. Jefferson makes gestural drawings and paintings that are cut into pieces and rearranged. The chaotic energy of his abstract mark-making is corralled and molded through collage into representations of faces, often of friends and loved ones.

Rebecca Gilbert’s work is closer to bricolage in many respects, using the objects around her, such as collected seashells and sculptures of women, to interact with printed material, such as magazines and books. Playful and humorous, but with a serious edge, her work uses small interventions to look at how we relate to the images and mass-produced artifacts around us.

Using Eden Soy packages and other materials salvaged from daily life, Joel Morrison meticulously cuts and arranges these sources into mosaic-like collages. Morrison’s work involves copious collections of printed material. Visually abstract, his work nevertheless convey patterns of use, consumption, and the routines of contemporary life.

David Schoerner often makes serial still life photographs of ordinary objects arranged in relationship to one another. In this show he deals with the photographs themselves in a similarly humorous and light handed way. Rather than cutting them up or rearranging their parts, he simply flips them over. If traditional collage challenges the hierarchy of the image by rearranging it, Schoerner’s work denies it completely, replacing it with his own handwritten description of what the image supposedly conveys.
Essex Flowers is a full service store front flower shop located at 365 Grand St at the corner of Essex in New York’s Lower East Side.

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Tags: David Schoerner, Eric Amling, Essex Flowers, Joel Morrison, Josh Jefferson, Justin Berry, Rebecca Gilbert