press release
Michele Araujo: Comfort Zone
For Immediate Release:
Studio10 is pleased to announce Michele Araujo’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. ‘Comfort Zone’ will present the viewer with several paintings and a video.
The video, “Everything That’s Going On With You”, is a series of contiguous interviews that Araujo conducted with eight, first-year college students, including her son. The subjects can be observed sharing stories and insights into their lives at an emotionally complex and transitional time.
The paintings are comprised of acrylic paint, inks, dyes and collage on aluminum panel. The collage elements (custom made and generic wallpaper) interrupt the picture plane with reoccurring motifs such as chain link fencing and images of Bonnie Elizabeth Parker (actually Faye Dunaway in the movie Bonnie and Clyde) spilling from the car in which she was shot to death.
Araujo takes multiple steps to cleave form from loaded content, signifier from signified, thus distancing the original image from a recognizable context. The techniques she employs include obscuration with paint, distortion through reproduction, and ‘semantic satiation’, whereby the repetition of a word causes it to briefly seem devoid of meaning. She selects wallpaper patterns with orderly and repetitive designs, then disharmonizes their symmetry by cutting the wallpaper into irregular shapes and scattering them across the panels. The surfaces of the paintings expand and contract, push and pull at the viewer — rolling waves of entanglement are followed by lulls that propel the viewer back to the surface. The contradictory gestures in each series of work are Sisyphean performances, which hold meaning in abeyance.
Both the paintings and the video examine the space between knowing and not knowing. In this way, the exhibition establishes a connection between the lived life and the creative life (as embodied in the act of painting). At the same time, one cannot help but be aware of the contrast between the particularity of spoken words in the video and the resistance to the particular that is a defining characteristic of the paintings. The exchange between these two forms is part of the dynamic tension of this exhibition.
Michele Arajuo lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
STUDIO10 is located at 56 Bogart Street
(Morgan Avenue stop on the L train) in Bushwick.
Gallery hours: Thursday through Sunday 1 - 6 pm or by appointment
Contact: studio10bogart@gmail.com (718) 852-4396 www.studio10bogart.com