BLACK / WHITE
curated by Brian Alfred and Shay Kun
On View: January 11th - February 22nd 2014
Opening Reception: January 11th, 6-8 PM
If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading. - Lao Tzu
LaMontagne Gallery is proud to present BLACK/WHITE, the first gallery exhibition co-curated by artists Brian Alfred and Shay Kun. This group exhibition will feature pieces by twenty five artists living and working from New York to Los Angeles. The works were created using a variety of media and methods and deal with widely differing content, but are all composed with a palette of black and white.
Alfred and Kun sought to bring together a diverse group of artists whose personal styles and preferred subject matter appear quite dissimilar and unrelated and asked them to create works specifically for the exhibit, all in black and white. Some of these artists have worked with this limited
palette before, while for others this was the first time. The objective was to create a dialog within the varied subject matter and ways of making imagery with the absence of color serving as the continuing thread.
The concept for this exhibit emerged out of the idea that in order to grow and develop and continue to create interesting work artists need to constantly challenge themselves. A challenge may manifest in the exploration of a medium or scale outside of the artist's comfort zone or it may take the form of self-imposed limitations. Each of these artists, whether a sculptor, painter, photographer or printmaker, was asked to create a black and white piece of a modest size.
Through this exhibit the curators aim to expose the viewer to an eclectic group of artists who created work within the same contextual limitations. Each artist responded differently in the way they adapted their personal practice to meet the imposed challenges. Brought side by side, all of these essentially disparate pieces will bring about a rich juxtaposition between the artists' differing styles and means of image making, as well as between their individual responses to the context within which all were compelled to work. The resulting dialog may be the genesis of change in the way these artists create their work moving forward.