Fantastic Animals
Group Exhibition

Opening reception - Friday, April 5th, 7-10pm

April 5th, 2013 through April 28th, 2013


BROOKLYN, NY (RELEASE March 20th, 2013) — Bunnycutlet Gallery is pleased to present Fantastic Animals, a 6-person group exhibit that presents a uniquely urban nostalgia for the mystic, communal, quaint, or forested world of traditional folk art.

Folk art is a decorative reflection of an indigenous culture, unselfconscious in its stylistic depiction of native life, cultivating cultural identity as it decorates. The prevalence and geographical diversity of folk art throughout history make it difficult to describe as a whole, but the term conjures a particular naive aesthetic in which the traditional rules of proportion and perspective are dismissed, utilitarian media derived from daily life like cloth, paper, and bright hand-made paints are employed, and a thematic connection to nature, often including fantastical animal based legends and anthropomorphized creatures, permeate throughout.

This exhibit brings together New York based artists who share, as city folk, an outsider's affinity for Folk Art's expressive sense of community - a visual longing for the type of dream-laden nature stories that are told around a fire. Artists Jared Deal, Jen Hill, and Jessica Milazzo have been exhibiting with Bunnycutlet owner Liz Artinian since 2006. Joining this crew are newcomers Niko Guardia and Efraim Klein. Each artist, while sharing academic training in illustration and animation, recreate Folk Art’s unpretentious and decorative promise of a world saturated with animals, kinship, and mystery in vastly different ways, while collectively expressing the idea that if a city dreams, it dreams of the woods.
 
 
ARTWORK ON VIEW
contact bunnycutlet(at)gmail(dot)com for availability
 
 
Liz Artinian
Winter Mouse
Silkscreen, 25-print Edition
16 x 20 Inches
$80.00
 
Liz Artinian
Hide Me
Silkscreen, 25-print Edition
16 x 20 Inches
$80.00
 
Niko Guardia
After
Oil on Masonite Board
12 x 18 Inches
$550
 
 
Niko Guardia
Before
Oil on Masonite Board
12 x 18 Inches
$550
 
Jared Deal
Bhalu

Acrylic on Masonite Board
12 x 12 inches
$300
 
Jared Deal
Lanuage Bearrier

Giclee Print
10 x 10 inches
$40
 
 
Jared Deal
Medved

Acrylic on Masonite Board
12 x 12 inches
$300
SOLD
 
Jen Hill
The Conjurer

Gouache on Paper
10 x 10 inches
$250
 
Jen Hill
The Departure

Gouache on Paper
14 x 16 inches
$900
 
 
Jen Hill
He Tells Slanderous Gossip

Gouache on Paper
9 x 11 inches
$700
 
Jen Hill
Him

Gouache on Paper
6 x 8 inches
$200
SOLD
 
Jen Hill
The Procession

Gouache on Paper
21 x 21 inches
$600
 
 
Jen Hill
Rapture

Gouache on Paper
13 x 16 inches
$450
 
Jen Hill
He Tells Slanderous Gossip II

Gouache on Paper
17 x 21 inches
$600
 
Jen Hill
I Spy

Gouache on Paper
17 x 21 inches
$600
 
 
Jen Hill
Tea Time

Gouache on Paper
10 x 10 inches
$250
 
Jen Hill
The Eye

Gouache on Paper
18 x 16 inches
$700
 
Jen Hill
The Spell

Mixed Media
20 x 20 inches
$700
 
 
Jen Hill
The Road Less Traveled

Gouache on Paper
17 x 21 inches
$900
 
Jen Hill
The Witness

Gouache on Paper
17 x 21 inches
$900
 
Efraim Acevedo Klein
First Show

Acrylic on Canvas
30 x 40 inches
$600
 
 
Efraim Acevedo Klein
Roof Party

Acrylic on Canvas
30 x 40 inches
$600
 
Jessica Milazzo
Oh Baby

Embroidery
5 Inches Round inches
$250
 
Jessica Milazzo
Eyes Up Here I

Embroidery, Googly Eyes
6 x 8 inches
$400
 
 
 
______________________________________________

Music/DJ Nithya Rajendran
 
Event Photography Brendan Adamson
______________________________________________


ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Liz Artinian is a Brooklyn based fine art painter as well as the founder of Bunnycutlet Gallery. Her long career in the animation field as an art director, painter, and background designer continues to inform her curatorial aesthetic and fine art career. In addition to running the Bunnycutlet Gallery, Liz is currently supervising the color department for the animated Adult Swim series The Venture Bros, which will begin production of its 6th season in the fall of 2013. Liz's illustration studies at the Rhode Island School of Design have been a fundamental influence on her artistic point of view. Her work is a constant advocation for conceptual art that employs figurative images and illustrative techniques, owing a great deal of inspiration to art movements that embrace these principles, popularized by terms like "Low Brow" and "Pop Surrealism." Her series for Fantastic Animals is a bright and graphic print-art conjuring of imagined and distorted forest inhabitants.

Jared Deal is a fine artist, animator, and toy designer based in New York, and has frequently exhibited with Bunnycutlet over the years. Jared studied animation at the Art Institute of Philadelphia, and his current work as Lead Animator for Nickelodeon's Team Umizoomi landed him an Emmy nomination. His fine art work combines a bold, cartoon aesthetic with the charm and intimacy of folk art themes, utilizing a variety of media including cast plastic and sewn plush for his installations.

Jared's acrylic series for Fantastic Animals is a fetishistic dive into varied folkloric traditions. His inspiration is the mysterious charm he experiences from animal words of different folk traditions; "bhalu," a Hindu word for sloth/bear reminiscent of The Jungle Book's "Baloo", "medved," a strong snap of a word which is Russian for bear, "nanuk," a delicate-sounding Inuit word for polar bear, and "xiong mao," the song-like Chinese word for panda or bear-like cat. These sounds ring cartoon and playful in Jared's head as he masterfully decorates his compositions with painted animals.

Niko Guardia is a fine art painter living in Brooklyn, NY. He graduated from the Ringling College of Art and Design in 2011. Niko's time reading comics as a kid was an early education in a certain kind of visual storytelling that still influences him today. What drew him in, perhaps more than the comic itself, was the baroque and grandiose nature of an all-encompassing narrative cover, which he would obsess over, flip back to, and stare at.M

Kinetic images teeming with lust, revenge, and heroism are still the principal themes that inspire his oil paintings today, as he is continually preoccupied with the paperback pulp covers of the 1960's, illustrated by greats like Robert Mcginnis and James Avati. Niko's twist on these themes is the female role, traditionally sexualized and flamboyantly degraded, which he seeks to empower as the aggressor. For Bunnycutlet's spring exhibit Fantastic Animals, Niko's series "The Hunt" tells the story of a young woman in NYC who fetishizes wolves as she embarks on a vengeful and horrific task.

Jen Hill's award-winning career as an animator, illustrator, and writer of children's books undoubtedly informs her jovial fine art paintings. Jen is a graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design's Illustration program, and is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Charm and playfulness abound in Jen's gouache compositions, yet always lurking is a sense of oddity, awkwardness, or a slight imbalance. Characters, seemingly from different parts of the same story, collide in one image, dancing, chasing, or staging a single subtle and effervescent narrative. The result is an effortless pictorial encapsulation of the creepy charm that ghost stories, tall tales, folklore, and fairy tales make us nostalgic for. In the artist's own words, "Humor, mischief and mystery are absolutely elemental."

Efraim Acevedo Klein is a Brooklyn based fine art painter and filmmaker who studied film and writing at the School of Visual Arts. Efraim's work explores the kind of alienation and disjointed human relationships that plague an urban lifestyle. His reoccurring use of anthropomorphized animals is a device that, while deceivingly adding charm, further underscores a sense of "other" from the viewer's point of view. His success as an artist is his ability to make room for playfulness within the feelings of distance he seeks to evoke. Efraim's 3-painting series for Fantastic Animals takes on a cinematic quality, each staged in locations taken from memory; a rooftop party distorted by fish-eye vision, an art-punk show populated by bat kids, and the view of his former house as seen from inside a car. The resulting effect is something between a movie and a memory, partially fantastical and partially personal. In the artist's own words, "I primarily present things from my own life.... (and) I try to show people as beautifully or as horribly as I can... in the hopes of consoling, provoking, inspiring, or beguiling them."

Jessica Milazzo is a Brooklyn based fine artist whose long career as an animation director and freelance illustrator informs her art. Her work speaks in visual metaphor, using bright quips of color and controlled design as quietly humorous punctuations. Her choice to work in "delicate" media such as watercolor and embroidery is offset by her visual themes; overt sexuality, action comics, and pop culture. The resulting artwork is both elegant and jarring - a rich and controlled juxtaposition of tumult and decor, interwoven with the subtle narratives of a witty mind.

Her embroidery work transforms a medium often considered "folkish" and gives it a city-modern, pop and pin-up culture twist. The artistic limitations to working stitch-by-stitch make each mark especially important, like creating a painting that can only have a small collection of very carefully selected brush strokes, strategically placed and rigorously contemplated. Further complicating her juxtapositions, Jessica's imagery playfully contrasts as well, staging knotted grotesque tongues against candy-bright popsicles, evoking all that is sexy, vile, sticky, and sweet. In this way, Jessica's work is the extension of her flirtatious sensibility. In the artists own words, "I like to embroider a sexy pinup and contrast that with playful googly eyes, strategically placed, reminding you just where your own eyes ought to be! And hopefully providing a little giggle along the way."

 
 
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