New Work By Bob Budin & John Price
Opening Reception: Friday, September 8th, 2017, 6-9pm
On View Through October 6th, 2017
John Price's drawn characters seem assembled from a list of parts: one gets four legs, a beak, a fin and some spots. Another gets two pairs of ears and is wearing lipstick. Two tails, antlers and a long neck. A sort of goat with three pink humps on its back. These features are often only lightly suggested to the extent that some characters are little more than a notched or amoeboid contour with something like a face. The creatures are dispersed, irregularly, in a choppy landscape of marker and crayon, always in profile as if waiting to be classified by an imagined biologist.
Robert Budin's landscapes have similarities in structure to those of John Price: simple divisions of land and sky, atomized characters here and there, a preference for broad shape over detail. Budin's characters, however, are anonymous: repeated silhouettes of people doing little more than conversing. They are accompanied by remnants of geometric functions: an axis, an arc, a trajectory, often gargantuan in scale among the little figures. The images are unassuming, but this scale disparity between landscape and figure and the ambling compositional approach add a bit of subtle humor that is characteristic of much of Robert's work.