KYLIE MANNING, GRACE MELTZER, JAY MIRIAM:
SUNSETS ON MARS ARE BLUE
June 12 - July 18, 2021
(in the little gallery)

SUNSETS ON MARS ARE BLUE - CHECKLIST PDF

Sunsets on Mars are Blue is a three person painting exhibition featuring Kylie Manning, Jay Miriam and Grace Metzler focusing on constructed realities. The three painters create worlds that determine what feels real rather than what is connected to reality, and whether there is a difference. All of the works - finding their own place between figuration and abstraction - contemplate our relationship towards time and attempt to evoke a sense of humor within heavy spaces. In organizing this show, Kylie Manning pays homage to Elaine de Kooning and Lee Krasner, and the history of the East End as a magical outpost for misfits and introverts. "Frequently referred to as the End of the World, it feels like the perfect place where people might intuit the otherworldly quality of our work."

Kylie Manning deals with the tradition of gesture as filtered through the lens of contemporary German painting. This brings the concept of representation and degrees of reality into focus. Her work simultaneously implies and denies narrative, expressed through light and brushwork. This hybrid character is informed by the biography of someone born in Alaska and partially raised in Mexico. Her observations return in disintegrating, dystopian landscapes that are both anarchic and humorous. Large, undulating masses billow forth and reveal themselves to the viewer only gradually and force us to contemplate our relationship with intimacy as well as nature. At the same time, her virtuoso brushwork displays an irreverent spontaneity that manages to evoke a specific time and place, thereby grounding us as viewers in our own here and now. - Armin Kunz

Grace Metzler paints darkly humorous scenes conjured from her imagination. Some characters appear across multiple works, “stopping by" like old friends or family members; others are extensions of herself. Despite this internal focus, the world of Metzler’s figures is often linked to the present day, with iconographies distilled from social media and television. The personal narratives and references to contemporary daily life synthesize our most ID like desires.  -Yossi Milo

Jay Miriam’s paintings contain a caldron of earthly delights, dreamscapes and momento mori, stirred up and splayed loose for the hungry viewer.
– Erin Goldberger, Director at Half Gallery / New York, NY.
Jay Miriam is an expressionist painter who primarily works with the female figure. Her canvases evolve from imagination, pulling from a memory or emotion to create worlds filled with nudity, laughter, and the occasional orgy. She isn't concerned with the realism of form as much as she is with the raw insides of our psyche. Her paintings often contain a secret, wrapped in humor, visible for the viewer to uncover.