Karin Bravin will be curating at Spring/Break Art Show for the third year in a row. This year she will exhibit a show called Dis-Place that will include work by Jeffrey Beebe, Amanda C. Mathis and Shiri Mordechay
Karin Bravin will present three artists working in three different media that explore the idea of a voyage into unknown. Each world they explore is personal and familiar, yet simultaneously strange and foreign.
Shiri Mordechay explores an anthropomorphic society filled with embattled figures, animals and natural forces, a journey through the mind. Jerry Saltz wrote, in his review of Mordechay's 2008 exhibition "Shiri Mordechay gives us a topsy-turvy world of mundane and mad images…It's Charles Adams meets Edgar Allen Poe meets Animal Planet. Mordechay never allows us to look at any one thing; chaos and tumult reign”. Using ink, acrylic, wire and paper, Mordechay creates chaotic installations through cutting and reassembling.
With a profound debt to the world-building language of Dungeons & Dragons and the fantasy/science fiction genres, Jeffrey Beebe has been obsessively drawing and writing out his world of Refractoria—a comprehensive imagino-ordinary world that is equal parts autobiography and pure fantasy—for the last fifteen years. He lives a cloistered, studio-bound life fixating on the creation of his monomaniacal maps, diagrams, genealogical charts, portraits, and other pseudo-archival ephemera. Creating parallel universes filled with fantastical characters, unusual beasts, and alternative terrains, Beebe repackages the past and contextualizes a life.
Whereas both Mordechay and Beebe give a nod to the work of Hieronymus Bosch, and depict a strange epic journey, Amanda Mathis’ work is an exploration of thoughts on dwelling and personal narrative. She explores notions of home and memory through the use of architectural imagery, and salvaged materials. Her work evokes a home that has been unearthed, picked apart, spliced together or turned upside down. Blurring the boundaries, her works at once appear comforting, familiar and domestic and on the other hand disconcerting and warped. Is the home a place you really want to be? For her site-specific installations, she will use salvaged carpets, wallpaper remnants, bits of molding and furniture.