Pink Kid Gloves

 A.I.R. Gallery and Chashama present “Pink Kid Gloves,” a group exhibition of A.I.R. Gallery artists, curated by Jinnine Pak, a 2005-06 Fellowship recipient.

Susan Bee, Sarah Blackwelder, Fay Ku and Deborah Wasserman each address the complexities of childhood or adolescence in their work. The artists approach the topic through a personal and cultural context and challenge archetypes of adolescence by juxtaposing the innocent with the sinister.
 

    By utilizing pop imagery, pulp fiction and elements of noir in her collage paintings, Susan Bee creates tapestries of female imagery against an allegorical backdrop saturated with rich color. The execution is playful yet tightly woven.

    Sarah Blackwelder’s paintings use still life as portraiture, employing stuffed animals as subjects. By utilizing shadow, texture and light, the artist gives her toy subjects a new level of complexity and hints at their conceivably ominous character.

   Images of children are present in much of Fay Ku’s work.  Drawing on her Chinese-American background, Ku’s figures are delicately and ornately drawn on a spare picture plane. They resonate with a mythical world of good and evil, freedom and entrapment.

   Deborah Wasserman’s new work for “Pink Kid Gloves” looks at childhood from the artist’s perspective as a new mother. The grid of a map stands as a metaphor for the relationships between mother and daughter. In Wasserman’s “Letters to My Baby” series, language and words become yet another network or grid concealing hidden messages. By employing text, found objects and painted diagrams, these works explore various perceptions of time, direction and purpose.