Unlock the Pattern – Jean Foos 11/06/2021


 

Local Project is pleased to announce Unlock the Pattern, a solo show by Jean Foos, on exhibit from Saturday, November 6 through Saturday, November 27. Opening reception:
Sat. November 6 from 6-8 pm
Gallery Hours:
Thursday & Friday 2–8 pm, Saturday & Sunday 2–7pm
(or by appointment: studio@jeanfoos.com)

Unlock the Pattern is a site-specific installation of new painting and sculpture by Jean Foos. The entire gallery is an immersive assemblage featuring walls hung with painted shapes derived from reclaimed packaging materials. This exhibition continues an ongoing project first developed during a four-month 4Heads Governors Island Residency (2020).

“I respond to the ready-made shapes and walls,” Foos explains. “What is their history? What did they contain in the past? What do their surfaces tell me now? How does a series of lines or shapes develop into a pattern? It’s a mysterious process, the way the brushstrokes accumulate and form a rhythm all their own.”

Foos’s work reveals the patterns inherent in the bumpy paper pulp forms and timeworn brick walls—drawing out the natural meanderings, tessellations, and cracks that their existing planes and textures suggest. These she meticulously and meditatively exposes—while following painter Joan Mitchell’s oft-repeated directive: “Put your feelings in there. Don’t just paint some shit, like you don’t care.”

This exhibition is made possible by the Queens Council on the Arts with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

 

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Jean Foos is a visual artist who favors ad hoc urban settings—crumbling piers, abandoned military housing, community gardens—for exhibition of her work. She currently has a studio at Culture Lab LIC, where she is an artist-in-residence and frequent exhibitor at their Plaxall Gallery. Hal Bromm Gallery (NYC) recently presented her sculpture in two group shows. In 2020, she participated in shows at the Susquehanna Art Museum (Harrisburg, PA) and The Corner at Whitman-Walker (Washington, D.C.). Her sculptural tower, “Convulsive Beauty in the Fur Teacup Bar,” was shown at Empirical Nonsense Gallery and in the “Every Woman Biennial” (both 2019 in NYC). Curator Jonathan Weinberg included Foos in two shows, in 2016 and 2018, that highlighted her involvement with the downtown artists community in the 1980s and 90s, entitled “Something Possible Everywhere: Pier 34, NYC 1983” and “Painting to Survive: 1985–1995.”

PRESS RELEASE