Waves & Particles

Rodger Greene, Bill Hodge, Stephen Rock

Reception & Artist Talks: Thursday July 9th, 6-9pm

Stephen Rock, Bill Hodge, and Rodger Greene use pieces of familiar things (like wood, words, Styrofoam balls) to create things that startle with their newness yet simultaneously draw attention to the thing that was once familiar.

Rodger Greene’s chunky, obviously handmade sculptures look like pieces of Coney Island fixed themselves up and hit the road Muppet-style to become art objects. Clumps of stripes jut out of scalloped edges at odd angles and invite you to think about abstract painting in three dimensions with no attempt at seamless illusion. Greene writes, “Relating pleasure in discovery and engagement with perception remains my aim.”

Bill Hodge glues bits of reclaimed plywood together (most often salvaged kitchen cabinet doors), cuts it into strips, and pieces them together. The compositions are primarily two-dimensional patterns and designs that play off of the intricate markings inherent in the wood itself. Wave-like shapes undulate over a dense array of browns: siennas, ochres, umbers. Hodge writes, “My art is inspired by the beauty that hides just below the surface of old, well-worn, discarded wood that has outlived its original usefulness. I find satisfaction in giving old wood a new purpose and reclaimed beauty.”

Stephen Rock paints with watercolors on prints he makes of digital collages. The opaque, hard-edged digital imagery is interrupted by soft, blotchy, semi-transparent mark-making happening in the negative space of the digital image. Images and words are cut up and arranged with more attention to what makes sense visually than preserving the original meaning of the image or text, though hints of meaning and original contexts peek through the abstraction. Rock writes, “The images are influenced by an evolving urban aesthetic that is a mash-up of cultures and conversation, a style of visual dialogue that consumes and reconfigures itself into a new language for the hyphenated, abbreviated, multilingual world.”

– Susanna Bluhm, Gallery Director