Rachel Bers: Conjurer

Rachel Bers

Conjurer

2010
colored vellum on paper

48” x 32”

Rachel Bers: Conjurer

September 8, 2011 - October 7, 2011

Reception for the artist: Thursday, September 8, 6-8 PM

4 4 3 P A S is pleased to announce Conjurer, an exhibition of recent work by Rachel Bers. Using botanical illustrations as a point of departure, Bers creates idiosyncratic biomorphic tableaux out of collaged colored vellum. Fantastical flora and fauna interact according to an intimate logic that suggests a narrative but leaves viewers free to draw their own conclusions.

Equally playful, her soft sculptures are flexible and can be made to hold different positions both on and off the wall. Begun as gestural line drawings, they are transformed into stuffed fabric forms that, like the collages, recall living organisms but exist in a realm that is distinctly their own.

In all of her work, Bers employs a vibrant palette to evoke domestic and biological excess - and possibility.

Bers holds and MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from Brown University. She has exhibited her work at Vox Populi in Philadelphia, Muskat Studios in Boston and the Reanimation Library in Brooklyn. More work can be seen at her website at www.rachelbers.com.

Rachel Bers

Fata Morgana

2010-2011
colored vellum on paper

30” x 22” and 30” x 20”

Rachel Bers

Anteater Fantasy

2011
collaged silkscreened paper

12” x 9 “

Rachel Bers

Darling Seedling

2011
collaged silkscreened paper

12” x 9 “

Rachel Bers

Embodied Drawing 2

2008
vintage fabric, armature wire, wool

Rachel Bers

Embodied Drawing 3 

2008
vintage fabric, armature wire, wool

Rachel Bers

Embodied Drawing 1

2008
vintage fabric, armature wire, wool

Rachel Bers

Encounter 1

2009
collaged pantone paper
13" x 9"

Rachel Bers

Encounter 2

2009
collaged pantone paper
13" x 9"

Rachel Bers

Encounter 3

2009
collaged pantone paper
13" x 9"

Rachel Bers

Encounter 4

2009
collaged pantone paper
13" x 9"

Rachel Bers

Family Portrait

2011
collaged silkscreened paper

12” x 9 “

Rachel Bers

Maroon Embrace

2011
collaged silkscreened paper

12” x 9 “

Rachel Bers

Moondrop

2011
collaged silkscreened paper

12” x 9 “

Rachel Bers

The Incubating Eye

2011
collaged silkscreened paper

12” x 9 “

 

Rachel Bers

Amphibious Creation Myth

2011

colored vellum on wood

48" x 36"

Julian Talamantez Brolaski, CAConrad and Kimberly Lyons

Thursday August 25th, 7pm
Please join us for readings by Julian Talamantez Brolaski, CAConrad and Kimberly Lyons, in conjunction with the exhibition: Shapeshifters, curated by Laurel Sparks

Julian Talamantez Brolaski is the author of gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011) and several chapbooks. Advice for Lovers is forthcoming from City Lights in Spring 2012. Brolaski lives in Brooklyn where xe is an editor at Litmus Press and plays country music with Juan and the Pines (http://www.reverbnation.com/juanandthepines ). New work is on the blog hermofwarsaw.

On gowanus atropolis:

"Aspirate all h's and brace to meet Sludgie, 'erstwhal' of the Gowanus, displaced echolocator through a lush verbal wildering of neologisms, hot archaisms, and barbed portmanteaus. Brolaski finds the 'herm' in 'hermunculae' and puts the 'gee' back in 'ambigenuity.' The tongue hasn't sounded this flexed and full since Chaucer lapped up Romance, but these damesires sing instruction with their fishairs: one 'ynvents a grammatical order' so to 'speke englysshe/polymorphously.'"

- Rodney Koeneke

CAConrad is the recipient of a 2011 Pew Fellowship in the Arts. He is the author of A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon (Wave Books, 2012), The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010), Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled The City Real and Imagined (Factory School, 2010). The son of white trash asphyxiation, his childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. Visit him online at http://caconrad.blogspot.com/.

On The Book of Frank:

"CAConrad continually speaks up, speaks out, and speaks frankly, forcing a re-evaluation of culturally pervasive notions about what constitutes normative gender, sexuality, and domesticity. But The Book of Frank is not a polemic, exactly; rather, in a mode reminiscent of John Berryman's Dream Songs, Conrad's sequence of untitled, short poems catalogs via the character of Frank the aftermath of the archetypal events of life: birth, childhood, independence, sexual awaking, marriage, parenting and death. These events are not narrated so much as given an absurdist, allegorical spin - part Kafka, part Jungian imagery, but always clearly articulated...At once charming and frightening, The Book of Frank will certainly take the top of your head off, and it might just replace it with something better."

- Noah Eli Gordon, The Boston Review












Kimberly Lyons is the author of several books of poetry including Phototherapique (Ketalanche Press/Portable Press, 2008) and Saline (Instance Press, 2005). Rouge, a new collection of poems, is forthcoming from Instance Press. Her poems have recently appeared in the magazines New American Writing, Peaches and Bats, and Peepshow/Poetry (online). She is the publisher of Lunar Chandelier Press.

On Saline:

"Again and again, a mindful image is cut out of the background of the world and then placed over another context, while the hollow shape left in the the background is filled in by an image from a new context...In this regard, thought steals back and forth between objects and words, revealing a world of firefly details that comes close to descriptive hallucination...a plethora of bright, irrational bloomings, radiant insights."

- Charles Borkhuis, The Poetry Project Newsletter