Dolby Chadwick Gallery is pleased to announce Hello/Goodbye, a group exhibition featuring art by Stephen De Staebler, John DiPaolo, Edwige Fouvry, Ann Gale, Hollis Heichemer, Shelley Hoyt, Katina Huston, Alex Kanevsky, Jerome Lagarrigue, Danae Mattes, Joshua Meyer, Ada Sadler, and Kai Samuels- Davis

Opening in December, a month that marks the close of one year while signifying the start of another, Hello/Goodbye explores themes of impermanence and transience broadly. What does it mean, for example, to live and die, to experience change, to let go of attachments, to have faith, and to find liberation? While each artist approaches these and other questions differently, they bear a common understanding that all life is indelibly linked and constantly changing, nothing ever repeats itself, and each moment is always different than the next.

Several of the artists featured in Hello/Goodbye focus their explorations almost exclusively on the human subject. Not only are Jerome Lagarrigue and Kai Samuels-Davis both known for their tightly-cropped paintings of faces, both also use a technique-one that relies on striking facets of colors-that reinforces motion and the passage of time. Though Ann Gale and Joshua Meyer also play with discrete brushstrokes to build up faces and bodies, the atomic-like quality of their markings encourages a vibrating, ever-shifting energy as opposed to the cinematic effect that distinguishes Lagarrigue and Samuels-Davis’s paintings. Despite these differences, the works are united by a preoccupation with the liminal: their subjects exist on the edge and in between.

These curiosities are picked up by Stephen De Staebler, whose sculptures directly confront the intermediary states touched upon by much of the art included in the exhibition. His monumental bronze statues of winged figures embody conflicting characteristics: Are they of this world, or another? Human or spirit? Modern or primordial?

While some of Alex Kanevsky and Edwige Fouvry’s most noted works are of human figures, they are also accomplished landscape painters. Rendered in heightened colors, these uninhabited, atmospheric worlds could just as easily be interpreted as coded explorations of psychological space. Shelley Hoyt’s graphic, ukiyo-e-inspired landscapes and Ada Sadler’s hyper-realistic oil paintings of empty chairs in domestic settings also invoke a certain pathos, though one that is more meditative than somber. The union of the existential and the natural is brought full circle by Danae Mattes’s mixed media artworks, which recall geological phenomena such as cracked riverbeds, marshes, and stalagmites and stalactites. The organic and prehistoric qualities of her art are visceral reminders of where we come from and where we go.

A hallmark of many of the works is their tendency to straddle naturalism and abstraction. In some of her most recent works, Katina Huston works directly from the shadows cast by human skeletons hanging from her studio ceiling; the extensive layering of pelvises, femurs, and rib cages, however, coupled with her ink’s tendency to pool and flow across the mylar, produces abstract compositions that conceal their original reference. In Christina’s World (2013), the introduction of vibrant plant life creates a palpable tension between life and death.