Fitzroy Gallery is pleased to present two exhibitions of work by Meg Cranston and Gibb Slife, both opening Sunday, May 4.

Meg Cranston

Los Angeles-based artist Meg Cranston’s work, rife with levity and wit, investigates the intersection between the individual and shared experience, and has previously included performance, sculpture, text and video, often referencing personal attributes and historical events.

In this installation, comprised of paintings and collages, Cranston combines found imagery with abstract forms, layering real signifiers and content—-a bleached blonde, onion rings, fashion watches, Vasarely-esque Op-Art designs are all represented. Acknowledging the sociopolitical importance of the medium in early modernist art, Cranston’s semiotic use of color, texture, form, and typography are a nod at commercial advertising and the use of photomontage.

Meg Cranston was born in 1960, Baldwin, NY. She received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts and her BA from Kenyon College, and is the acting Chair of the Fine Arts Department at Otis College, where she has been a member of faculty for over twenty years. Cranston has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, J. Paul Getty Community Foundation Artist Grant, Architectural Foundation of American Art in Public Places Award, COLA Artist Grant, and Artadia NADA New York Award for her installation "Emerald City" with Fitzroy Gallery. Exhibiting internationally since 1988, Cranston will have a solo exhibition at Fitzroy Gallery in November 2014, and her work was recently exhibited at LAXART and "Made in LA 2012", at the Hammer Museum. Cranston received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts and her BA from Kenyon College.

Gibb Slife

“Media cross one another in time, which is no longer history.”, wrote Friedrich Kittler in "Gramophone, Film, Typewriter".

The divergence of content that causes a psychological shift is in essence the impetus of the practice of collage. In this recent suite of paintings by Gibb Slife that intention to dislocate and reorient the subject matter, in this case wallpaper, produces questions about authenticity, composition and labor. The wallpaper patterns, meticulously reproduced with requisite slits and stains, are from such sources as a book on Russia’s “Silver Age” Art Nouveau textiles and current West Elm and CB2 catalogs.

A series of contradictions are developed such as weight vs. ephemera, fact vs. fiction and natural vs. processed. The verdict of these questions isn’t ever necessarily determined, or if it is in a moment, can shift psychologically again, starting the investigation all over.

Gibb Slife was born in 1975 in Cleveland, Ohio. He received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1997. Slife’s work has recently been exhibited in "More Young Americans", curated by Susanne van Hagen, Marc-Olivier Wahler and Miguel Macedo Basto de Carvalho, at L’Enclos des Bernardins, Paris; "Bass! How low can you go?", curated by Amir Shariat, Leila Heller Gallery, New York; and "Blind Cut", curated by Jonah Freeman, at Marlborough Chelsea, New York. Slife lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.