Studio member Emma Battlebury’s work features in Triest Gallery, Brooklyn NY, within the group show ‘Speaking Esperanto’.
In the exhibition literature, it discusses how it’s “ambitious to paint with the intention that everyone will understand just what it is you are painting, just as it is ambitious, even naive, to believe in a world united by a common tongue. The paintings in this exhibition were not selected because of their shared thematic content, nor were they chosen because they might speak the same visual language. Each work is able to converse not due to their formal similarity, but merely because of the ambition of the artists, who believe, much like Esperantists, in an ongoing, sometimes lateral, progression of a timeless system. Marc Matchak paints the protagonists of a Young Adult novel series, annonymizing these characters with a shifting sense of style, texture and pattern. The gray bed cover that comprises two-thirds of the frame further complicates our attempts to situate the figures between memory and their original context. Emma Battlebury’s despondent fairy is a fantastical creature with an impressively modern sense of angst. Wings drooping, head bowed, the fairy takes a phone call with a sense of gravity antithetical to her whimsical nature. Timelessness is also abundant in Georgia Gray Gardner’s vividly rendered oil paintings. A woman with eyes closed as if in veneration is haloed like saints in medieval paintings; on her neck, she wears a 90’s-style tattoo choker. Chemtrails and scarlett clouds of smoke in the background mark something foreboding in this collision of the contemporary with the divine.”
Ormond Art Studios 