Pita Brooks and Kristin Rogers

Living and working together in Lakewood, Pita Brooks and Kristin Rogers create artworks that are at once entrenched in material explorations, and in the expression of ideas surrounding life’s absurd incongruities. Sometimes they create collaboratively and sometimes independently. Their work as a whole is a layered dialogue about both the situational and the dispositional.

 

Pita Brooks’ work examines the balances and imbalances between organic and synthetic production. She takes a modestly cynical look at how these systems are too often either grossly abused or wildly misinterpreted. With a pronounced interest in intricacy and finely hidden details, her diorama-like landscapes—largely encaustic—present wonderfully waxy narratives of unbelievable (dis)proportions.

 

Kristin Rogers’ work explores the interplay between the delicate and the makeshift, between the coarse and the refined. Using reclaimed construction materials as the building blocks, his works create an unsettling limbo of deconstructed environments that have been, nonetheless, carefully reconstructed. The assemblages resonate as the artist turns his attention to conceptual layers that pertain to the (social) constructions of meaning—particularly around notions of labor, power, authority, community, and language.

 

The gallery will will be transformed to feature this expressive, three-dimensional exhibition.

 

Barbara Stanford

Whatever you do, don’t call Barbara’s work “medical”. Though the term might come in handy, given her body of work that will be exhibited at Maria Neil Art Project this May, she struggles daily to engage the viewer in the hopes that they retain ownership of their bodies and better understand them within and without.

 

“The majority of people willfully and blissfully remain in denial and ignorance of the contents of the ‘house’ they are living in, walking around in, sleeping in, etc., every second of their earthly existence. We have been so accustomed and even trained to leave all this to the doctors that I consider artistically confronting people with their own physical makeup to be the equivalent to breaking a long held taboo, much like the advent of psychotherapy revealing the unconscious with all its dark and frequently unsavory aspects.”

 

Ms. Stanford has been creating art mostly for herself and for a handful of juried and group exhibitions. Having never shown commercially, nearly twenty years of work will be on display to the public for the very first time. Emotion runs heavy in her work. Every bone, nerve ending, and muscle is recreated with the understanding that there is greater meaning to them besides the obvious. All mediums are open for exploration, and in every new experience is another piece to the bigger puzzle.

 

Pita Brooks & Kristin Rogers: Relentless Incongruities

March 6 – April 19

Opening Reception: 5 – 10 pm Friday, March 6

 

Barbara Stanford: Imperceptible Paradigm

May 1 – June 14

Opening reception: 5 – 10 pm Friday, May 1

 

Maria Neil Art Project

15813 Waterloo Rd

Cleveland, OH 44110

216.481.7722

marianeilartproject.com

 

Every First Friday: 5 – 10 pm

Wednesdays: 2 – 8 pm

Saturdays & Sundays: 12 – 5 pm

Other hours by appointment.