Johnny Abrahams‘ lives and works in New York. His latest body of work consists of painstakingly painted op-art pieces. Working exclusively in black and white these large patterns are absolutely disorienting. Once the viewers eyes become accustomed to each piece, elaborate mazes dazzle the senses. “Johnny Abrahams’ panel paintings are made up of various relationships between pattern, shape, and composition, using only a single width of band in either black or white acrylic paint. A pattern is chosen for its impact on perception. Line is perceived where no line exists, and shape suggested by the termination of many “lines” along an implied edge. Light is broken into its constituent colors, which move in opposition across the surface. Approaching a work, a design may appear subtly constructed of two tones or tone gradations; passed a threshold, these reduced elements become vibratory, destabilizing the fixed gaze of the eye.

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Artist Mark Dean Veca opened his new solo exhibit Made For You and Me at Cristin Tierney  January 31st and is on view through March 9th.  The title of the exhibit is a lyric from the Woodie Guthrie song This Land is Your Land.  The song, originally expressing an anti-capitalist sensibility, has since often been appropriated to convey capitalist sentiments  such as growth through consumption.  Interestingly, Veca’s work often reverses this same process.  He re-appropriates corporate images to comment on corruption, consumption, and a generally waning culture.  Appropriately the gallery statement calls his work a kind of “Sinister Pop”.  This is particularly evident in his piece titled Tailspin.  The piece depicts the Exxon-Mobil Pegasus pointing down, blue on one side, red on the other, and spinning.  Tailspin subtly references a society’s consumption dependent on energy resources that are exceedingly spinning out of control.

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Benjamin Rawson lives and works in the UK. His gouache paintings and drawings are often presented as house diagrams where op-art patterns, tropical foliage, and basketballs run wild. Other works feature densly layered vegetation filled to the brim with every color in the rainbow. It is as if the artist is presenting post modern psychedelic versions of Mouse Trap for a culture obsessed with sports and illusions of paradise.

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Western Exhibitions in Chicago, IL recently opened an exhibition entitled Plant Life. The show was curated by Geoffrey Todd Smith and is on view through March 9th. The show brings together a group of artists with a wide variety of techniques as they approach the subject of plants, flowers, and weeds. From traditional still lifes to experimental assemblage the show injects life into age old motifs. From the press release: “Plant Life is a group exhibition of artists who take flowers, plants or weeds as their subject. Each artist transforms and manipulates, formally and conceptually, their leafy content through a variety of materials and manners of expression, asserting their idiosyncratic visions by obsessing over materials, offering the plants new context while broadening the relationship to their human neighbors.” The show features Jonathan Gardener, Chinatsu Ikeda, Heidi Norton, Tyson Reeder, Mindy Rose Schwartz, Eric Wert, and Scott Wolniak.

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Diane Han is an illustrator and graphic designer originally from Korea, but now living and working in Los Angeles. While diverse, a common thread through Diane’s work is a play on words. Working largely with acrylic on paper, Diane plays with different means of representing animals in order to tell a story that is often critically and socially driven, while still managing to be so approachable and pleasant. I personally love the skunk piece after the jump, talk about a problem-solver.

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