Monster
Gallery A
March 7- March 29, 2025
Opening Reception: March 7, 2025, 6:00-9:00 PM
Hours: Friday/ Saturday, 1:00-6:00 PM and by appointment
M. David & Co. is pleased to present Monster, a group exhibition of works by Amelia Biewald, S. Klitgaard, Helen O’Leary, Gret Sterret Smith, and Kyle Staver.
Featuring a range of paintings, drawings, and sculptures in various media, Monster pertains to notions of monsters, monstrosities, and monstrousness. Some of these notions are readily apparent in the artists’ works. Some are less than overt. With monsters in the mix, nothing is inert.
Be Aware: Monster
by Paul D’Agostino
Monsters are everywhere. All the time. Bad monsters and good monsters. Big monsters and small monsters. Real monsters and metaphorical monsters. Monsters we see, monsters out of sight. Monsters we hear, feel, dream, or otherwise sense. Monsters are right there somewhere if we look around, listen close, and pay attention.
Monsters are in the movies and on television. They’re in news headlines and on news broadcasts. Some monsters battle other monsters. Some monsters report on other monsters. There are greater and lesser monsters. Monsters in attics. Monsters in toy chests. Skeletons in closets often serve as concealed stand-ins for monsters hidden in our minds. Some monsters are horrific. Some are relatable. Some monsters incite anxiety, fear, and loathing. Some just want to be friends.
Deep traditions exist and are compounded over time of monsters and monstrosities of manifold forms, and of manifold sorts, and these monsters represent all manner of things and take on various roles. Some monsters of lore symbolize or embody awful terrors, but not all of them are so horrendous. Some assume different characteristics according to shifting contexts. Some monsters conjure primordial fears from immemorial pasts. Some unleash freshly fearsome hells of the immediate present. Some are harbingers of things to come. Some monsters might even stir within us, disturbing our consciousness, waiting for us to succumb.
So monsters are everywhere, within and without. And they might not all be invariably bad. In a most fundamental, etymological sense, monsters are manifestations or beings that ‘show themselves’ in one way or another – lurking or haunting, rumbling or roaring, prowling or pouncing – so as to warn or admonish, caution or instruct, remind or raise alarm, foretell or portend. A monstrous being might appear as unnerving or frightening, or ominous or evil, but the essential message it seeks to convey is perhaps more curiously mysterious: ‘I am here. See me. Be aware.’ If the ultimate effect of encountering a monster is to make us stay away from something perilous, or to remind us to better shield ourselves from dangers all around or dangers to come, then perhaps we’re better off encountering that monster and heeding its warning as opposed to carrying on unawares. On that note, when’s the last time you checked under your bed?
For the five artists in Monster – Helen O’Leary, S. Klitgaard, Kyle Staver, Amelia Biewald, and Gret Sterret Smith – monsters pertain to all of the above and then some, and they inform and find expression in their paintings, drawings, and sculptures in a range of media in various ways, and not necessarily conspicuously or literally. Through their artworks selected for this show, the artists in Monster suggest, point to, give physical form to, define, and redefine all manner of monsters and monstrosities. And as you can read here, the artists do so in their own words as well. Like their artworks pertaining to monsters, the artists’ definitions of ‘monster’ indicate various visions, interpretations, contours, and understandings – all intended to invite further dialogue and spark deeper conversations.
And so, after you read the artists’ takes on the show’s theme, take a moment to reflect on what ‘monster’ means to you. If you need to conjure a monster while doing so, just look around, listen close, pay attention. Keep cave. Stay quick. Be aware.
– Paul D’Agostino, Ph.D. is an artist, writer, educator, curator, and translator.
Monster artists Helen O’Leary, S. Klitgaard, Kyle Staver, Amelia Biewald, and Gret Sterret Smith responding to the prompt: What does the word ‘monster’ mean or suggest for you? How might monsters find form in your work?
Helen O’Leary
I am working with the myth of the Cailleach, the hag of Beara, an Irish force of a woman. Neither good nor evil, she is fierce and wild as she shapes, breaks, and recreates landscapes and affects weather. She is feared and revered across Celtic cultures. She looks after animals, shelters goats, and is the patron saint of wolves. Rocks fall from her gathered apron as she legs over mountains, one-eyed, pale, aging. I absolutely love her.
S. Klitgaard
Monsters are constantly changing in their symbology while sticking true to their mythology. They are built out of our fears and failures, and are also blamed for them.
Kyle Staver
Monsters are made up of the stuff I’m most frightened of. They are vague in description, which gives them easier access to those unnameable corners of dread lurking inside me. I should also mention they prefer the dark.
Amelia Biewald
A monster to me represents something that is universal, but hard to explain verbally. It’s something that elicits a sort of primal reaction, a scratch at your psyche, usually mild, occasionally causing a fight or flight response. For me it’s usually visual, something I can witness and that confronts me and sparks reaction, but it can also be felt through words, like an ominous warning about the future. A monster is not really any one thing. It’s a collective ancient darkness that is timeless. An eerie nervousness or anxiety.
Gret Sterret Smith
Monstrous beauty: an umbilical adjective sustains a vital yet overused noun. This monstrous pair is inclusively rich with beautiful beasts, comic prodigies of excess, and the sublime grotesque. Honest, weird one-offs breathe free and fearless, a sympathetic portent and offering for our time.
Lesley Bodzy: Levity and Depth
Gallery B
M. David & Co. Gallery is pleased to present Levity and Depth, Lesley Bodzy's first solo exhibition in Gallery B, opening on Friday, March 7 from 6 - 9 pm.
M. David & Co. Gallery is pleased to present Levity and Depth, Lesley Bodzy's first solo exhibition in Gallery B, opening on Friday, March 7 from 6 - 9 pm.
Contradictions, dichotomies, counterpoints, and polarities imply instances of contrast, division, opposition, and dissimilarity. They point to notions of paradoxes and incongruities, and to ideas of variable distinctions pitched at distant extremities.
All such circumstances are, in broad strokes, relational. While indicative of difference and disequilibrium, they can also be situated along lines of interconnectedness. To be fully understood, indeed, they must be. Their relativities entail placements on common spectrums or conveyance through shared mediums. There’s no counterbalancing, for example, without something on either side of some semblance of a balance. The counterpoint to a point only expresses its full significance if the point in question has been expressed sufficiently enough to be meaningfully countered. ‘This one here’ makes more demonstrative sense if there’s also a ‘that one there’. And back and forth, and vice-versa, and so on.
Decoupled, these types of relationships become weakened or incoherent, or they fall apart entirely. Yet insofar as they remain coupled in some way, they cohere. Such coupled relativities of contrasting relationships, contradictory elements, and oppositional circumstances are an abiding source of inspiration for sculptor Lesley Bodzy. They inform how she selects and amalgamates various materials for her mixed-media sculptures, and they furnish conceptual grist to latch onto while contemplating formal qualities, palette choices, and process-related moves, and when determining if certain pieces have reached their moments of completion in states of subtly raw messiness or delicate finesse. Experimentation is of paramount importance to the artist, and she embraces it in ways that allow for planning and happenstance to come into procedurally active and readily visible confluence.
Bodzy’s interests in material convergence and thematic divergence furnish the aesthetic backbone for Levity and Depth, the artist’s solo exhibition of new sculptures at M. David & Co. Gallery. Working in her studios in New York City and Houston, Bodzy has created a multivalent body of work conceived, for the purposes of the exhibition, as a large-scale, site-specific installation featuring, on the one hand, counterbalanced couplings of formally interconnected pieces and, on the other, counterpointing aggregations of autonomous objects. Arranged in various configurations from floor to ceiling, Bodzy’s curiously amorphous, bizarrely bulbous works hover and loom in her capacious workspaces, dangling around and sprawling about in an atmosphere of cavernous shadow-play, suspended kinetics, and ecstatic, somewhat sci-fi theatrics. Many of the hanging works feature balloons in variable states of full or partial inflation, or even impact-suggestive deflation, ostensibly the material consequence of subjection to pour-overs, sprays, drizzlings, and somewhat contained yet forceful dumpings of interactive materials such as resin, acrylic paint, and polyurethane foam. While materials such as these evidence a degree of chemical sameness given their shared essential properties as plastics, their existence in very differently inert or activated states at the moment of incorporation into the creative process – solids and pseudo-solids, liquids of various weights and viscosities, gaseous billows and expansions, stretchy elastics – ensure that they’ll react to, counteract, and interact with one another, catalyzing formal and material destabilization and metamorphosis before settling into place, balancing each other out, establishing a level of functionally stable equilibrium. Bodzy’s sculptures are thus the consequence and embodiment of all this pushing and pulling, inflating and deflating, eventually curing and cohering activity. Oppositional yet resolvable forces are captured in, laid bare by, and remain readily identifiable through the resulting works.
Rather less identifiable, however, is what these objects are, or what they might be intended to be. Their formal aspects register as both vaguely familiar and otherworldly. Their multivalent plastic-ness is plain enough, but they also seem to cosplay as various other material realities: ceramics, blown glass, organic curiosities, mineral deposits, extracted and preserved organs. For Bodzy, such elusive identifiability is the point. Most simply, the sculptures are what they are, or what they turned out to be, by dint of the instantiation and working-out of material processes. The artist’s aim is for the sculptures to serve as abstracted vessels of the themes of contradiction, paradox, and incongruity that inspire her, while also furnishing tangible attestation to the possibility of resolution. Bodzy seeks also to convey with them something of the mysteries of life and death, and the effects of time and aging on the body, as well as an array of related dualities: inhalation and exhalation, accretion and secretion, intention and chance, rawness and refinement, natural and artificial, beautiful and abject, sensual and unemotional, shiny polish and goopy mess. In palette and form alike, flesh-tone works such as Translucent Fragility, InstinctualSciamachy, and Rancorous Glare appear to carry these themes with a sense of carnal vitality and apparent lightness, while larger, more formally complex and chromatically heavier pieces such as Diaphanous Nebula, Unsteady Contingency, and Multiplicitous Instances hint at these matters much more enigmatically, and with substantial weightiness and gravitas. The yields of so many reactive processes, interactive forces, and invasive interventions, Bodzy’s sculptures attain modes of enduring rest in states of deeply curious elegance.
In Levity and Depth, Lesley Bodzy makes a prodigious display of counterpoints and distinctions, incongruities and divergences, and contrasts and differences. But she also makes plain that interconnections are inherent to such circumstances as well, and that resolution and equilibrium can be wholly plausible if not inevitable outcomes of resistive processes. In Bodzy’s sculptures, semantic and formal abstractions find expressive resolve through experimental actions and material interactions. Their curiously restful allure lures you into looking, and their deeply nuanced look lures you into lingering.
– Paul D’Agostino, Ph.D. is an artist, writer, educator, curator, and translator.
Dioramas in Dialogue
Gallery C
M. David & Co. Gallery is pleased to present Dioramas in Dialogue, featuring work by Ellen Anthony, Marilyn Banner, Phyllis Famiglietti, Patricia O’Maille, Claudia Renfro, and Cynthia Sparrenberger.
Dioramas in Dialogue
by Paul D’Agostino
Fantastical fabulations, dynamic figurations, delightful pastiches, soulful characterizations, material curiosities, narrative insinuations, and atmospheric theatrics of secret histories and escapist mysteries abound in Dioramas in Dialogue, a group showcase for Outsider Art Fair, presented by M. David & Co. Gallery, featuring new artworks by six contemporary artists: Marilyn Banner, Cynthia Sparrenberger, Ellen Anthony, Patricia O’Maille, Claudia Renfro, and Phyllis Famiglietti. Presenting their works in three collaborative pairs, these artists tell obliquely apparent yet distinctly compelling stories of joy and grief, life and loss, lessons learned and successes earned, and real-world struggles and dreamworld marvels.
For all six artists in Dioramas in Dialogue, striking notes of formal variance by satisfying material curiosities experimentally is a paramount part of the process. It’s a manner of moving things forward in their studio practices without unraveling connective threads, a way to maintain consistency while reveling in the throes of creating something fresh. This entails working in a range of media, abstract formalities, and presentational modes – all crucial not merely for practical purposes, but insofar as it serves as a prolific source of inspiration as well. Such an approach is iterative yet not repetitive, and one that demonstrates imaginative freedom, creative determination, and expressive continuity in equal measure. These artists’ practices are as rooted in confidence and intention as they are in experimentation and impulse – the traits that stoke the burn that fuels the churn. For this group of seasoned makers, their common creative recipe is tried and true: Know what you’re cooking. Never cook it the same way twice. Remix ingredients and methods. And remember there’s always a novel way to cook it up – or something new to cook altogether.
It’s not a recipe these artists arrived at overnight. As is the case for many artists, it’s an exploratory ethos that results from a mixed bag of creative experiences – from a lifetime of working instinctively and by trial and error, to mentoring and training inside and outside of institutional settings, to developing skills honed through various personal and professional pursuits that eventually make their way into artistic expression in the studio, especially once it’s possible for a devoted studio practice to become a primary focus. This same mixed bag of experiences is also one that, for some artists – despite how genuinely enriching such a nonlinear creative background can be – might nonetheless lead to limited exhibition opportunities or exposure in the art world, particularly when one’s artistic practice is held in check by family life and family loss, personal and interpersonal tribulations, and variable modes or extended periods of social or geographical isolation. Pursuing a professional path as an artist is ridden with circumstantial challenges even without so many additional limitations, so the sum total can amount to quite a lot to overcome. Nurturing material enthusiasms, however, and staying active in the studio by staying actively curious, can make many such real limitations seem immaterial.
It’s no surprise then that the artists in Dioramas in Dialogue, given their common ground in mixed-bag artistic recipes and diversified, at times challenging creative backgrounds, operate within a shared sphere of assorted, bountifully expressive abstract aesthetics and narrative thematics. These characteristics are readily identifiable for each artist individually and for the group of six as a whole, and they come into particularly delightful, formally complementary focus through the collaborative installations they’ve developed by working in pairs. To this end, the artists’ aim was to convey a sense of shared staging, dioramic interplay, and implicit dialogue among their works. Hence Marilyn Banner’s profoundly spirited, loosely delineated figurations on richly textured raw surfaces, casually accented with loosened threads splayed out at the fringes, alongside Cynthia Sparrenberger’s charismatic sculptural characters, including a sassy rabbit strutting along like a tiny giant storming onto the scene, with a cheerfully defiant gait, from an unseen land of make-believe at stage left. Hence, too, Ellen Anthony’s rustically charming, theatrically charged bricolage sculptures perched and dangling, as if idling in wait in an obscure puppet master’s secret workshop, among Patricia O’Maille’s nimbly rendered, soulfully folkloric, storybook-suggestive apparitions that seem to have emerged wholesale, with human and avian likenesses, onto vintage-like papers from some mystical ether. And hence, as well, Claudia Renfro’s deftly embroidered, colorfully embellished, fabulously animated tableaus of cartoonish figurations fantastically rejoicing in whimsical reverie, parading around next to Phyllis Famiglietti’s painstakingly assembled, sympathetically amusing composite sculptures that scan as humbly engineered toys or elemental automatons discovered on the tool-cluttered workbench of an inspired tinkerer.
The artworks in Dioramas in Dialogue inhabit a world of intrigue, imagination, and mystery where the preciousness of life and fundamentality of fun have been lost on no one. It’s a place where quieted acoustics whisper variable narratives that present as visually vociferous, even raucous. In this collaborative exhibit, the artworks on display are in contextual dialogue with one another while speaking to viewers individually, jointly, and collectively, with an array of potential narratives lingering among them. Some such stories are hinted at by the artists themselves in their artworks’ titles, as well as in the rich and insightful reflections they composed about one another’s works on occasion of this special show. There’s a lot to explore and interpret in Dioramas in Dialogue, and a lot to relish. Unambiguous throughout is that harnessing the creative spark of joy – a long-sought, hard-fought-for, and hard-won recipe for success – is an indispensable part of the artistic process.
– Paul D’Agostino, Ph.D. is an artist, writer, educator, curator, and translator.