Ben Schwab and Blake Shirley
"Gallery Exhibits Cognitive New Paintings from Two Artists
Who Question the Status Quo.”
Ben Schwab and Blake Shirley at the Albany Center Gallery. Show begins July
14 and closes August 22. Both artists will attend the opening reception
on Friday August 7th from 5:00 pm to 9:00 pm in the gallery in conjunction
with First Friday.
Albany Center Gallery is located at 39 Columbia Street in downtown Albany,
across from Tricentennial Park.
Ben Schwab creates a vision of the
overpopulation of cityscapes through his use of orthogonal grids of abstract
linear configuration. He expresses the idea of expansion and growth in our
cities and questions its impact on our urban environments. His paintings
are compositions of urban landscapes that reflect his passion and interest
in the representation and visual construction of space and time with-in
a two-dimensional surface. His technique and application of paint on the
canvas creates a sense of action and change that allude to manifestation
and evolution through fundamental creation. “My work expresses ideas
of expansion and contraction related to construction in urban and suburban
environments, often connected to overcrowding populations and existential
dissociation. Working with these ideas enables me to gain a better understanding
of people, the environment and myself. “
Schwab received his M.F.A. in 2005 from the Henry Radford Hope School of
Fine Arts Indiana University and his BFA from the Missouri State University.
He has had his work exhibited across the country including the Chashama
Gallery, University of Rochester, Siena College, Benoliel Gallery at the
Center for Emerging Visual Artists in Philadelphia Pennsylvania, and the
Joseph Gierek Gallery in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He recently received the Strategic
Opportunity Stipend (SOS Grant) from the New York Foundation for the Arts
and The Arts Center of the Capital Region. In 2008 he received The Scholars
and Artists Grant from The College of Saint Rose to study and research in
Tokyo, Japan. He currently works as the assistant professor of art in Drawing
& Painting at The College of Saint Rose in Albany New York.
Blake Shirley’s recent
works are as layered with intricacy as life itself. He describes life as
a swarm of trivialities, a mixture of both familiar and the inexorably strange.
The paintings are just that, creations of vibrant, yet blasé colors
and cerebral, yet trivial items and abstractions. Shirley focus’s
on what we see everyday, and what our brains choose not to absorb into our
memory. Images of filing cabinets, plaid wallpaper and plastic high chairs
go seemingly unnoticed yet create one’s perception of reality so thoroughly.
There is an influx of information we can obtain on a day-to-day basis, but
what do we choose not to remember? What do we not see? And how exactly does
it create meaning on an individual basis? His series of paintings will attempt
to answer those questions in a way he feels most fit, by distorting what
we feel important to remember and our ambivalence towards how the world
should be perceived.
Blake Shirley relieved his MFA in 2007 from the University of Connecticut
and his BFA from the University of Utah. In 2008 he had a traveling show
Titled Sketchbook Project that made it’s way around the North East
to locations such as the Chicago Art Source Gallery, Museum of Contemporary
Art and the Laconia Gallery. He has been exhibited at the Artspace Gallery,
Sideshow Gallery, Slater Memorial Museum, Soho20 Gallery, and the Los Angeles
Center for Digital Arts. He currently teaches at the University of Connecticut.
