The four paintings on view develop from two works that were shown in the artist’s recent Frieze London booth: a six-foot-high praying mantis and a Fabergé figure of obsidian. The artist returns to this miniature world with whimsical-severe representations of model train figures. An alienated headshot crosses paths with three simulated city dwellers. The scale shift allows an expression, a view of detached honesty, and ideas of absence and presence to be naturally prominent. Their model quality conveys the whole of reality as an object to behold. This can free the viewer, and it folds back toward the city outside, a step in a negation-based quest for awareness and the desire to be There.

The open-ended title of the show, according to the artist, relates to reification, reincarnation, or other possibilities, or the imaginary life of the letter R caught in a momentary phrase. Lead Model 1 is semi-faceless, Lead Model 2 is stripped down to the truth, Mantis Head bears antennae to receive tenuous connections, and Lead Model 3 is assertive, pupils displaced, before a cascading checkered pattern. The round bit of land for each of the models permits the subordination of genre: the paintings consolidate still life, portrait, and landscape into one collapsed totality.

The particular features of each figure speak to different abstract forces. Transposed humanity, substitute bodies, a confrontation with autopilot tendency… perhaps an indirect fusillade against objectification of being, with the historical purpose of registering that the figure has been progressively dehumanized by the limbo of representation. And yet, knowingly simplified figures have been a carrier of feeling since the beginning of art. The arrangement at The Frame taps into the artist’s core themes: appearance, incompleteness, iconoclasm, detachment, and substantiality — as witness the artist’s brief overview of practice that accompanies this group.

The Frame Gallery is pleased to present The Inmost Flame, a group exhibition of works that

have a spiritual significance and communicate to the soul. The show is by appointment only and

opens November 9th until December 15th, 2024, on 75 East Broadway, Unit #230, New York, NY.  Curated by Lola Montes Schnabel, who raises the question: what is the purpose of Art itself? Essentially putting one’s breath into an object to communicate with others, including those no longer here and the unborn. Art transcends the present to point us towards questions of the future.

Ideas travel. Mentors transport. These two related ideas are fused in this exhibition as each work was created by a person who has been a source of inspiration for the curator, with the evidence of their practice shown in this exhibition as reliquaries, objects that affirm their inner lives to Lola and, through their small scale, represent works she would travel with as talismans to place by one’s bedside – “things to reach for if the house was burning down.” 

Carry-on works used to comfort one when on the road, in hotel rooms, to protect us. A true icon is one that has ‘appeared,’ a gift from above, opening the way to the Ideal and able to perform miracles.

My father was never an artist, though it felt fitting for his final months, drawing would be his test for mental cognition, the symbol and medical proof that he was not to get better.

The medical system failed my father in many ways. Millions of Americans experience this every day. In the end, I wondered how many diagnoses and prognoses are made far too late because people don’t believe empathy is a learned skill; that somehow, like great artists, you’re either born with it or you aren’t. Listening is one of, if not the most, undervalued types of labor. 

I was not born with empathy, but rather acquired it over years of practice. It is a practice, to be honed and nurtured, always developing. This show is about listening and hopeful change. I will never not be hopeful.

The Foster-Rose Method only requires a shared sense of willingness.

For 15 years I have worked diligently within various networks of service, supporting mental health, addiction recovery, post-incarceration employment, stable housing, and career-building guidance. These experiences have come together to build what I found to be a transformative and excavatory Method, one that is based in conversation, asking questions, understanding empathy as a learned practice, finding personal growth through shared vulnerability, and mutual aid. The Foster-Rose Method is transformative in ways other methods cannot access due to no monetary exchange; it is free, without hierarchy. This Method undoes itself every time the session ends, building itself back up whenever recreated or shared. It does not shy away from the existential dreads but faces them head on. Participants will receive a free 1 hour in-person session.