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BETHANY BRISTOW Curated by David Gibson and Jennifer Junkermeier Bethany Bristow, Bonnie Collura, Gabert Farrar, Limor Gasko Scott Kiernan, Karen Marston, John O’Brien, Sono Osato Meridith Pingree, Richard Schort, Fumiko Toda Ernest Rubenstein Gallery of The Educational Alliance 197 East Broadway, New York NY 10002 September 18 – October 31, 2008 Reception: Thursday, Sept 18, 6-8 PM Beauty's Burden explores our predetermined attitudes toward art as a means of personal and cultural expression. In a museum-style exhibition that is directed only by its theme, we hope to show how beauty operates in collusion with the specific dictates of image and form, occurring randomly across mediums, flowing through the cracks in our understanding of each artist's process. Beauty in this case does not represent an idealized standard, but an element of culturally determined content that collaborates in the moment (or process) of creation with ideas specific to each artist's formal aim. The a...

Curated by David Gibson and Thomas Jaeckel 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel 532 West 25th Street, New York NY 10001 September 4 – September 29, 2008 Reception: Thursday, Sept 4, 6-9 PM JOHN BERENS: Midtown JAC LAHAV: Frida Kahlo Each of these artists has made a traditional practice of painting into a signature motif. Yet they are not merely making rote, reliable, and commonplace versions. They are working in the periphery of that traditional practice, reaching for achievement beyond recognizable limits, making what is usually considered an acceptable form into something rigorous and subtle. Both artists ask the same questions: what is this form, and how far can I take it? In Berens’s landscapes, we are at first made conscious that he is setting the scene, in terms equal to the theatrical practice of dramaturgy. This is connected to his sense of place, having been brought up in the Midwest, and then studying in California, but soon after moving to New York to pursue his art career, he has liv...