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Artists: Greta Alfaro, Julia Chiang, Richard Garet, Pryce Lee, Naama Tsabar and Dustin Yellin

They Sicken of the Calm Who Know the Storm
Curated by Maureen Sullivan
January 16 – February 15, 2014
Fridman Gallery
New York, NY, USA

Beautiful danger, living life to the extreme, broken dreams and endless cycles of incurable hope and pain, screaming on the inside, pulsating with a palpable energy…

These are ideas and emotions evoked by the six artists – Greta Alfaro, Julia Chiang, Richard Garet, Pryce Lee, Naama Tsabar, Dustin Yellin – featured in the exhibition THEY SICKEN OF THE CALM WHO KNOW THE STORM, curated by Maureen Sullivan and presented at FRIDMAN GALLERY, January 16 through February 15, 2014.

Richard Garet’s electrified color-rich moving image “paintings,” created through sound then silenced, cannot be stifled. Julia Chiang’s white chains triumph beauty over function, made all the more implausible by their handmade fragility. Greta Alfaro’s films lure one in with sedate serenity. But the underlying anxiety, created mostly by our own challenges with stillness and yearning for action, is soon realized in a frenzied gluttony, leaving only the remains of the day in its wake. Dustin Yellin’s explosive and collapsed illusions are suspended, dissected and trapped forever in sliced layers of resin. Naama Tsabar plays with signifiers of danger and enjoyment, things that are slick and seductive then fall apart. Here white sheets – the material of dreaming, escape ladders, and Molotov cocktails – slowly absorbs liquor from bottles of alcohol creating a disorienting multisensory – and potentially combustible experience. Pryce Lee shows in NY for the first time with a new 9-piece shattered mirror work created specifically about an incident in the city – the 2012 Empire State Building Shooting. Capturing the randomness, violence and fragility of life, the innocent bystander suffering for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the work reflects us destroyed and whole.