Open Field: Kate Abercrombie, Anthony Bowers, Shelby Donnelly, Chris Landau, Andrea Marquis, Lauren Sauder, Rebecca Saylor-Sack, Mary Smull, and Kate Stewart
Curated by Andrea Gaydos Landau
August 7 - 30, 2015
Opening Reception: Friday, August 7, 6 to 10 P.M.
Closing Reception: Saturday, August 29th

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PHILADELPHIA, PA-
Tiger Strikes Asteroid presents “OPEN FIELD,” a group exhibition curated by Andrea Gaydos Landau.

We have long asked the question of whether nature is separate from us. This show brings together a group of nine artists working in a range of media to examine the relationship between nature and culture. Are they divided, symbiotic, parasitic, metaphysical? The artists’ perception of this problem goes deeper than a simple binary answer. In some of their works, the divide is framed by its apparent function or failure. And in other works, systems of artifice are built-up through architecture, the decorative, and the scenic.

Rebecca Saylor-Sack paints in a hallucinatory vivid palette of colors to construct an image of simultaneous growth and decay, and Andrea Marquis pushes materiality and the ornate to the brink. Here both artists leave us to view an irresistible demise.

Works by Lauren Sauder and Chris Landau examine the intersection between technology, architecture, and the environment, addressing ideas of function or failure within the landscape. Landau utilizes new technologies and traditional printing process to envision possible future landforms. While Sauder constructs new vistas which collide our built environment with the natural terrain.

Shelby Donnelly gives us a familiar domesticated form that has talismanic charm, and Anthony Bowers captures a trace, a moment in time, resulting in an image which is simultaneously abstract and directly representational.

Kate Stewart, Mary Smull, and Kate Abercrombie’s work all reveal implications of artifice, reality and escape in our culture. Kate Stewart’s mysterious and luminous drawings merge the everyday with the organic to unveil the supernatural. Mary Smull’s needlepoints deviate from the ‘original rules’ and the artist asserts her agency to create an image of a new order and structure. Kate Abercrombie paints a colorful, super-saturated representation of our world that’s a constructed collage of sensuality and pattern, excess and control.

The opening will take place on Friday, August 7th from 6-10pm, and the show will be on view August Seventh through August 30th at Tiger Strikes Asteroid gallery located at 319 North 11th Street, Second Floor, Philadelphia, PA 19107. Save the date for a closing event to be held on Saturday, August 29th hosted by Jesse Smith and Andrea Gaydos Landau.

Essay by Jesse Smith, a writer and Ph.D. candidate in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where his research intersects the areas of environmental history & the history of technology.

Curated by Andrea Gaydos Landau, an artist and educator living in Philadelphia, and a member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid gallery. Recently, her work has been exhibited nationally at Rowan University in NJ, Daimler Financial Corporate Headquarters in MI, and internationally at Korea National University of the Arts in Seoul, South Korea. Her work appeared in “Hothouse”, an exhibition exploring the field of Fiber from the past 37 years at Cranbrook Art Museum in Michigan. Locally, Andrea has shown at the Philadelphia Art Alliance, Goldie Paley Gallery, Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, Cheltenham Center for the Arts, Center for Emerging Visual Artist, and was selected for Philagrafika’s Invitational Portfolio. Landau works at The Fabric Workshop and Museum and at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, PA.