Freight+Volume is excited to announce Waking Dream, a group exhibition of work by Angela Dufresne, Elizabeth Huey, Lauren Luloff, Erika Ranee, and Lisa Sanditz. Encompassing a wide variety of artistic approaches, the works on display explore the physical qualities of paint and its infinite formal and expressive potential, across both figuration and abstraction. Waking Dream focuses on the exterior and interior psychological landscape, filtered through the lens of escapism and refuge, offering an alternative, fantastical vision of reality.Lauren Luloff and Erika Ranee’s works manifest formal correspondences with psychological states, with Luloff recalling feelings of inner calm and harmony with nature, and Ranee highlighting the stimuli that provide fleeting sparks of fantasy and imaginative interactions with our surroundings. On the other hand, Lisa Sanditz and Elizabeth Huey craft strange, off-kilter dreamscapes that function as a sort of psychological playpen, unfurling twisting, layered vistas that blur the line between reality and fantasy, and push the limits of escapism. Indulgence in one’s interior mental states is encouraged by their work, and this affirming attitude allows the viewer to ease their impulsive defense mechanisms. Angela Dufresne’s work reflects a more extreme interrogation of interior psychological expression, centered around sexuality and the often complex anxieties that inevitably accompany it.
Angela Dufresne frames the body as a lightning rod for psycho-sexual tension, probing the complex interrelationships of sexuality with concepts of morality, religion, and paranoia. In Kiss The Cunt of God, a threatening female figure with exposed genitalia confronts the viewer directly, flanked by a menagerie of animal carcasses. Fueled by the intersections of sexuality and the darker, suppressed elements of the psyche, the painting addresses the unspoken drives that we would rather remain sheathed in silence.
Characterized by impasto brushwork and a hyper-saturated palette, Elizabeth Huey’s paintings hone in on the dynamic interpersonal relationships, empathy, and human connection, often situated within fantastical, surreal dreamworlds that oddly parallel reality. Huey’s work beckons the viewer to indulge in escapism and sonder; interestingly, there are seldom elements of voyeurism in her work, with a sense of welcoming invitation prevailing. For example, though One’s Own Masquerade presents an orgiastic scene replete with tokens of blasphemy and sexual depravity, it projects a jovial, carnival-like atmosphere. In her other works on display, Huey depicts similarly enticing and imaginative psychological playgrounds.
Lauren Luloff’s effervescent, luminous works on dyed silk highlight calming, tranquil notes of the natural world; in Provincetown, Bright Trees, cascading tiers of flowers and branches laid in bleeding washes of dye create an impression of profound serenity and oneness with a universal current. Luloff’s other works on dyed silk depict natural scenes with a similar delicacy, also allowing the dye to bleed freely onto the borders of the silk support, imbuing the works with an organic wholeness.
Erika Ranee’s paintings incorporate a dazzling range of mark-making techniques; expressive brushwork, modified paint, and unconventional materials such as shellac and spray paint culminate in a highly visceral and materially complex surface structure. Ranee’s textures are strikingly contemporary, and immediately allude to our daily interactions with our built and material environment, reduced to their sensory gestalt. In many ways, her abstractions appear to refract the vast influx of material stimuli that bombards the individual in modern society.
Lisa Sanditz presents a new shift in her oeuvre, from “connecting outward to inner, in location and self”. Catalyzed by a desire “to paint something different and to consolidate my personal life into a very intimate domestic world”, Sanditz’s paintings in Waking Dream traverse an array of domestic environments, from the “mancave” to more intimate (and perhaps voyeuristic) bedroom and bathroom scenes. In A Possible Christmas Dinner and Suburban Basement Snakes 2, she suffused stereotypical suburban imagery with a menacing tenor. In the former, the faces of the family members are smudged and obscured, and a body lays under the dining room; meanwhile, in the latter, the subject has a riddling and seemingly incongruous collection of snakes. By framing the structures of domestic life as environs rife with psychological energy, Sanditz queries the viewer to interrogate their relationships with their own abodes, particularly the ways in which they channel certain psychological states.
Angela Dufresne is a painter and video artist originally from Connecticut. She was raised in Olathe, Kansas, the town Dick and Perry stopped in before they killed the Clutters (In Cold Blood). She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and sometimes can be found in the Catskills. She received the first college degree in her family lineage. Her work articulates non-paranoid, porous ways of being in a world fraught by fear, power and possession. Through painting, drawing and performative works, she wields heterotopic narratives that are non-hierarchical, joyous and polymorphous. She has exhibited at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, NY; the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, ME; The National Academy of Arts and Letters in New York; The Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York; the Kemper Museum in Kansas City, MO; Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, NY; The Cleveland Institute of Art in Cleveland, OH; The Aldridge Museum in Ridgefield, CT;, NY; the Rose Museum in Waltham, MA, among others. Dufresne received a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship and won a Purchase Award at The National Academy of Arts and Letters in 2011 and a Jerome Foundation Fellowship in 1992. She won residencies at Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Yaddo, the Siena Art Institute and The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown and the Headlands Center for the Arts. Her solo exhibition presently at the the Samuel Dorsky Musuem at SUNY New Paltz is a survey of portraits painting in situ over the past 12 years. Her solo exhibition at the Kemper Museum in Kansas City “Making a Scene” was a survey of the past 12 years of work. (fall 2018), She will be included in "Paint Also Known as Blood" curated by Natalia Sielewicz an exhibition that reflects on violence, pleasure and feminine desire at the Museum of Modern art in Warsaw Poland and “ Visionary New England” an exhibition exploring the impact and contemporary legacy of utopian, spiritualist and mystical practices of New England at the Cordova Museum in MA curated by Sarah Montross. Her work is in the collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Museo de Arte de Ponce, Ponce, Puerto Rico; American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; and Harvard Business School, Boston, MA.
Elizabeth Huey's paintings explore human connection and healing. Born from a substratum of expressive paint, the architectural and figural elements of her work hail from a multiplicity of styles and eras. Huey draws imagery from her own photographs as well as an ever expanding collection of found snapshots, as well as historical research to delve into the complexities of her subjects. One gets the sense that myriad forces -from nature and architecture, to culture and history - are at work in the minds of each protagonist. Driven to depict the inner motivations of the heroic, Huey’s paintings are portraits of the miraculous. The spatial arrangements and scale shifts support a hypnagogic sense of seeing things from the inside out. By bringing together disparate elements, she creates dynamics, both visual and psychological, that are altogether new. Before earning an MFA from Yale University (2002), Elizabeth Huey obtained a BA in Psychology from George Washington University (1993) and studied painting at both the Marchutz School in Aix-en-Provence, France and the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture in Manhattan. She was awarded the Terra Foundation Fellowship and Residency (2001) in Giverny, France, the Johns Hopkins University Artist Travel Fellowship (2006) to Bologna, Italy, and the Artist Research Fellowship from the Smithsonian Institution (2008) in Washington D.C. Most recently, she was awarded the Alma B.C. Schapiro Artist Residency at Yaddo (2014) in Saratoga Springs, NY, and the Soho House Artist Residency (2016) in Miami, Florida. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Born in Virginia, Huey spent fifteen years in New York and presently resides in Los Angeles.
Lauren Luloff, born 1980, in Dover, New Hampshire, received her MFA from The Milton Avery College of Art, Bard College and her BFA from Pennsylvania State University. Recent solo exhibitions have been with Ceysson and Benetiere, New York; Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY; Galerie Bernard Ceysson, Luxembourg and Geneva, Switzerland; Marlborough Chelsea, New York; The Hole, New York; and Annarumma Gallery, Naples, Italy. Notable group exhibitions include Galerie Lelong, New York; CANADA Gallery, New York; Tanya Bonakdar gallery, New York; The Queens Museum,Queens, NY; Marlborough Gallery, Madrid, Spain, and Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy. Her work has been featured and reviewed in The New York Times, Vogue, T Magazine, Art in America, the Huffington Post and the Village Voice among others. She has been awarded residencies by The Bau Institute, in Cassis, France, The Macedonia Institute, in Chatham, NY and DNA Residency in Provincetown, MA. Luloff lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Erika Ranee received her MFA, with a concentration in painting from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the recipient of a NYFA Fellowship in Painting and has attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She was a 2009 AIRSpace resident at the Abrons Arts Center and was awarded a studio grant from The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, 2011. Her work has been shown in several group exhibitions: at the Bronx Museum, in The Last Brucennial, at The Parlour Bushwick and at BravinLee Programs; at Tiger Strikes Asteroid (TSA/NY) and at David & Schweitzer Contemporary. Recent exhibition venues include the Southampton Arts Center, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery and Freight+Volume Gallery in NYC; several solo exhibitions at BRIC Project Space, Ground Floor Gallery and Lesley Heller Gallery in NYC. She lives and works in New York.
Lisa Sanditz was born 1973 in St. Louis, MO. In 1994 she studied at the Studio Art Center International in Florence, Italy. In 1995 she received her BA from Macalester College, St. Paul, MN and in 2001 graduated with an MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. In 2005 she was selected by Creative Time and United Technologies to participate in an outdoor mural project where she was one of three commissioned artists, along with Alex Katz and Gary Hume, to paint site-specific murals on billboards in lower Manhattan. She is a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship Recipient. Sanditz has had multiple solo shows at galleries which include Acme Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans, LA, and CRG Gallery in New York, NY. She has been interviewed and her work reviewed in publications such as BOMB Magazine, Two Coats of Paint, Gorky’s Granddaughter, and The New York Times. She currently resides in Tivoli, New York dividing her time between teaching at Bard College, painting, and her family.
For any inquiries contact: nick@freightandvolume.com