Romantic Radiations
Lauren Walkiewicz, Masha Morgunova, Irene Feleo, Bret Shirley, & Hannah Antalek
Curated by Art Hap's Morgan Everhart, Mel Reese, & Alex Feim
The Yard Greenpoint
33 Nassau Street, Floor 2 Brooklyn, NY 11222
April 3 - June 23, 2023
For information and appointments, contact mel@arthap.com
Art Hap and The Yard Greenpoint are pleased to present Romantic Radiations, a group exhibition of artworks by Lauren Walkiewicz, Masha Morgunova, Irene Feleo, Bret Shirley, and Hannah Antalek. This exhibition presents a selection of Greenpoint-based artists creating work across a variety of mediums which offers romantic responses to the tumultuous present, through a bold use of color, forms, and the suggestion of alternative realities.
Though the present moment is one of seemingly perpetual social and political upheaval and turmoil, each artist in this exhibition attempts to reconcile these omnipresent realities in their own sensual, vibrant, and even hopeful ways. Masha Morgunova’s work is a response to the war in Ukraine; her dreamlike scenes juxtapose fiery atmospheres with intimate human embrace in an attempt to find solace within unrest and violence.
Hannah Antalek’s drawings are devoid of figures, though still suggest a relationship between humans and nature, and the possibility of evolution through devolution. Planetary survival by way of glowing, gooey fungi and oozing, futuristic flora become romantic symbols of hopefulness for the planet, beyond humanity. Dancing alongside these fungi are Lauren Walkiewicz’s fantastical creatures who are prospering in this post-human world, which is another reflection on nature’s ability to thrive outside of human interference.
Bret Shirley’s more playful approach to historical formalism evokes questions of museological display within traditional white cube settings, and how such environments shape the perceptual experience of objects. His vivid, color-oriented and materially inventive approach utilizes a formal vocabulary that is both familiar and alien, and offers experiences of intense visual pleasure within a moment of deep anxieties.
Grounded in referential visual iconography, Irene Feleo’s paintings oscillate between portraits, fractals, and glitches which help her embrace technology as a man-made tool used not only as a guide through the present, but perhaps as a window into a technological utopia.
Despite their seemingly disparate approaches, the works of each artist in this exhibition are connected by the shared belief in the capacity of art to provide catharsis in a time of seemingly endless crisis. A survival instinct of learning how to be native to the now, because there is no opting out.
Lauren Walkiewicz’s work fantasizes about a future evolution of humanity that is in harmony with nature after the climate apocalypse. Our environmental consumption has left us with a debt that will be paid to the gods in blood, floods, and fire. After the reckoning, what will a balanced relationship with nature look like? Using acrylic paint on intricately cut pic panels, Walkiewicz imagines this new world: creatures make homes from discarded trash, while humanoids spawn and run from predatory chickens. This utopia is not the humancentric Garden of Eden, but a place where pleasures are balanced equally with the pain of survival. Lauren Walkiewicz is a Detroit born artist living in New York City. She earned a BFA from the University of Michigan Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design in 2013 and works as a middle school art educator in the Bronx. She has shown with SPRING/BREAK art show, 550 Gallery, and The Locker Room. She was recently featured in I Like Your Work’s Spring Catalog “Through Mossy Ways” and Create Magazine issue #32. Walkiewicz has been an artist in residence at RUC residency in Valcamonica, Italy.
Hannah Antalek’s work explores an imaginary post-human landscape with roots in science fiction and environmental crisis.The characters in Antalek’s work most often take the shape of engorged daisies that appear more mycological than floral, suggesting a means of subterranean communication, and a broader interconnected network. Neighboring plant forms are an amalgamation of real and imagined botanicals that have undergone a hypothetical evolution in reaction to a changing world. Mysteriously backlit in vivid tones, each color cast is evocative of an unknown light source that might insinuate the presence of a second sun, a foreign moon, the heat or chill of a nearby chemical glow.
Through these speculative scenes, Antalek’s work questions not only the positive and negative implications of humanity’s impact on nature, but the capacity for adaptation and resilience across all life forms. With humankind’s natural predilection towards fatalism and apocalyptic end-time predictions, these works are a reminder of nature’s cyclical metamorphosis and the seasonality of change.
Hannah Antalek is an artist living in Queens, NY and working in Brooklyn, NY. In 2013 she graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in painting, and continued her education through the New York City Crit Club.
When walking through a museum, Bret often finds himself as intrigued by the systems of categorization and definition and resulting methods of display and storytelling as by the art and artifacts on view. These systems not only define the role and value of objects, but lead the viewers on a predestined path to affirm those roles all the while allowing one to revel in a sense of discovery and self-controlled journey. Didactic placards inform us that the pre-Columbian Mesoamerican animal shaped vessel is more artifact than art, that through its institutional definition as such it holds less significance and value as Breugel’s Tower of Babel.
These notions are heavily influential and visually present in Bret’s current work. Silhouettes of simple shapes, drawn from Mesoamerican pottery, European master works, and many more sources are rendered in deep hues with often barely perceptible changes in color through a shape. Custom framing of the paintings is integral, as a way to force as much of Bret’s will as an artist on the viewer. When a frame ceases to act merely as a vessel and becomes an active part of the artwork, one is forced to view it as such. The use of linen and metal leaf both have roots in the canon of classical painting, though in his paintings are used more like display furniture, the linen backdrop, and gilded mounts in a purely museal presentation.
Bret Shirley was born in San Jose, CA in 1980 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn NY. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 2004. His work has been shown nationally and internationally and is in numerous private and public collections, including Texas A&M University, The Huntington Library and Gardens and MD Anderson Cancer Center. Recent exhibitions include shows at IRL in New York City, Cardoza in Houston TX, Peripheral Space in Los Angeles and Point of Contact Gallery at Syracuse University. From 2018-2021 Shirley ran the gallery space and studio program BS in Houston TX, which during its run hosted nearly a dozen artists for subsidized studio space and programmed twelve exhibitions before closing during the covid-19 pandemic.
Irene Feleo is an Australian illustrator, designer, and animation director currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Felep works across the mediums of animation, digital illustration, writing, and painting. She was born in Sydney, Australia, to Filipino immigrant parents where she was raised and spent most of her life. In her mid-20’s she moved to NYC to pursue a career in motion graphics and animation, all the while experimenting and developing her personal art practice. Her work is inspired by the blending of digital and organic worlds, contemporary symbolism, superstition, and emotional revelries through the personal gaze. Her work has been screened and exhibited in Melbourne, Sydney, Berlin, and New York.
Masha Morgunova’s recent projects explore how being exposed to the suffering of the world—past, present, and future—can shape our collective state of being human. Many of Morgunova’s paintings contain elements of inversion, where colors in some areas of the paintings are flipped to their opposites, creating an uncanny (unheimlich) version of the familiar world. She uses inversion as a means of expressing the imbalance caused by an amplified Weltschmerz—a German term that describes melancholia associated with the world’s weariness and its apparent distance from the idyll. The color blue is an important part of this project; deriving inspiration from William Gass’ and Maggie Nelson’s written meditations on blue. Morgunova is determined that it embodies the desired connotations to portray a contemporary Weltschmerz — solitude and contemplation, grief and longing, emergence of life and its fading. Masha Morgunova is a multimedia artist based in New York City. After graduating from Earlham College with honors in Painting, Masha continues to make figurative work in a variety of media, including ceramic sculpture, oil painting, and silicone casting. Her works are held in private collections in the US, Italy, Russia, France, and Belgium. She is the co-founder and Art Director of Grey State, a non-profit arts organization supporting emerging international artists.
Morgan Everhart @morgan_everhart
Morgan Everhart works in painting, curation, and writing. Everhart’s practice challenges naturalism and ontology through reflection on personal experiences, identity, and art history. She received her BFA from the University of North Texas in 2013, and her MFA from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2016. Recent exhibitions include: Flesh and Bloom at The David Owsley Museum of Art, Indiana (2021), Flowers for my Failures at the Longwood Museum, Virginia (2019). She has multiple murals in New York City, one of which is featured in Neumeraki’s International exhibition Art Off-Screen. Everhart currently lives and works in New York, where she is also a contributing writer to A Women’s Thing publication.
As part of the Art Hap Curatorial Team, Mel Reese is the Co-Curator in Residence at The Yard: Greenpoint in Brooklyn, NY alongside Brooklyn-based artist and curator, Morgan Everhart. For several years, Reese was the Head Curator for Art in Res (YC W20) where she developed and managed the curatorial program. In 2021, Reese curated the booth Fractured Truths in SPRING/BREAK.
As an artist, Reese is a Brooklyn-based observational painter inspired by formalism. She holds an MFA from SVA and a BS from Skidmore College and has completed residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Elsewhere Studios, and JX Farms. Reese has exhibited widely throughout the United States and has been featured in several publications including New American Paintings, New Visionary Magazine, Inside Artists, Studio Visit Magazine, and A Women’s Thing. Reese currently lives and works in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY.
Alex Feim @afeim
Alex Feim is an art researcher and writer based in Brooklyn. Her research and writing focuses on intersections between art and architecture, exhibition context and phenomenology, and time based media. She received her BA in Art History and Comparative Literature and MA in Art History from Binghamton University. She is a co-founder of Art Hap, which is an evolution of her experimental cartographic and documentation based research practice. Her writing has been published in Art Spiel, Battery Journal, and Art Press.