Epode

Uprise Art is pleased to present Epode, an exhibition of new work by Kate Roebuck and Vicki Sher.

In Roebuck’s work, the relationship between each form and the negotiation of space becomes a psychologically charged metaphor for identity, self-exploration, and the ways we navigate the world around us. Her paintings function as a tool for self-discovery and a means to process the external. Roebuck’s roles as a mother, daughter, adoptee, artist, partner, and woman, have informed her perspectives and influenced the way she moves through the world she inhabits. But these roles are not rigid - as a perennial searcher and dreamer, she has found that the borders of these identities are porous and malleable, ready to be reshaped and remade as needed. Roebuck’s paintings operate in a similar shape-shifting capacity. Though graphic in their silhouette, they contain a graceful fluidity. Pools of watercolor bloom and puddle, creating a ghostly shadow that flows under and around her organic forms. The bounding lines that define each shape fluctuate with the artist’s hand, adding another dimension of movement and character, and playing between the handmade paper’s deckle and the canvas’ rigid edge.

Both Roebuck and Sher’s works offer a cumulative investigation into the poetic and the profound, using a refined yet direct vocabulary that is as clear as it is lyrical.

Sher’s work creates a dynamic contrast, between formal and playful, representational and abstract, serious and humorous, beautiful and odd. Similar to how the duality of an epode’s long and subsequent short verses play against each other, the duality in Sher’s works serves to add visual and conceptual interest to her rounded sculptures and gestural paintings.

Sher’s aluminum sculptures are painted using an industrial automotive paint, encasing the metal forms in a glossy candy-toned lacquer. The petal-like forms that pile atop each other feel buoyant in their suspended animation, transcending the heft and gravity of the sculpture’s raw materials. This sense of balanced precarity and teeming abundance translates into Sher’s two-dimensional works as well. In her drawings on drafting film, her omnipresent petal and halfmoon shapes teeter in groundless space. She works the oil pastel into the surface of the drafting film, lending a velvety sheen to the finished work that contrasts the semi-transparent frosted mylar. In her works on canvas, Sher layers acrylic and oil stick to create overflowing compositions that harken to the frenetic quality of the natural world.

In their works, Roebuck and Sher use their vocabulary of abstracted and distilled forms to contrast and underscore the natural world and the experience of daily life. Both Roebuck and Sher’s works offer a cumulative investigation into the poetic and the profound, using a refined yet direct vocabulary that is as clear as it is lyrical.

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