Jason Patrick Voegele has curated a fantastic exhibition at the Lodge Gallery in New York City this fall featuring top realist painters Derek Buckner, Todd Gordon, Valeri Larko, and Tun Myaing, among others. What’s their unifying theme?
The Lodge Gallery in New York City will be opening “The Outer Boroughs” tomorrow, November 17, with a reception from 7-10 p.m. Curated by Jason Patrick Voegele and running through December 17, “The Outer Boroughs” explores the transformative cultural history of New York through contemporary urban landscape painting. Works by artists Derek Buckner, Todd Gordon, Valeri Larko, Tun Myaing, Laura Shechter, Pamela Talese, and John Wellington will compose the show.
According to the gallery, “Paris has its arrondissements, Shanghai has its municipal districts, and New York has Manhattan and its outer boroughs. Beyond the historically Manhattan-centric perception of New York as the epicenter of the art world, this exhibition focuses on the cultural history, transformative energy, and transgressive aesthetic of select creative communities within Brooklyn, Queens, and The Bronx. Although each borough represents a unique and differentiated pride and history, all the neighborhoods represented in this exhibition follow a similar and repeating cycle of discovery, overdevelopment and decline. Both the blights of urban decline and the variant results of urban renewal are on display. In some works, we observe the kind of redevelopment that often creates booms in commercial value, safety, and convenience while in others we witness the heavy loss of cultural integrity and the sacrifice of traditional creative output in favor of more subversive and territorial markings.
“The works in this exhibition are formidable testaments to the only unchanging constant in New York, which is change itself. Here, through the beauty of each urban landscape we witness the ongoing dynamic between nostalgia and growth. We witness the skin of the city shifting. Waves of residents once abundant are now gone or replaced; meanings vanish and new meanings are culled out of the transformation. As the familiar expires and generations of culturally grounded communities lose grip on their homes to the tune of post-industrial triumph and gentrification, this is perhaps a perfect moment to pause and take account of the greater contributions to the legacy of our great city and the great creative energies that are born of the outer boroughs in transition.”
To learn more, visit The Lodge Gallery.
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