HEAVEN GALLERY presents SMALL GESTURES

Gianna Commito’s gestures are small and highlight her process and the history of abstraction. Her paintings aim to erase any evidence that the artist’s hand was ever in play. Striped planes are delineated by taped edges, cutting off and covering up the information underneath and around unyielding geometric forms. A closer look reveals quite a different process, one in which many small gestures, both real and suggested, add up to create these fractured surfaces. The scale of Commito’s work ensures that no gesture swells beyond a subtle signal or shrug. Once noticed, though, they provide a counterpoint to the work’s louder and more obvious formal tendencies.

Nina Rizzo began painting on miniature canvases years ago and only recently found their role in her overall studio practice. Working on these canvases has allowed for play and discovery regarding the perception of size. The gestures present in these very small paintings, if reproduced without contextual information, read as monumental. When their size is understood by a viewer, the gestures read as small, but strong and very physically present. Rizzo began using these miniatures as the basis of larger paintings in 2016. Each painting requires a different strategy to increase the scale. The physical presence of the paint became the means for developing the character of each painting. Paint, in these relatively larger gestures, cuts, turns, sits, stirs, and glides to locate the main activity of these paintings on the surface of the canvas. Along with maintaining much of the simplicity of the compositions of the mini works, the resulting paintings keep the action in the marks and paint application. Rizzo is a Chicago based artist and Associate Professor of Painting at Northern Illinois University.

Stephanie McMahon’s paintings explore new discoveries informed by her observations and experiences within a particular environment or place. Weaving in and out of referential forms and colors, she aims to invite intuitive and contradictory responses, by creating an image that fluctuates between deliberate and incidental. Gestural brushstrokes impart physicality yet glide weightlessly over smooth surfaces as figure ground relationships oscillate and conflate. The gesture in McMahon’s paintings refers to the present moment and reconstruct a past experience.

THE WORLD CAN NEVER BE EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANT IT TO BE.

The work in the world can never be exactly what you want it to be is geared to address and put on display the feeling of unease that living in the United States today imparts. This show grapples with these ideas through painting, sculpture, fiber, and installation. Yvette Mayorga, Tanner Bowman, and Matthew Hilshorst all bring up issues related to gender and identity in their use of material, technique, and subject matter. With themes of the domestic and kitsch a common bond is created throughout the work. Objects celebrate disappointments, paintings created with piping bags and candy colors and common domestic subjects and images sag, drip and crack. The work aims to be political in the way it subverts and perverts its subject matter.

Tanner Bowman is a product designer and artist in Chicago IL. Bowman is interested in the intersections between art, design, and craft and is currently producing objects that question the functionality of art in the domestic space. Through playing with traditional crafting techniques with an experimental playfulness, Bowman creates queer and modern objects that give the audience a place to question their surroundings. Considered an anti- industrial designer, he believes that the most valuable object is one in which a person can see and feel emotional labor the maker puts into it.