Jack the Pelican presents for your viewing pleasure "Baby Bowies," a group exhibition curated by Walter Benjamin Smith. This show highlights four young artists, Justin Lieberman, Jina Valentine, Jason Loebs, and Matthew Siegle. Each presses fast forward on the Bowie button, shape-shifting their artistic identities with a new level of self-awareness and rapidity. They are unpredictable young Americans controling ch-ch-changes of mark, medium, and intent to create to put meaning in flux.

Justin Lieberman presents a large painting built out of strange debris, trash, and relics titled "Majesty" for its purple decorative frame. The painting includes as well as a trough that rests beneath on the floor to suggest the eventual demise of the work.   Lieberman has regularly reshaped his identity from Yale painter to fictitious artist roles such as a homeless folk artist and most recently as an advertising director. This particular shift included the transformation of Zach Feuer Gallery into an advertising firm. Justin's work is a witty and poetic panic-attack sourcing a vast array of 'disposable culture' artifacts of recent decades. The artist re-imagines these mass-market forms with strange new potential as cultural capital.

Jina Valentine offers us delicately cut-up bags of sugar and corn meal that emerge as beautiful cadavers of processed pop food packaging with their granular insides pouring out. Valentine is also installing what may be perceived as a nervous sand painting of a makeshift prayer rug out of bleached flour. Jina, who recently was exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, works almost as an actress in her studio playing roles of folk artists with odd and obsessive practices. She consciously chooses strange alternatives to canvas from cupboard objects and wallpaper to record cases and shadows.

Jason Loebs is exhibiting a new family of small oil paintings ranging from neoclassical portraiture to text pieces, such as "Real Myth," a painting made of cryptic graffiti text with tromp-l'oeil effects. The artist is interested in the extent to which we construct our present by collecting, archiving and mythologize our past. To displace the reading of one painting as singular, Loebs presents his paintings in a series to set up multiple points of reference so that each work's meaning is contingent on the paintings around it.  

Matthew Siegle is displaying a weird and vast array of sculptures from his ever- reinvented studio practice.   He has built two sculptures of a globe rendered into the American pagan symbol of fear, the Jack-o-Lantern, with the grinning mouth made from the collective shape of the Islamic countries filled with a yellow paint.   Matthew also offers us "Hey (Best Painting in a Brown Paper Bag)," a sculpture made of, in the artist's opinion, his best painting ever, wrapped up with a brown paper bag and ribbon.   Siegle, a trained painter, has subordinated his painting abilities to assist in Duchampian sculpture that synthesizes contemporary pop culture with Dada aesthetic tropes to support clever and opaque narratives of political and cultural displacement.  

For more information on this show please contact the gallery at 718 782-0183 and info@jackthepelicanpresents.com