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TWO NEW YORK SOLO DEBUTS
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| Gallery 1 JACK BALAS |
Gallery 2 NAOMI HARRIS |
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| Jack the Pelican is pleased to present Jack Balas’s New York solo debut. The fun of Jack Balas’s paintings is the buff beach boys who frolic unselfconsciously in the surf. More poignant are his solitary figures gazing out into the vast sea. Inset into all the scenes are words and drawings that interject the private musings of the artist and his subjects. Bravura painting meets introspective mindstate. These multiple-figure compositions and landscapes are a studied reflection on solitude, longing and loss. Jack Balas lives in Colorado. A recipient in 1995 of an individual fellowship in painting from the National Endowment for the Arts, he is represented in the Kent Logan Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A portfolio of his paintings "Today I Drove Along the Rio Grande" was published in issue #120 of The Paris Review. His substantial career over the last 20 years includes seventeen solo shows. This is New York’s first major introduction to his work. |
Jack the Pelican is pleased to present American Swinger: Born to be Free, the photographs of Naomi Harris.
Naomi Harris photographs the swingers of the American heartland. For several years, she has followed their pickup trucks and sex toys, hoedowns and gang bangs along the backroads and deep into the woods of our mysterious nation. She presents this middle-aged Budweiser America in the fullness of its exhibitionist display. Capturing, with wry agility, the glory of a proud humanity in its unbridled search for the perfect orgasm. It is a world of no such thing as privacy. Onlookers emerge from their tents or trailers and brush their morning teeth or comb their hair as they wait their turn to join in. It is an all-American, patriotic jamboree. This is Naomi Harris’s first New York solo exhibition. Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, Harris moved to New York City in 1997 to study at The International Center of Photography. In December 1999, she moved to Miami Beach to document the lives of the elderly residents of a hotel. Naomi Harris is the recent winner of the PDN 30 Emerging Photographers Award and the Agfa Young Photojournalist Award. |
