Barron Storey, and Small Works from Sloan Fine Art

Barron Storey, accomplished and highly influential illustrator, fine artist, and musician, has produced a large series of artworks on paper which plumbs his deep and varied musical influences. Storey has spent decades creating a series of journals which chronicle his personal artistic journeys, and this show is an opportunity to bring together two of his most fertile creative pursuits; illustration and music.

Mia Brownell was born in Chicago to a sculptor and biophysicist. She uses the conventions of the painted food still life as a means to comment on contemporary issues surrounding food. Her paintings simultaneously reference 17th century Dutch Realism and the coiling configurations of molecular imaging. Susan Siegel’s intimate, delicate paintings — inspired by 18th Century masters such as Fragonard, Gainsborough and Watteau — seek to revive dormant stories within historical portraiture. In place of men and women, Siegel inserts a cast of animal-human hybrids. Metaphors of power and artifice, these once un-empowered agrarian creatures command the trappings of the ruling class. The Victorian/Edwardian eras have long fascinated Aaron Smith. For years he has collected vintage photographs of men of the period. To him, these men represent a masculine ideal, if largely a constructed one. Their bearded faces and distinguished attire are spectacular, while their stiff poses and serious expressions belie an existential vulnerability. Brad Woodfin's animal subjects are chosen for a specific reason much the same way a portrait painter selects human subjects. All of Woodfin’s delicately rendered creatures emerge from a deep black background, barely breaking the glossy surface shadow, existing in a no man’s land between darkness and light, power and vulnerability, a mournful celebration of the majesty of the animal world.