Arcadia Contemporary | 10/14-10/29 | New York, NY

Inside/Outside

Arcadia Contemporary presents a new group show with the featured artist Michael Miller

Beginning October 14, Arcadia Contemporary in New York City will be presenting Inside/Outside, a new group exhibition that features a variety of artists exploring the dynamic between big and small, intimacy and distance, safety and danger and, yes, inside and outside.

Michael Miller, Amish Homestead, oil on canvas, 24 x 36"

Featured among the group of artists is Ohio-based painter Michael Miller, who will be showing his rural farm scenes that certainly hit the “outside” theme hard. “My work is a never-ending quest to find the beauty and truth that lies in the simplicity of rural America. Growing up, my parents took me to many Civil War battlefields,” he writes on his website. “Even at a young age, the barns and wide-open, well-manicured fields made a huge impression on me. They seemed to be frozen in time and there was something sacred woven into those places. I started painting landscapes because I didn’t know how to express my love for them in any other form. It is my hope that my work freezes a way of life that is passing, beckoning all viewers to reflect on some distant memory.” His works are also explorations in light, which can be seen in Amish Homestead, with its cooler more diffused light, and then also Breaking Storm, which is warmer and more intense.

Shaun Downey, The Visitor, 2022, oil on panel, 20 x 36"

Light plays a large role in Shaun Downey’s The Visitor, in which a figure stands at a house door with what appears to be light from a car’s headlights shining behind her. “My intention with The Visitor was to explore the passage of time and our attachment to the places we’ve spent our lives in. I wanted the figure to appear to have travelled from another era into ours, as if she is revisiting a location she was familiar with, only to find it boarded up and abandoned,” Downey says. “I focused on her clothing and suitcase to set her timeframe, and the graffiti on the building to reveal that we are in the present. The juxtaposition of these elements, plus the odd lighting and bare branches, thrust forth a narrative as if a from single frame from a film, something I strive for with many of my paintings.”

Aron Wiesenfeld, June, charcoal on paper, 50 x 38"

Antonio Cazorla, Walkway to the Beach, 2023, oil on canvas, 26 x 39"

John Brosio, who is also swayed by the cinematic qualities of painting, will be showing Edge of Town No 4. The image could be a benign scene from a small town, except for a large tornado that is sweeping through the background. Figures in the painting seem unaware, or maybe just unfazed. “I was thinking of older work and wondering what some of those notions would look like now, at that scale. I have not done a very large tornado piece like this in almost 10 years or so. In the end it was intuition, familiarity and memory for the most part,” Brosio says. “Some of the buildings are made up but a couple exist…As for tornadoes, they are our national Godzilla and nature combined. But I also thought them wonderfully obvious and, at the time I started, very untapped. There was none of the gorgeous video footage that we now take for granted. I had to go out to the Midwest to ‘chase’ these things and get imagery. To me it is almost like wondering why people paint the ocean.”

Nick Alm, Among the Oaks, 2021, watercolor on paper, 42 x 30"

Tim Rees, Nightfall, oil on linen, 35 x 21"

Nick Alm will be showing Among the Oaks, a watercolor showing a figure looking up at a large tree. “The scene for Among the Oaks takes place in a historical area in Stockholm. In the late 16th century, Johan III decided to turn the area into royal hunting grounds. The absence of agriculture and forestry have led to unique natural and recreational values, with a large number of old oaks and a rare fauna. The painting is a celebration of these values,” the painter says. “Winter scenes in watercolor are better painted in the studio, where the cold doesn’t freeze the water, and the snowflakes won’t spoil the paint surface. The size and format begged for an almost vertical tilt, leaving less room for excess water, as it would pour down the surface. My thought was to keep the painting somewhat simple and abstract by keeping the technique loose in the interpretation of details, letting the medium play its natural tricks. The result is realistic, yet loose and abstract on closer inspection.”

John Brosio, Edge of Town No. 4, 2022, oil on panel, 42 x54"

Tim Rees will be showing his oil Nightfall, an image of his son inspired by a visit to the Gulf Coast. “The painting began with light washes of color, followed by thicker paint, eventually modeling the form with directional marks of traditional stack lead white paint. I worked a section at a time, completing first the face, then the body, then working toward the background until the painting was complete. The color was the focus of the painting, and as such I tried to keep it as strong and clean as I could, faithful to what I observed,” Rees says. “I tend to shy away from conceptualizing in terms of warm and cool, especially when painting such ferociously orange skin, because I worry it could lead to making muddy colors. I am acutely aware, however, that in such intense lighting conditions, the power of the light sources—a low sun, and an opposing blue sky—are strong enough to dominate and overpower local color. Using this knowledge, I painted the lights of the skin by keeping to yellow and red pigments, and pushed the blue strongly in the shadows to describe the fill light. Because skin at sunset would appear this way in nature, the colors foil to make an eyepopping drama, and the viewer interprets the colors as intense light.”