Main Space

January 14 - February 25, 2023
GYAN SHROSBREE: THE DRESS / WHAT TOUCHES THE FLOOR 
Opening Reception with the artist: Saturday, January 14, 2023, 5 – 7pm

Brooklyn, NY (January 2, 2023) — Ortega y Gasset Projects proudly presents a solo show opening on Saturday, January 14, GYAN SHROSBREE: The Dress / What Touches the Floor, co-curated by OyG Co-directors Clare Britt, Leeza Meksin, Nickola Pottinger, Adam Liam Rose, Zahar Vaks, and Lauren Whearty. The exhibition, activating both the main gallery and The Skirt, will be on view through February 25, 2023. 

For this presentation, the artist will be showing a series of large scale paintings on tarp and stretched canvas, comprising figures paired with pairs of shoes, encircling the main gallery. In the Skirt space, Shrosbree will create a site-responsive installation of her playful and colorful paintings that range in size from bossy large-scale to tiny and intimate.

Shrosbree’s subject matter deals with female-bodied, dressed-up figures, evoking fashion’s ability to signify self-determination, agency and empowerment. This is a feminist point of view - full of spirited resistance to the austere modernist and minimalist ideals still circulating today. 

Shrosbree addresses the emotional, personal and political content in her work by asserting: “There is a psychological note that I want to hit upon, somewhere between extreme discomfort and pure joy. The feeling that our hands are too big and our outfit too fluffy. Once again, you arrive at the party in the wrong attire feeling exposed and without your armor. Or the opposite, the armor is just right and you feel powerful and protected by the colors that surround you.”

In Shrosbree’s chosen list of materials, further content can be gleaned. The supports for her large scale figures are tarps –flexible, unfixed and utilitarian. They can be rolled up easily and hung in a variety of ways suggesting make-shift, temporary home structures, or the processes associated with fixing, rebuilding, repainting, redoing. Pairing paintings on tarps with the more conventional stretched canvases, the implied hierarchies within fine and applied arts are playfully debunked. What is the difference and similarities between dressing up our bodies, dressing up our paintings and dressing up our homes? 

When looking at the world through the eyes of Gyan Shrosbree we start to see that the questions and answers play charades, while finding pleasure in dress-up, juicy colors, flattened shapes, awkwardness, and masquerade.

For the opening on Saturday, January 14th, the artist has also made a fashion line of wearable art, in collaboration with her mother, Kathleen Shrosbree. Gyan paints her vibrant imagery onto unstretched cotton duck, and Kathleen patterns and sews the individual pieces, ranging from tunics to tote bags. The OyG co-director artists will all be modeling the various items at the opening, made specifically for the occasion.                                          

Text by Leeza Meksin

ARTIST BIO
Gyan Shrosbree received her B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute, and her M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She has had recent solo and two-person exhibitions at JEFF, Marfa, TX; Wrong Gallery, Marfa, TX; Ola Studio, Pound Ridge, NY: nx.ix Gallery, Detroit, MI; Haus Collective, San Antonio, TX; Grapefruits, Portland, OR; Grand View University, Des Moines, IA; Yellow Door Gallery, Des Moines, IA; Ripon College, Ripon, WI; Lovey Town Space, Madison, WI; and The Iowa Arts Council and State Historical Museum, Des Moines, IA. Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions Western Exhibitions, Chicago, IL; Cleve Carney Art Gallery, Glen Ellyn, IL; Ground Floor Gallery, Nashville, TN; The Woskob Family Gallery, State College, PA; NYSRP, Brooklyn, NY; and Artstart, Rhinelander, WI. Gyan has been an artist-in-residence at MacDowell, Yaddo, The Vermont Studio Center, Two Coats of Paint, and The Maple Terrace. Recent publications featuring her work include Hyperallergic, New AmericanPainting, Egomania Magazine,The Coastal Post, Inertia Studio Visits, Precog Magazine, and Maake Magazine. Gyan is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at Maharishi International University. She lives and works in Fairfield, Iowa.

CURATORIAL NOTE:
This solo show is co-curated by OyG Co-directors and artists Clare Britt, Leeza Meksin, Nickola Pottinger, Adam Liam Rose, Zahar Vaks, and Lauren Whearty. Typically, the artists who run OyG Projects take turns curating shows. Sometimes, however, OyG co-directors collaborate by working as a curatorial team on a solo show which creates an exciting experience both for the exhibiting artist, who receives a lot of feedback from our team, and for the co-directors themselves, who get to think about curation in a collaborative and expansive manner. Previous such collaborative approaches to curation included the solo shows of Rick Briggs, Carl Hazelwood and Rose Nestler.