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May 18th through June 17th Safe-T-Gallery will be the site of a new,
intense painting installation by Brooklyn artist Susan Hamburger. “Progress” will
feature a suite of 8 large oil paintings presenting a panoramic view
of the new and old architectural developments along the southern border
of Williamsburg’s McCarren Park. The paintings in turn will be
installed within one of Hamburger’s characteristically deadpan,
foam-core, faux-period rooms. The entire installation becoming a large
salon highlighting the “Progress” of today within the decorative
comfort of yesteryear.
The current great transformation of the landscape of Brooklyn is no
more apparent than in Williamsburg. Here a generation of artists has
seen
a neighborhood change from a low-rise, largely ethnic enclave in the
1980’s, to the hipster-haven of the 1990’s to the high-rise “Dawn
of Luxury” in the early 2000’s. Susan Hamburger has been
using a variety of tropes over the past few years to bring these changes
into context, approaching them as both a concerned resident of the neighborhood,
but also as an artist with a sensitive, knowledgeable and witty eye.
The paintings, with their rich color and attention to detail, are as
fascinating as any construction site, full of quiet energy under a benevolent
blue sky. But in the tradition of many early American landscapes painters
(one thinks of George Inness and “The Lackawanna Valley”)
there is also an ambivalence of values. By installing her paintings
of modern development in a near Victorian, genteel setting, Hamburger
highlights
our conflicted feelings about change and expansion, growth and progress.
Susan Hamburger’s work has been described by poet and critic Jeffrey
Cyphers Wright as “delightfully informed Romanticism” and “wickedly
en point.” Ms.. Hamburger has received a number of awards including
a chashama AREA studio residency and she is a current recipient of
a PS122 Project Studio. She has also received residency fellowships
from
the Ucross Foundation, the Jentel Foundation, the Saltonstall Foundation
and the Millay Colony for the Arts.
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