Joerg Dressler, Heidi Johnson, Amanda Konishi, Michelle O’Connell

THIRD NATURE

May 4 to 29, 2021

Virtual Opening: Thursday, May 6, 2021 at 6:00 PM

Artist Talk: Joerg Dressler and Amanda Konishi, SATURDAY, MAY 15, 2021, 6:00PM on IG LIve
Artist Talk: Heidi Johnson and Michelle O’Connell, Tuesday, MAY 25TH, 6:00 PM ON IG LIVE

IN-PERSON VIEWING: BY APPOINTMENT
CURATED BY SARAH ELLEN ROWE

Empty Set Project Space is pleased to present the artwork of Joerg Dressler, Heidi Johnson, Amanda Konishi, and Michelle O’Connell in the exhibition, Third Nature. Third Nature explores visual interpretations of the natural world in new and surprising ways. In this exhibition, the artists transport the viewer into otherworldly, sublime and peculiar natural environments. Geometric constructions are juxtaposed with landscape imagery in Joerg Dressler’s paintings. Vibrating color swatches alongside botanical and oceanic vistas invite the viewer to consider personal and shared experiences in nature. Heidi Johnson’s depictions of avian species are presented in surreal and dense spaces that distort light and color to create a psychedelic reverie. Tactile textures and sumptuous curves in Amanda Konishi’s artwork invent tangible mysterious worlds summoning the viewer to distill the transcendental qualities of landscape through pattern and color. Michelle O’Connell’s landscapes depict the physical qualities of nature while equally articulating an impossible enlightened psychic space creating an artifact of meditative mark-making and visual daydreaming. This collection ultimately considers the tacit relationship between the spirituality of humans as part of and in reverence to the natural world; filling a necessary void. The scope and breadth is a kaleidoscope, a hypersensitive reaction and quest to reach the outer boundaries of romanticism in modernity.

Third Nature runs from May 4th to May 29th. The virtual opening will take place on Thursday, May 6th, 2021 at 6:00 pm on Instagram Live (@empty.set.gallery).  There will also be a virtual artist’s talk on Instagram Live (@empty.set.gallery) on Saturday, May 15th at 6:00 pm.

Third Nature will be on view through May 29th at Empty Set, 860 E. 136th Street, #10D, Bronx, NY. In-person viewings are by appointment only. Email at emptyset.gallery@gmail.com or DM us on Instagram for an appointment. For more information about Empty Set and its events and exhibitions, please visit emptysetart.com.

Joerg Dressler
Driven by nature and how we perceive it, Joerg Dressler’s landscapes present experiences of reality filtered through his perception. The seen and unseen are reassembled creating a new reality. Dressler’s evocative, sensual paintings derive from a sincere dialogue between the representational and the abstract, the conceptual and the purely spontaneous. While remaining uniquely his own visual communication, the vocabulary for his artwork is drawn from a cross-section of art history: Romanticism, Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, graphic design, and photography. Recurring themes in Dressler’s paintings include the passage of time, impermanence, frailty, and perception. 

Heidi Johnson
Johnson’s large-scale paintings investigate the distortion of time in natural history collections, the assemblage of materials and objects, the further physical abstraction and distortion from being put under glass and preserved in a moment. Johnson explores temporality; the type that one may feel after reading a dense literary passage laden with imagery, only without the prosaic visual and figurative descriptions. The viewer is left with associations that are the seams between emotion and thought, thought and word, and word and page, all blurred together.  Johnson begins by working through the conceptual lens of the Still Life of the Dutch Golden Age, where species from different continents meet on the same plane, and blooms bloom together out of season, and time flattens. Johnson’s artwork references multifarious art historical sources and time becomes fluid with abstract and figurative references coexisting. In the artist’s most recent work her symbolic focus has been on our avian species. For Johnson, birds are small messengers of life that serve as extensive poetic metaphors.

Amanda Konishi
In her work, Konishi sublimely considers the relationship between texture, form, mark-making, and objecthood. Textural and optical sensations seen in nature are large influences in her work. Often deploying pattern, mark-making, and line to chase the essence of the natural world, Konishi’s artwork bears witness to the intimate details in nature. Konishi views physical and visual textures as separate but overlapping stimuli and often includes textural details in her work as she observes the curve of a shoot or handles a seedpod. For Konishi, visual texture is something that seems to take on a more defined identity as our society is heavily plied with complex image consumption. 

Michelle O’Connell
Michelle O'Connell's work is born out of the landscapes she travels to and sees in her dreams. Her drawings record her memories. She often begins a drawing with a quick sketch and builds the composition slowly, using color and mark-making intuitively, allowing the subconscious to lead her hand. O’Connell uses drawing as an escape from every day, a way to let her mind rest. She often draws mountainscapes as mountains have always been places where she finds solitude, beauty, and peace.