Jeff Feld and Lyla Rye

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CALDWELL, NJ – January 2, 2022

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Jeff Feld: A tour of the monuments of Ridgewood, Queens and Lyla Rye: Flatland

Wednesday, January 26 – Saturday, March 5, 2022
Q & A and Gallery Walkthrough with the Artist: Wednesday, January 26, 5-6pm
Opening Reception: Wednesday, January 26. 6-7:30pm

The Mueller Gallery at Caldwell University is pleased to present A tour of the monuments of Ridgewood, Queens by New York artist Jeff Feld and Flatland by Canadian artist Lyla Rye.

Employing diverse aesthetic strategies –– objects, drawings, collages, performance and on-site collaboration, Jeff Feld’s work engages with issues related to the unsolicited pressures and ubiquitous contradictions we encounter every day. Through his practice he examines the tension between fluidity and stasis, objecthood and reductionism, the abject and the pristine. Nothing is left complete, things typically fall short, progress is questioned and slow. For his show at the Mueller gallery Feld’s “A tour of the monuments of Ridgewood, Queens”, pays homage to Robert Smithson’s “A tour of the monuments of Passaic” through which Feld investigates the mundane ephemera that occupy his urban environment calling into question aesthetic value, importance and what we view as monument.

Lyla Rye’s video work entitled Flatland explores the collision of various modes of representation from video and digital effects to isometric shapes.  Rye is interested in how these differing modes of spatial depiction portray and distort illusions of three-dimensional space. Each mode inherently has a point of view, both literally and intellectually. For example, perspective is convincing from a single vantage point, which historically was the king’s throne. Isometric projections, meanwhile, expand geometrically and, one might say, democratically in all directions without diminution, yet are not true to our optical perception of the world. These animations are intentionally simple, evoking a quiet humor and a subtle tension due to the falsehoods of perception they present. In this way, Flatland considers the relative truth of our understanding of the times we live in. These visual contradictions are extended into notions of time in my new embroideries based on digitally distorted imagery.

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Biographies:

Jeff Feld

A citizen of Ireland and the United States, Feld was trained as a social worker and spent much of his professional life working in child protective services. Many of the issues and contradictions found within cultural, institutional, and hierarchal systems he experienced during this time are equally reflected and felt in the works created. 

Jeff Feld’s sculptures and drawings have been featured in both national and international exhibitions, including the Chris Sharp Gallery in Los Angeles, The Drawing Center, The Brooklyn Museum and the Queens Museum of Art in New York and Dunker Kulturhus in Helsinborg, Sweden. 

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Lyla Rye

Lyla Rye studied at the University of Waterloo, York University and the San Francisco Art Institute. For over 25 years her work has been exhibited in galleries and screenings across Canada and internationally including New York, San Francisco, Adelaide, Auckland, Paris, and Berlin. She has exhibited at The Power Plant, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, The Textile Museum of Canada and Olga Korper Gallery among others.  She has work in the public collections of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, York University, Cadillac Fairview Corporation, The Tom Thomson Art Gallery, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery and as part of Ways of Something at The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.  

The most recent catalogue of her work is titled Cyclorama and includes essays by Caoimhe Morgan-Feir and James Campbell. She has received numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council. Rye has done residencies in Quebec City, Berlin, Shelburne and at the Banff Centre for the Arts. 

Lyla Rye lives and works in Toronto.