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, object hood 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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