Mueller Gallery Presents Art Exhibitions “Jeff Feld: A Tour of the Monuments of Ridgewood, Queens” and “Lyla Rye: Flatland”

Caldwell, N.J. – 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.

The exhibitions will run Wednesday, Jan. 26, to Saturday, March 5.  

A “Q & A and Gallery Walkthrough with the Artist” will take place 5 to 6 p.m. Jan. 26 with an opening reception following from 6 to 7:30 p.m. 

Employing diverse aesthetic strategies—objects, drawings, collages, performance and on-site collaboration—Feld’s work engages with issues related to the unsolicited pressures and ubiquitous contradictions people 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. 

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.

Rye’s video work, titled “Flatland,” explores the collision of 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 has an inherent 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 one’s 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 an understanding of the times we live in. The artist says these visual contradictions are extended into notions of time in her new embroideries based on digitally distorted imagery.

For more information, go to www.caldwell.edu/gallery or call 973-618-3238.