New Paintings and Collaborations by Jaime Gartelos and Ellie Balk

New Paintings and Collaborations by Jaime Gartelos and Ellie Balk opens on September 5, 2008, and continues through September 29, 2008.

Born in St. Louis, Balk graduated from Bowling Green State University with a BFA in Painting and received her MFA from Pratt Institute in 2005 where she focused on painting and collaboration. She is currently painting murals with middle school students in various schools throughout Brooklyn through residencies from BRIC's Rotunda Gallery and with Grants from NYSCA and the Puffin Foundation. With the theme of community, she has helped students further explore their place and function in their neighborhoods and communities. Carrying this mission into her own work, Balk organized and produced two collaborative community murals in her neighborhood with support from the St. James Block Association in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and has two large community murals in proposal process. Her current mission is to cover Brooklyn in painted circles while using painting as a tool to bring community together. Her recent paintings have been exhibited at RePop and Tillie's in Brooklyn, Hovercraft Gallery in Portland, Oregon, the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.

St. Louis native Jaime Gartelos created most of the work in this exhibition in his Cherokee Street studio before moving to Chicago where he completed work on this exhibition. Gartelos has shown work at Mad Art Gallery in two previous exhibits and helped produce the rock opera "Onward Broken Spaceman" and the Mad Art Radio Show.

Balk and Gartelos collaborated on two paintings for this exhibition. The viewer is invited to see their two bodies of work separately, as the result of two minds coming together in one space, on one plane. This collaboration is an experiment of the two artists' passion for painting and the explosion of synergy.

A free opening reception will be held on Friday, September 5, 2008, from 7:00 p.m. until 11:00 p.m.