Mad Art Gallery proudly presents Working Hard At Playing With Yourself work by Gabe Lanza, Beth Bojarski, Chris Miller, and Mark Winter. This exhibit opens on Friday, April 4, 2008, and continues through April 24, 2008. Raised on an underground language of imagery from the flat world contained on the front of cereal boxes, toys, and television programs, Gabe Lanza blends ironic spice into the expected charm of his visual treats. Using found objects and words to develop his paintings, Lanza mixes the old with his new. His antique frames are built using old trimming and moldings, found scraps of wood, and old wooden drawers. Combining features of cartoon and folk art, his work is a composition of extractions and rearrangements from his drawings and sketches that explore a self-contained reality, another universe incorporating fantasies and illustrations. He brings to it a distinctive liking for tightly stitched paintings, amiable art patterns and crystalline, hard-edged shapes as well as an affection for old wallpaper, tin toys and cartooning. Lanza works both big and small and in two and three dimensions, depicting emotional relations between characters with a touching, comedic sense. Originally from Milwaukee Wisconsin, Gabe Lanza is a full-time fine artist who lives and works out of his studio with his wife and 26 pound cat, in Chicago, Illinois. Beth Bojarski's career as an artist had modest beginnings, a high school student drawing countless pictures of Michel Jackson to decorate her bedroom walls. Bojarski earned a B.F.A. in illustration from Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Today she works with oils and acrylics, applying them to found surfaces: barn doors, cabinets, tree stumps, whatever captures her imagination. Bojarski's whimsical characters catch the viewer's eye, while her text pulls you into her absurd and fantastic world. Bojarski's paintings will make you laugh, and then feel guilty for laughing. Chris Miller's work engages the viewer with the complicated ambiguity of real life. His paintings are representational. Anyone can recognize the people, places, and things in Miller's work. Miller finds variety and mystery in reality. His paintings capture a moment and then subject that moment to an existential inspection that might not happen outside of the painting. Miller's work gives the viewer interpretive freedom, allowing each individual to find his own personal connection to the work. Miller strives to draw attention to the process of analysis itself, and what is revealed within that process. Mark Winter has been creating sculpture for more than fifteen years. Though his mother taught art classes at his family's farm throughout his childhood, Mark failed to take an interest. After high school he attended Wyoming Tech where he studied auto body repair and learned skills in welding, metals, and painting. After owning his own auto body business for several years, personal influences directed him toward what is now his full time career, sculpture. Winter incorporates scrap metal and recycled parts in his sculpture. The found pieces are collected and manipulated into sculptural forms. Color on the artwork is either found on the metal or applied to the piece. Winter's work has been shown in Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis, Kansas City, New York, Los Angeles, and Florida. His studio is located in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin on his family's farm, the perfect place to work, play, and store acres of collected scrap metal. An opening reception will be held on Friday, April 4, 2008, from 7:00 p.m. until 11:00 p.m.
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