New York, NY - My Pet Ram is proud to present Color Cathedral, an exhibition of works by Roberta Gentry and Jack Arthur Wood.

Jack-Arthur Wood and Roberta Gentry both thrive on the inability to bring order to chaos. Their work asks us to unfocus our eyes and let our minds wander. In doing so we can appreciate new sensations and find inspiration in imperfection. Digging through the layers of their poignant constructions allows us to make sense of time, vision, and experience as we happen upon forgotten memories and sparkling catalysts that can irrevocably alter our perception.

The jumble of humanity on the city’s measured framework, the potent geometry of exotic foliage, and the melding of the urban skyline with the sprawling landscape are all readily accessible within the works of Color Cathedral. Thinking about symmetry and the underlying structures of visual lives, Wood and Gentry question the self-imposed order we bring to a world filled with competing stimuli. Building upon the grid, whether that be Gentry’s underdrawing or Wood’s use of painted fabric, each artist asks us to take a moment to extract ourselves from the promise of organization and give into a more fulfilling experience. By harnessing the orderly structure and bending it to their whim, they create a connection between mathematical perfection and pure abstraction.

Jack-Arthur Wood constructs immersive architecture that hovers between a feverish collage of painted canvas and an optically dense construction of shapes, seasons, and moods. Cut fabric compilations, colored in gradients of acrylic, grow into abstract complexes of shapes that mimic natural formations and the ever-growing expanse of the urban environment. Casting glances toward New York’s famous monuments as well as ethereal atmospheric effects, Wood’s paintings share a kinship with the oeuvre of artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, whose flower studies and skyscrapers created a diametric opposition of subjects while continuing to investigate the lived experience of American life. Works like Color Cathedral (Land Lattice) marry romantic visions of open skies, red suns, and greenery with the intricate construction of scaffolding or the lead outlines of stained glass. Embodying the same fervor as Charles Demuth’s I Saw the Figure Five in Gold or the overwhelming urban space of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Wood’s paintings are infused with the electric energy of cities and the sublime thrill of wild nature.

Roberta Gentry’s diaphanous compositions exist somewhere between botanical illustrations and faded illuminations from some indecipherable sutra. Building each form from multiple translucent layers, she dispatches with any sense of illusionary depth or overt representation and instead clings to a central ‘spine’ from which all else blooms. Like thriving snake plants or dead-end arterials, twisting lines in works like Dormant and Double cross into neighboring fields, creating visible intersections where two expressions occupy one space. Equally influenced by centuries-old religious artworks, architectural elements, and biological formations, there is a certain quiet reverence in Gentry’s paintings that asks for a more sustained awareness of time and its passing. While more graphic at first glance, closer inspection reveals the time and care of the artist’s brush as she applies layer upon layer, resulting in a testament to patience and artistic labor.

Embracing symmetry as the through bridge between natural and manmade aspects, both artists in Color Cathedral beckon to the human need for an innate semblance of balance. We see it in nature and strive for it in life. The bilateral symmetry of leaves and our own human bodies offers repetition that is never perfect but superficially similar. Rather than push toward mechanical perfection, works like Wood’s Atoning for Tonnage or Gentry’s imposing Pomegranate are more Rorschach blots than kaleidoscopic duplicates, their mirrored halves diverging and changing only under careful observation. With this in mind, we are called to acknowledge and highlight the imperfections in our orderly systems. We take the time to tease out slight differences, think about wabi-sabi and the beauty of transience, and purposefully deviate from the path to better appreciate the harmony between nature and our human world. All of these elements serve to lift us out of the everyday and restore some small spark of light in a world grown dim.

Color Cathedral will be on view beginning Friday, December 15th through Sunday, January 14, 2024. The gallery is located at 48 Hester Street in the Lower East Side. Gallery hours are Wednesday-Sunday from 12-6pm and by appointment. For more information about this exhibition, please email info@mypetram.com.

Roberta Gentry is a Los Angeles based artist whose work is inspired by the natural world and the balance of order and chaos that exists within it. Using painting, she explores the connections and conflicts that occur between architecture and biology, and questions the divide between natural and artificial. Roberta received an MFA in painting from SUNY, Albany and has been included in recent exhibitions at Bozo Mag, Los Angeles, Ladies' Room, Los Angeles, and Gallery ALSO, Los Angeles, and SCOTTY, Berlin.

Jack Arthur Wood Jr. is a visual artist, writer, curator and educator. Wood studied at Guilford College, in Greensboro, NC, receiving a BA in printmaking in 2012, and earned an MFA in printmaking from Texas A&M University—Corpus Christi in 2017. He has been a resident at The Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, The Wassaic Project, The Jentel Foundation, Little Bear Hill, and Tiger Lily Press. Wood has had solo/two-person presentations at Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY; Green House Gallery, Brook- lyn, NY; Conduit Gallery, Ridgewood, NY; Paradice Palase, Brook- lyn, NY; Not Gallery, Austin TX; The Weil Gallery, Corpus Christi, TX; Hudson & Jones Gallery, Cincinnati, OH; and The Bakery, Vancouver, BC. His work has been exhibited. at Geary Contempo- rary, Millerton, NY; Soloway Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; 5-50 Gallery, Queens, NY; Field of Play Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Ortega Y Gasset, Brooklyn, NY; O’Flaherty’s, New York, NY; The Ekru Project,Kansas City, MO; Heaven Gallery, Chicago, IL; Pause OFF Gallery, Mil- ford, OH; and Deanna Evans Projects, Brooklyn, NY. Jack Arthur Wood lives and works in Queens, NY.