My Pet Ram is pleased to present Framework, featuring Amanda Marrè Brown and Japeth Mennes, opening this Friday, October 21 from 6-9pm.

How do we experience the world? What does the daily life of an earthling hinge upon?  We create systems of support and structures to rely on that help to guide our  understanding. In Framework, Amanda Marrè Brown and Japeth Mennes offer excerpts  from their visual experiences in the form of frozen moments from a living city. In depicting doors, windows, and other entry points, they place focus on the interplay between these real world frames and that of the canvas itself. With a graphic sharpness that verges on the digital, both painters navigate through a familiar landscape that nonetheless appears alien. Formulating conversations about interior spaces and their exterior façades, paintings like Mennes’ Window Shade (2022) and  Marrè Brown’s Lume (2022) tease the viewer with a hint of hypothetical spaces just out of sight. 

Both artists present a duality in their paintings, which are simultaneously inviting and remain obscure. Images of windows and archways offer an opening, yet an attempt to enter is stymied by shutters and shades drawn close, or the jarring flatness of a void. Both Mennes and Marré Brown draw from their everyday experience. Drifting through the city on the way to work, the store, or coming home at night, they glimpse snippets of the world. Held in their minds or in the photo album on their phone, each advertisement, accoutrement, and archway becomes the source of new meditations. 

In the past, Mennes has taken imagery from signage around Brooklyn and Queens as  his subject. Translating the simplified insignia for laundromats and window repairs  shops into compositions in vivid matte, he plucks them from their everyday obscurity  and demands a reconsideration. In this exhibition, the sources become murky. Are the  windows and shutters and blinds culled from two-dimensional vinyl, or are they stylized  versions of real-world objects that have passed into a sort of graphic limbo courtesy of  the painter’s brush? The glass in pieces like Triple Pane (2022) utilize the double stroke  as a means of suggesting transparency when, in fact, they are quite the opposite.  Creating a visual iconography based on colloquial advertising practices, Mennes urges  a reinvestigation of universal symbols. 

Marrè Brown’s paintings of arches and entryways are inspired by instances of prolonged observation. Fleeting moments when light and shadow meet in perfect harmony become portals that lift one out of the mundane and into a momentary reverie. She notes, “My intention is to lure the viewer into a perceptual encounter in which visual sensations give way to an experience of looking that is felt throughout the body.” Using precise gradients and vibrant opaque colors, she creates a feeling of push-pull that holds the viewer between illusionary depth and flatness. In works like Lunette (2021), abstract forms flit between two dimensions and the infinite blue of a James Turrell skyspace. Marrè Brown harnesses this interstitial area to ask questions about vision and the dialogue between painted and physical space. 

The paintings in Framework exist in the real world. Their filtered depictions of the  everyday connect to a lived experience. The shutters and arches in Mennes’ and Marrè Brown’s paintings have a one-to-one correlation with the body, and in their presence our minds may wander to our own traversal of the city. If memory is but a string of images held in our mind, how do we impart some of their worth onto others? By bringing focus to the unglamorous, the commonplace, and the routine, these painters speak to a universal experience. The window is closed, the view is obscured, but the invitation is open.

FRAMEWORK will be on view Friday, October 21, 2022 through Sunday, November 13, 2022. A reception will be held on Friday, October 21st from 6-9pm. The gallery is located at 48 Hester Street in the Lower East Side. Gallery hours are Wednesday-Sunday from 12-7pm and by appointment. For inquiries and more information about this exhibition, please email info@mypetram.com.

Text by Graham W. Bell 
Graphics by Joey Parlett