Memory believes before knowing remembers. - William Faulkner
Nostalgia requires memory. Memories require experience. Experiences require life. Nostalgia, a group show of figurative paintings by New York based artists Hiroya Kurata, Karyn Lyons, and James Ulmer is a culmination of renderings of moments in life which blossom experiences real and imagined.
Kurata’s works on panel and canvas depict abstracted human interactions evoking characters and scenes from distant memories, found photographs, and his own domestic life. Creating dreamlike windows into the past, the viewer becomes voyeur and must ask if they are looking at a memory of the artist or their own.
Lyons’ oil on vellum works illuminate the intimate details which deliver the past into the present. Drawing on her experiences as a young woman she revisits the interiority of her teenage years unfolding longing, loneliness, and private pleasures. Remembering the specifics of then, a favorite album, a box of cornflakes, a tennis sweatshirt, colors our navigations of past moments and makes vivid times that have been bitter and sweet.
Ulmer’s flashe on canvas paintings celebrate the importance of color and its mysterious link to our emotional state. Reductive human forms reflect upon themselves and interact with others through bright bursts of pigment that render snapshots of life that feel familiar and other worldly all at once.