ERIK THOR SANDBERG: Cyclical Nature
DEAN KESSMANN: Architectural Intersections
ISAAC MAISELMAN: Entre El Diablo, El Dios

April 4 - May 23, 2009

Conner Contemporary Art takes great pleasure in announcing our 10th anniversary. We are especially pleased to celebrate our first decade with concurrent solo exhibitions of new work by three gallery artists: Erik Thor Sandberg, Dean Kessmann and Isaac Maiselman.

Erik Thor Sandberg calls forth the regenerative powers of nature in Cyclical Nature, his third solo exhibition with the Gallery. Viewing the artist's latest series of large oil paintings on canvas elicits as much pleasure as he evidently took in painting them. Freeing figures from interior settings of his previous compositions, Sandberg opened magnificent landscape vistas as sites for the enactment of life, death and regeneration. In his inventive allegories, people and animals negotiate a tenuous balance between knowledge and irrationality. Sandberg reconciled the unsettling eventualities of his protagonists' actions by grounding them in vital elements which assert nature's boundless forces of reclamation and rebirth.

Dean Kessmann furthers his exploration of unusual ways of seeing familiar architectural spaces in Architectural Intersections, his third solo exhibition with the Gallery. In this new series of photographs the artist rediscovers the simple delight an imaginative world inspired by childhood memories of lying on his back and looking at the ceiling upside-down. Kessmann photographed his current apartment with a large-format view camera, focusing on points where off-white walls meet an off-white ceiling to define the shape of a room, at corners, as well as at junctures with encased supports and conduits. Kessmann's elegant minimal images challenge preconceptions about gravity and light as they evoke the plasticity of abstract forms. A catalog is available with essay by Karen Irvine, curator, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL.

In his first solo exhibition with the Gallery, *gogo projects artist Isaac Maiselman critiques political exploitation of religion in the video installation Entre el Dios, El Diablo. The videos disclose Maiselman's efforts to symbolically internalize, cleanse, and reform biblical scripture into a tolerant ethical code unstained by human aggression. The artist's imagery combines unfathomably black objects, casting nearly impenetrable shadows, with translucent materials and bright surfaces that convey pure light. These uncompromising visual qualities of light and dark, which symbolize good and evil, figure the polemic that impels Maiselman to remake white pages with black text into his own Bible through video.

An opening night reception will be held Saturday, April 4: 6-8pm.

Artists in attendance.

For further information or images, please contact the gallery @ 202-588-8750 / info@connercontemporary.com.