24 April-24 May 2014
Don Joint: “Coney Island Blueprints”
Don Joint’s newest series, “Coney Island Blueprints”, continues a painterly exploration of the Carnivalesque that began with the 2010 exhibition “Waldameer”, a visual return to the artist’s boyhood memories of the historic Pennsylvania amusement park of the same name. His collaged paintings build upon a lifelong fascination with amusement parks by structuring their seemingly abstract compositions around a collection of early 20th century blueprints of rides drawn from the Coney Island archives. Joint’s rhythmic, gestural works evoke both the sensory experience of these mechanical marvels and the mythological fantasies of his childhood.
In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, poet and author Erik LaPrade writes: “In these new works, Joint combines elements of two different cultures to create his fantasy park: industrial and mechanical drawings of Coney Island rides, and the powerful, vivid colours and imagery of Japanese Ukiyo-e prints. The fantasy world of Joint’s amusement park is the world of Ukiyo-e, the floating world. Ukiyo-e prints almost always present us with a visual narrative, whether actual historical stories or mythological tales and legends. However, in Joint’s world, there is no narrative story; we are the narrators, and part of the fun of this park is for us to try to make sense of the fantasy through which we are moving.”
(adapted from the gallery’s press materials)
INFORMATION
Pavel Zoubok Gallery
531 West 26th Street, 2nd Floor
New York, New York 10001 USA
(212) 675-7490
Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10AM-6PM
Image:
untitled
by Don Joint
14″ diameter
mixed media on panel
2014
photo: Sonya German
Image courtesy of Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York