Front Window Gallery

Burton C. Bell: Descansos

August 12 – November 10th, 2016

Front Window Gallery is thrilled to present Burton C. Bell’s Descanso. In this haunting photo, Bell captures the palpable, real-time grit of train tracks set against the infinite possibilities of an unfathomable, endless horizon. Here, time and place are at once concrete and ethereal, constantly shifting underfoot. According to Bell, “In the Southwest and West you will see many roadside crosses marking the place where a person died in an auto crash. There are thousands. These markers are called descansos, the Spanish word for rest area. In the year 2001, I made a trip from Los Angeles to Santa in my ’69 Ford F250. My goal was to capture and document as many descansos as possible along Route 66. Many times I ventured off the path to explore. Resonating my journey back to LA, heading west, my future at that moment was infinitely unclear. This is my own personal descanso.”

Amy Abattoir: Boy Overlooking

May 17 – June 21st, 2016

Front Window Gallery is thrilled to present Amy Abattoir‘s Boy Overlooking. In this beguiling painting, Abattoir deftly co-mingles the familiar with the surreal, while casting a broad range of emotions over the entire scene with deceptively simple narrative elements. The introspective experience of the lone figure of a boy standing on a bridge is mirrored in the watery, wintery, almost monochromatic landscape in which he is placed. By setting up visual and metaphoric dichotomies, such as what is inside versus what is outside, Abattoir’s Boy Overlooking poses more questions than answers. Is this merely a nostalgic scene of innocent childhood exploration, or something slightly more sinister? And it’s in this charged not-really-knowing-what’s-happening arena that Abattoir suspends the viewer, creating a palpable tension that holds everything together.

Deborah Rosenthal: Three Paintings

Landscape with Lovers (detail)

March 29 – May 4th, 2016

Front Window Gallery is thrilled to present three paintings by Deborah Rosenthal. Landscape with Lovers is a figural abstraction investigating themes of love and loss, transformation and change,  and the inevitability and permanence of time as writ large in the landscape. Also on view are two small studies for a stained-glass commission permanently installed in New York City’s Ansche Chesed Synagogue: one depicting a pomegranate and the other the tree of life.

Chuck Webster: Three Works

February 19 – March 18th, 2016

Front Window Gallery is excited to present three works by Chuck Webster. In his book “Painting Abstraction” (New York: Phaidon, 2009), curator Bob Nickas described Webster’s work as “… translucent, biomorphic, and geometric forms — abstraction as sign, symbol, emblem. Their waxy, almost sculptural feeling, along with the vibrant color, gives the sense that they can actually be held in the palm of one’s hand…”

Jamie Wilson: Smart phone Small town

January 15 – February 17, 2016

Front Window Gallery is excited to present Smart phone Small town, an exhibition of Jamie Wilson’s ethereal photograph #untitled. Using only his cell phone camera, Wilson photographs overlooked or hidden moments of beauty discovered as he wanders around Milton, PA. By manipulating these images with various filters, Wilson manages to transform what most people think of as commonplace or ordinary into poetic, mysterious, and often unsettling images. Wilson’s work, such as #untitled, hints at the strange and wonderful lurking just beneath the surface of what we think we know when we look at everyday objects.

Kim Beck: The Sky is the Limit

December 18 – January 13, 2016

Front Window Gallery is thrilled to present Kim Beck’s Space, a unique lightbox from her ambitious 2011 public art project, “The Sky is the Limit”. Over New York City and Pittsburgh, Beck commissioned skywriting planes to write fleeting messages such as “Space Available,” “Everything Must Go,” and “All Sales Final”. Referencing the history of skywriting as an early medium of mass advertising, Beck appropriated common advertising slogans from everyday flyers and newspapers and put them back in the sky, albeit without any product to sell. Without a product, the empty language takes on new open-ended meanings, hovering somewhere between the evanescently poetic and prophetically apocalyptic.

Evelyn Twitchell: On the River

November 20 – December 16, 2015

Front Window Gallery is pleased to present On the River, an exhibition of three  works by Evelyn Twitchell that evoke the forms and forces of the natural world. Twitchell’s oil paintings and clay relief sculpture are engaging and idiosyncratic riddles, products of a Thoreau-ean attempt to give form to elusive, skittering, peripheral impressions of natural forces and rhythms like growth and flight. Animal, vegetable, and mineral are all drawn from nature, essences tapped at the source and distilled into metaphors. These works are a reconstruction after the experience, not a one-to-one response, and exist in a time and space guided entirely by their own very particular rules.

Sonya German: roue de charrette

October 23 – November 18, 2015

NOTE: video will be on view from 5pm – 11pm daily

Front Window Gallery is pleased to present Sonya German’s roue de charrette. This single-channel video of people performing the mesmerizing, playful act of a cartwheel is intended to evoke false nostalgia for a place just outside of memory. German intentionally degrades the quality of the video through a repetitive process of breaking down and rebuilding in order to mimic the shifting space where actual memories are created.