Femke Hiemstra/Ryan Heshka @ Roq La Rue (11/12/10)

[sleepboy]

[roqlarue]

Roq La Rue Gallery
presents

Femke Hiemstra
"Bone Shaped Bone"
new paintings

and

Ryan Heshka
"Super Things"
new paintings

Opening Friday November 12th 6-9pm
Both artists in attendance!
contact us to be on a preview list!

Roq la Rue is pleased to bring back two of our more popular artists, Femke Hiemstra and Ryan Heshka, to the gallery. Both create fantastical, extravagantly detailed worlds with a sense of dark fun.
Femke Hiemstra’s meticulously tight, jewel like mixed media paintings and exquisitely rendered black and white drawings are homes to a dark fairytale land where inanimate objects come to life and frolic with animal neighbors. Lollipops become ship captains, strawberries become giant wrestlers, and vegetables become Halloween gods with lantern eyes. Femke occasionally uses typography in her work, using words from various languages and letters in her paintings to further enhance the narrative while still retaining a playful sense of mystery, or as a visual device to frame in the scenery, as if you were looking at her world through a secret window. She also uses found objects to paint on, such as boxes and wrappers, to create imaginary products with magical properties. In this series she has several paintings on vintage book covers, which are then tantalizingly sealed up in a frame, leaving the viewer to speculate on the full story.

Ryan Heshka unapologetically pays homage to Golden Era sci fi pulp while creating a style that is also uniquely his own. He explores themes of man vs nature, (even though often the "nature" is from another world) as well as the exploring the ideology of pushing the limits of science as a tool to help and further mankind, and the technological terrors that can be inadvertently unleashed as a result.
His work is acrylic painted on wood panel in candy colors that are just a bit off, heavily varnished and embellished with tags cut from pulp magazines, which serve as inspiration and explanation of each piece.

Roq La Rue Gallery
"Purveyors of Fine Pop Surrealism
and Contemporary Art Since 1998"
www.roqlarue.com

[sleepboy]

I saw Heshka's stuff for the first time at a Copro group show and quite liked it: arrestedmotion.com/2010/09/openings-blab-show-copro-gallery/