Fantastical 4-20: Daring to Defy Convention

For Immediate Release – Lower Burrell, PA – April. 20, 2013 – New Artwork by Lauren Toohey and Beth McClone featured at Artform Tattoo Gallery In Lower Burrell.

Artform Gallery and Tattoo is pleased to present new work by two emerging and exciting artists: The work of Lauren Toohey and Beth McClone comments on the everyday aesthetic of middle class values, and twists it into a form of resistance against the conventional and traditional system. Both artist’s work interrogates, questions, encodes, transforms, subverts the status quo. Their visual language is characterized by deadpan humor and feminist absurdist propositions that playfully and subversively invert expectations; revealing the tension between internal psychology and external reality, and relates observation and knowledge as states of mind.

The gallery opening is Saturday the 20th of April 7pm- to 11pm; with Admission, free parking and refreshments served. The show continues to June 20th.

Lauren Toohey creates mixed media paintings composed of storybook animals and surrealism in a world where light-heartedness rules and where rules are undermined. Through a decidedly colorful approach , she makes work that deals with the documentation of events and the question of how they can be presented, but not by telling a story or creating a metaphor. Her works are an investigation into subconscious realm that can only be realized in painting. The result is a series of idiosyncratic and quirky self portraiture. Her works are a drawn reflection upon the art of painting itself: thoroughly self-referential, yet no less aesthetically pleasing, and therefore deeply inscribed in the history of modernism – made present most palpably in the artist’s exploration of some of the most hallowed of modernist paradigms.

Beth McClone mainly works in painting by parodying mass media by exaggerating certain formal aspects inherent to our contemporary society, Sometimes they appear idiosyncratic and quirky, at other times, they seem typical by-products of American superabundance and marketing. Her paintings are saturated with obviousness, mental inertia, low brow and steampunk references. They question the coerciveness that is derived from the more profound meaning and the superficial aesthetic appearance of an image.

The Artform Gallery and Tattoo, establishing itself as a premiere venue to see some of the most exciting artwork of the Pittsburgh art scene; bringing together emerging underground talent and established creative professionals from high brow fine art, to low brow street art as well as some the most high quality tattoo art in Western Pennsylvania.

Artform Gallery & Tattoo
2603 Leechburg Rd. Lower Burrell, PA 15068
724-212-3153
artformtattoo@yahoo.com

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