LAUREN COMITO

GRITTY RITUALS

Lauren Comito John O’Connor Peter Schenck

Curated by Peter Schenck

Open Reception: September 5th, 2024 | 6 – 8 pm

September 5th – 28th, 2024

Equity Gallery, 245 Broome St, New York, NY

Gritty Rituals is an exhibition that joins three artists: Lauren Comito, John O’Connor, and Peter Schenck. Each artist brings an almost religious reverence to their imagery, but their laser focus is aimed squarely at distinctively secular iconography: the human figure, post-consumer waste, advertisements, art history and text based narratives that reflect life’s absurdity. Rich color, compositional density, repetition of personal symbols, and mix of high and low culture can all be found in their work. Monk-like in their devotion to their craft and imagery, each artist toils not for the lofty goal of a heavenly afterlife, but to embody and redirect the gritty aspects of the modern world’s physical and visual assault on ourselves.

Each artist fuses the complexity of contemporary daily life with deep investigations into defining moments of art history. O’Conner’s works on paper manifest the color intensity and detail found in medieval illuminated manuscripts. He painstakingly renders his images in color pencil with the dedication of a 15th century old master, fusing them with high octane 21st century commercial logos, car advertisements, and intentionally nonsensical narratives. Comito and Schenck look to cubism and 20th century abstraction, but intertwine those daunting subjects with their own low brow aesthetics of cartoon figuration and 1980’s graphic design. While humor abounds in Comito and Schenck’s visual world, there is a dramatic tone in their work as well, as if their irreverent figures and structures are armoring themselves against the precarious world we all inhabit.

Lauren Comito’s art transforms the overlooked into the profound. Drawing inspiration from everyday objects such as discarded packaging, she begins with abstract forms that evolve into complex, meaningful structures. In Comito’s work, these ordinary items serve as potent symbols of impermanence and serve as a connection to our consumer society. Through symmetry and repetition, she constructs figures that emerge from abstraction, inviting viewers to engage in pareidolia—perceiving faces, watchful eyes, portals, and more within her compositions. Her colorful, totemic, Rorschach-like figures explode onto the canvas, confronting viewers while offering a playful counterpoint to their serious undertones. Comito creates celestial beings and intricate structures that are deliberately convoluted and challenging to decipher, prompting us to question the psychic impact of our contemporary landscape on our consciousness.

John O’Connor’s works are packed with information culled from a diverse array of topics, including conspiracy theories, emergent behavior, generation of consciousness, political language, mathematics, jokes, the lottery, and absurd postulates, among others. He transforms information from these subjects into patterns, forms, and shapes, which balance conceptual specificity with the rigor of abstract painting. O’Connor’s drawings collapse the space between the generation of an idea, its gradual materialization, and final graphic realization.

Peter Schenck’s paintings abstract, stretch, bend and squeeze elements of the classical still life and portraiture into a kaleidoscope of color, texture and form. His work serves to elevate the joy and absurdity of being a painter in our tumultuous times. . While the jumble of the outside world is apparent within the managed chaos of his paintings, Schenck remains focused on depicting the quiet, mundane, inward life of the studio artist. Paint brushes, palettes, skulls, pedestals, paint tubes and the artist himself all jostle for attention in this curious world of gallows humor. He manifests the anxiety of art historical influence, but the ecstasy as well, implementing Picassoid figures, Gustonesque landscapes, and mid century abstraction in a frequent painterly loop. The understanding of painting in the wake of such powerful artists is palpable, but no less so is Schenck’s obvious delight in adapting their discoveries to his own purposes.

While each artist strives through their studio rituals for aesthetic transcendence in their work, they all realize as Willem de Kooning once said, “Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped up in the melodrama of vulgarity. I do not think of art as a situation of comfort.” Rather than viewing art as a method of transcendence, Comito, O’Connor and Schenck all embody de Kooning’s drive to examine the strange, messy, and beautiful aspects of living in the chaos and complexity of the present.

In “Gritty Rituals,” Comito, O’Connor, and Schenck engage in a powerful act of psychological sublimation, transforming the mundane into the extraordinary. Their works serve as complex defensive mechanisms, deflecting, digesting, and reinterpreting the bombardment of modern life. Through meticulous craft and inventive composition, each artist creates a visual language that both confronts and transmutes our daily experiences. This exhibition invites viewers to witness how art can process the psychological weight of our contemporary landscape, offering new perspectives on the objects, information, and cultural icons that surround us. “Gritty Rituals” ultimately reveals the profound in the everyday, challenging us to reconsider our relationship with the world we inhabit and the inner landscapes we cultivate.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES:

Lauren Comito is a Brooklyn-based visual artist and educator. She holds an MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA in Art History and Painting from Tyler School of Art. Comito most recently exhibited in Vagabond Shoes, curated by Ben Klein at McBride Contemporain in Montreal, QC. This year, her work was featured in a See You Next Thursday Art Auction and the group show Backwater at Field of Play Gallery in Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited at PS1 (Iowa City), Open Air Media Festival (Iowa City), Shrine Gallery (New York), Park Place Gallery (New York), 25Kent presented by Wallplay (New York), the Hewitt Gallery at Marymount Manhattan College (New York), Index Art Center (Newark), Chashama: A Space to Present (New York), Slag Gallery (New York), Touch Gallery (Boston), The Rema Hort Mann Foundation (New York), Icebox at Crane Arts (Philadelphia), Swarovski Headquarters (Cranston, RI), Mighty Tanaka Gallery (New York), University of Delaware Crane Gallery (Philadelphia), University Arts League (Philadelphia) and the Slought Foundation, University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia). She published a limited printed edition with Eminence Grise Editions, showcased at the Editions and Artists’ Book Fair and Art on Paper in New York, and the SOON Paris Art Fair in France. Comito currently teaches at The New School and Pratt Institute. She has additionally served as a visiting artist at Rutgers University, Pace University, UMass Amherst, and Sarah Lawrence College.

John J. O’Connor was born in Westfield, MA and received an MFA in painting and an MS in Art History and Criticism from Pratt Institute in 2000. John was awarded a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. He attended The MacDowell Colony, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Vermont Studio Center, the Celia & Wally Gilbert Artist-in-Residence Program, and was a recipient of 2 New York Foundation for the Arts Grants in Painting and Drawing, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, the and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Studio residency. John has been in numerous exhibitions abroad, including The Lab (Ireland), Martin Asbaek Gallery (Denmark), Neue Berliner Raume (Germany), Rodolphe Janssen Gallery (Brussels), the Louhu District Art Museum (Shenzhen, China), TW Fine Art (Australia); and in the US at Andrea Rosen Gallery, Pierogi Gallery, Arkansas Arts Center, Weatherspoon Museum, Ronald Feldman Gallery, Marlborough Gallery, White Columns, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Baltimore, the Wellin Museum, the Queens Museum, and the Tang Museum. His exhibitions have been reviewed in Bomb Magazine, The New York Times, Artforum, the Village Voice, Art Papers, the Brooklyn Rail, and Art in America, among others. John presented his work in discussion with Fred Tomaselli at The New Museum, and his work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Weatherspoon Museum, Hood Museum, Southern Methodist University, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. A catalog spanning 10 years of John’s work was published by Pierogi Gallery with essays by Robert Storr, John Yau, and Rick Moody. He teaches and co-chairs the Visual Arts program at Sarah Lawrence College. John is also a member of the experimental art and technology collective NonCoreProjector.

Peter Schenck was born in New York City and is a Brooklyn based painter. He received his BFA from Boston University (2006) and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania (2009). Schenck has exhibited his work internationally and nationally, including: Tales of Art Gallery (Imola, Italy), The Dot Project Gallery (London), Galerie Sebastien Adrien (Paris, FR), Young International Artists Art Fair (Paris, FR), Freight + Volume Gallery (New York, NY), BravinLee Programs (NYC), Andrew Edlin Gallery (NYC), Planthouse Gallery (NYC), Arts + Leisure Gallery (NYC), Lesley Heller Workspace (NYC), Lorimoto Gallery (Queens, NY), Park Place Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Good Naked Gallery (Brooklyn), The Delaware Contemporary Museum (Wilmington, DE), Tyler School of Art (Philadelphia, PA), Vox Populi Gallery (Philadelphia), TSA Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Victori + Mo Gallery (Brooklyn), Readymade Gallery (Orleans, MA), Airlock Gallery (San Marcos, CA), HOLA Fresh Start (Santa Monica), and The Santa Barbara Center for Art, Science, and Technology (Santa Barbara, CA). He has been an Artist in Residence at The Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT) in 2015 and the DNA Residency (Provincetown, MA) from 2016 – 2024. Schenck has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Timeout New York, Juxtapoz Magazine, Two Coats of Paint, Wall Street International Magazine, Elephant Magazine, #FFFFFF Walls, the Painting is Dead Blog and Tom Ray’s Art Podcast..