FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:


Paradigm Gallery is pleased to present Featured Collections by PJ Linden and Hunter Stabler, an exhibition of new works. The exhibition, marking Linden's second and Stabler's first with the gallery, will open on September 28th, and remain on view through October 20, 2018. An exhibition of sculptural works by the multimedia artist Hilary White, Seeing Impossible Color, will also run concurrently.

In her practice, Linden uniquely refines the use of non-traditional mediums, such as the kitschy, dimensional fabric paint, oft-referred to as puff paint, seeking to transfigure the biological into the supernatural, as filtered through the prism of a consumerist culture predicated upon the synthetic and the mass-produced. Based upon patterns and textures found in nature, primarily aquatic life, the natural rough, granulated surfaces of shark and stingray skins, urchin spines and fish scales, as well as the markings and colorations serving to repel predators, Linden creates second skins or aposematic pelts, employing them as unconventional canvases.

Inspired by a classification of crustacea, which reproduces asexually or produces eggs without the need for fertilization by a male, Linden aims to magnify present and future mutations. Ranging from small-scale canvases to large-format mixed media sculpture, her cotton candy-colored palette––pearly, pink barbs of stippled acrylics––subverts the tools of men into feminist weapons. Cross-pollinating Neo-pointillism with 'her own futurist cabinet of curiosities', Linden emasculates objects historically gendered as male, challenging the traditional expectations and cultural impositions of the binary. About the series Linden comments, “The past year I have dedicated myself to a cotton candy pallet, focusing on the infantile allure and brutality of pale pink and baby blue; the expectations of the binary and the cultural impositions of humans in relationship to non binary subphylum." Accordingly, Linden's collection is presented with the title "Pink and Blue."

Derived from religious and mythological symbols, Stabler's newest collection features delicate, expertly hand-cut paper compositions exploring the formal interplay between the illusory notion of space and the actual physical shadows upon the two-dimensionality of the paper itself––the foregrounding flatness contrasted with, at times, modulated depth. Based upon multicultural religious and cymatic patterns, Stabler's obsessively intricate, labor-intensive works, with their perspectival patterning, effectively create the illusion of form.

His multi-layered, graphite and ink cutout prints on paper aim to represent what is generally considered incomprehensible--the mystical creatures and microcosmic vibratory events, the subtle invisible phenomena and theoretical shapes of the universe. Conversant with the ancient, canonical, modern and contemporary ideas of spatiality, Stabler's complex compositions of the mythical and preternatural, the magical and otherworldly, inspire a sense of spiritual mystery, awe, and fascination.