FUTURE FAIR 2021

Featuring Derek Weisberg, Pajtim Osmanaj, Lujan Perez, and Joseph Cochran II

September 9th - September 12th, 2021

Eternity in an Hour is an exhibition of four artists working in diverse mediums whose work provides an invitation to sit in the stillness of a moment frozen in time. Each piece in this exhibition can be understood like a tableau, a scene of an unfolding story.  The presentation’s atmospheric and textural presence leaves the viewer with a familiarity that can’t quite be placed; a primordial reflex like a memory that possible may not even exist, one that could have come before or after our own existence.

 Upon entering the booth, viewers are greeted, or rather halted by a legion of Derek Weisberg’s life size porcelain figures. Arranged in circular display, which could be perceived as a clock, these stoic and stirring creatures stare back at us unnerved as if they are backing us into a corner of self reflection. Weisberg’s masterful piece-meal compilations, all at once classic and contemporary give us that eerie sense of someone watching us, that if we blink they might move. The anomalous and transmuting character’s feel as though we imagined them out of work of fiction of who’s plot escapes us, leaving our startled sensibilities unresolved. 

Osmanaj’s works draw us into a different world with a preternatural familiarity. It is as if we are being absorbed into his two-dimensional works, rather than looking at them.  His mystical and mythic landscapes, formed by his masterful mixed media approach combining canvas, paper, plaster, and various painting techniques, leave us pondering a barren and endless void.  In his large, illustrious canvas work, dramatic drapery hangs halfway open, unveiling a window into somewhere else altogether.

As Osmanaj’s empties his pages, Perez fills hers with a twisting, turning amalgam of imagery and energy.  Her large scale paper works, which float off of the wall from hand sculpted clay armatures, feel like a time-lapse of life itself.  Perez’s work’s take the viewer head on, first as a complete gesture, and with time one begins to unwind the whirling combination of technique and sentiment.  Her mixed media printmaking approach, combining multi block woodcuts with a variety of inks and oils, are likewise contained and sprawling as the layered and fragmented moments seem embedded, as if they weren’t put there, but found there.  The artist’s over scaled “vessels”, taken from Traditional Spanish Ceramics, and conceived from memories of her adolescence in Spain, are a childlike reminder of what in life is big, and what is small, a nod that a series of combined moments, is all we are, all we have.

Joseph Cochran’s practice is rooted in the study and examinations of societies, where the artist places himself and lives among often rural, less frequented locations across continents.  These rigid studies of societies, ones which are often in their own way hermetic, tie to Cochran’s own origins in Brownsville, Brooklyn.  The three works in this exhibition, all were taken during the artists sojourn in Sardenia, Italy.  At the entryway of the booth, Ferragasto stands as a foreboding gesture to the booths concept, while the still life, Home For Migrants, Nuoro, with its sincerity is Cochran’s focus on the minutiae at its finest.  In the double exposure, Santu Naniu, titled after the towns June equestrian festival, you can almost feel the dry heat and dust settling on your tongue. His voyeuristic and fixated works, exist in a space which is unbound by time and identity,  which in itself is an aggressive stance as we face a barrage of world events and technology at a rapid pace.