And then there were three...

Join us in welcoming our third new artist this month! Colette Robbins will be showing her work alongside Reuben Negron and Noa Charuvi at our New Artists Silent Auction We journeyed up to Harlem today to visit her studio, and it was WAY worth the trip.


Colette's paintings are acrylic on wood panel. Her work explores contradictions in sculpture vs. photography vs. paintings. In her words: "My paintings and drawings deal with remnants of the figure. Whether it's a rolled up bundle of severed legs or strange helmet-like fossils that may or may not have once been alive, my images speak about what survives."


"Within the paintings/drawings there are highly detailed manmade objects placed in natural or neutral scenes. These scenes look like they should be inhabited by the living but are not. Instead they are occupied by objects that reference the form or utility of a human. The works have many areas that are rich with intricate patterns and atmospheric textures that form type.s of known variables for the viewer to enter into. Once the viewer acknowledges the known components of the works they are faced with the question of why these elements exist within the space of the painting. The viewer soon sees that the scenes are the consequence of unknown events. Therefore they function like a story being told in reverse."


"Like the way cultural tragedies make us look backwards at the trail of clues the present hands us, my work implies a, perhaps, tragic history. The viewer is left to wonder who has abandoned this here and what should be done with it. The responsibility is to whoever stumbles across these uncanny scenes as the task falls on those which remain."



Hear Colette discuss one of her works!

New Artists Silent Auction at Like the Spice!

One of Us, One of Us, One of us!

We have some new inductees to our coven of artistry here at Like the Spice! Reuben Negron and Noa Charuvi will be exhibiting works for our First Friday's New Artists' Silent Auction on February 6th, 2009 from 7-9pm. Come for a cocktail and to bid silently on their gorgeous paintings.


Noa Charuvi was born in Jerusalem, Israel, but lives and works in New York City. Her work contains a sense of documentation but also of universality, since the places in the paintings are not anchored to a specific event.



Her paintings present the absurdity of that reality, but at the same time create a composition of color and shape that is purely formal, evoking beauty and harmony. The experience of the work is therefore a mix of pleasure and terror. In all her work, she skillfully pulls the realism out of her subjects, and selectively applies abstractions.
Reuben Negron was born in Florida, raised in the Bronx and entered adulthood in Connecticut. He began studying theater and set design at an early age but embraced the challenge of watercolor while attending the Maryland Institute College of Art. Of his work, he says "I have always been interested in the domestic and the mundane. Interpersonal relationships, the unseen and the under-appreciated have always been represented in my work. I often use shared experiences as a way to draw closer a seemingly disparate world.



In some of his work, viewers were are invited to invent or "finish" the stories for themselves thereby becoming part of the narrative process. The result, as they essentially take ownership over part of the creative process, is an elaborate emotional play between the image and the audience that is rooted at the very heart of storytelling.


A second series, Dirty Dirty Love™ is a frank look at modern relationships. This series aims to challenge social expectations by presenting taboo subjects in a mundane light.


Well, that's it for now! See you on Friday!