Drawn and Quartered: Small Drawings

Drawn and Quartered: Small Drawings
August 11th- September 2nd 2007
Opening Saturday August 11th 6:30-10:00pm

Featuring works by New York-based emerging and established artists, Drawn and Quartered surveilles and surveys the expanded field drawing occupies in 2007.

All works in the show are drawings 11”X17” and under. Artists invited to participate were given no other restrictions; allowing for a multitude of media, approaches and subjects. They were also encouraged to creatively stretch the boundaries of what can be a drawing. In addition to traditional drawing materials like pen, ink, and pencil the show also includes digital drawings, collage with drawing elements and linear paper constructions.

The works in this show hover between glamour and banality, fear and awe, history and disposability, memory and quotation. The small scale enforces an economy of means if not of meaning. The artists take cues from such diverse and perverse phenomena as Classic Science Fiction, postcard photography, Audobon prints, petroglyphs, the Northern Renaissance, goth fashion, the sex lives of the Roman Emperors, graphic design, dangerous animals and suburban sprawl. This show is about exploring the new possibilities of this refreshed art form and presenting many of them together.

Including works by
Kathleen Vance, Amy Hill, Liz Brown, Brian LaRossa, Jeremy Bronson, Moriyama Tadashi, Eric Lopresti, Jason Bryant, Ross Racine, Ali Beletic, Isuel Isuel, Thom Smith, Sean Flannigan, Allie Rex, Abby Goodman, Dylan Peet, Seth Cohen, Erin Riche, Bill Herring, Michiel Sanders, James Bierdman, Kendall Bradford, Christopher Martino, Sunny Chapman, Kevin Reay, John Zaso, Eduardo Cervantes, Devin Powers, Grace Teng. Please check the website for more information. www.likethespice.com

June 21st Like the Spice creates music with Make Music NY

Like the Spice Celebrates Summer With the Make Music New York Festival

On Thursday, June 21st Like the Spice is acting as one of the many venues for the Make Music New York Festival. Based on France's Fete de la Musique the festival celebrates the first day of summer with streets full of free music. Since it was inaugurated in France 25 years ago, the idea has become an international phenomenon, celebrated on the same day in more than 300 cities in 108 countries, including Germany, Italy, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Australia, Vietnam, Congo, Cameroon, Togo, Columbia, Chile, Mongolia, and Japan – this will be the first year that New York will participate.

Like the Spice is hosting six bands from 5-7pm on the sidewalk in front of the gallery. Come celebrate with great music and barbeque.

Mike. P. Flanagan Smith is a storyteller, actor and folk musician based in the Brooklyn.

Oceanographer frontman Jeremy Yocum makes stripped down, folky gospel country music. Backed by fellow marine scientist Eric Elterman on viola and newcomers Mattley Mountain and Brian Hersey on harmonica and electric guitar (respectively), Yocum has built a quartet out of whiskey watered down with tears.

With bombastic rhythm and explosive guitar, Matt Naas and Charles Joesph Dukehart III will change the way you look at a two-man band. Both classic and new, The Expotentials weave between blues and garage based guitar riffs, strong original song writing, and full force thunderous roar.

Cakes of Light make stripped-down, lyric-centered songs exploring singer/songwriter Jay Dunbar's obsessions with bicycles, turtles, nonviolent revolution, chemo-gnosis and the so-called myth of the Mormon Worms.

Percussionist Brian Osborne is an active performer of improvised music, and has been organizing and participating in DIY music events throughout the US and in Europe for over 13 years. Brian's current projects include George Steeltoe Ensemble, DOSDEDOS, Paper Leg(s), and Blastocyst. Brian collaborates frequently with dancer Elisa Osborne.

Wes Matteu plays with a semi-permanent, rotating ....family of amazing musicians including: Ellen Houle on drums, Shane Leddy on upright and elec. bass, Tom Clark on keys, slide, harmonica, french horn and whatever he feels like that day.....and when they can Dave Birch/mandolin, Kathleen/banjo and sometimes Todd Erk/upright ,marina Phillips Kisse/violin and Chris Sarulo/saw.

Make Music New York Festival at Like the Spice
June 21st 5-9pm - Free

Like the Spice Gallery Celebrates One Year With “Triumphant” Exhibition

Most Triumphant: Paintings by Liz Brown
June 22nd- August 5th 2007
Opening Reception - Friday June 22nd 6:30-10:00pm
Press Preview - June 15th-21st Gallery Hours or by Appointment

Like the Spice is proud to present Most Triumphant: Paintings by Liz Brown, opening Friday June 22nd in conjunction with the celebration of its one-year anniversary. Time freezes and history sits silent in this collection of majestically deadpan paintings. Building on her successful first New York solo show at Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts in Chelsea this exhibition features work from several new series.

Ms. Brown’s recent paintings troll the shallow pool of memory to see if we really catch much in our day-to-day experience. Dinosaurs, battleships, miraculous vans, an indoor undersea paradise, and a machine with all the answers populate this exhibition. Ships stage epic battles against a vast and empty ocean. Vans make Duke’s of Hazard style jumps and drift off towards heaven. Natural and artificial histories battle each other in chilly silence. Even the forest seems air-conditioned as painted by Brown. The once and future king of the thunder lizards, deposed, stands watch over his diorama.

These epics flattened onto canvas refuse to have their grandiosity distilled out of them, retaining all the resonance of echoes. To make immemorial the victors of nature and society, and transmute them into living fossils Brown edits out the cobwebs. As George Bernard Shaw said, ”If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it how to dance.”

Liz Brown has shown in California, Maryland, Connecticut and New York. She has been included in three previous group shows at Like the Spice. In 2005 she was a Space Program recipient of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the New York Public Library Print Collection, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and the Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport Connecticut. She earned her MFA from the Mount Royal Graduate Program at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2004. Since then she has taught at the Montpelier Cultural Arts Center in Laurel, Maryland and at Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington DC. Currently Liz lives and maintains her studio in Brooklyn.