Room 01: Moyna Flannigan, Knucklehead
Room 02: Alix Lambert, I am not like them at all and I cannot pretend
Video Wall: Ursula Hodel, Fat

Room 01: Sara Meltzer Gallery is proud to present Scottish artist Moyna Flannigan’s Knucklehead. Knucklehead is Flannigan’s second solo exhibition at Sara Meltzer Gallery.

Through the genre of portraiture, Flannigan continues her fascination with Western culture’s image-obsessed ways. The paintings are not portraits in the true sense: they are not likenesses of real people, but instead, amalgamated images derived from the artist’s imagination. As typical to her work, Flannigan explores gender, rites of passage, and dressing up. This body of work focuses on men and depicts a variety of male roles, both fictitious and real. Her subjects include jockeys, lawyers, and a magician among others. They are not canonized ideals, but rather curious takes on characters on characters not typically portrayed in traditional portraiture. Each wears their own “uniform” connoting an automatic understanding of their position, but paradoxically each invites the viewer beyond the veneer of their public self into a shared moment in their private domain. Curious to Flannigan is the inherent difference of how one seems versus how one is. This series is inspired by a variety of silent film stars, especially Buster Keaton: a man for whom she always had a sense of empathy, a man known for his comedic persona, yet a man who beneath the surface is quite different from his image. The idea of the clown is also central to this body of work. The clown, whether sad or happy, is made-up to reveal the image of his persona, rather than the essence of his true character. This tense ambiguity is precisely what Flannigan so poignantly investigates.

Moyna Flannigan teaches painting at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. She received her MA from Yale in 1987. Flannigan has had solo exhibitions at Doggerfisher Gallery in Edinburgh, Gallery Akinci in Amsterdam and Lotta Hammer Gallery in London. Her work has been included in group shows at Musee cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, Switzerland, at DCA in Dundee and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, among other international venues. She was a finalist for the NatWest Art Prize in 1999.

Room 02: Sara Meltzer Gallery is proud to present Los Angeles artist Alix Lambert’s I am not like them at all and I cannot pretend,. Lambert presents a series of her personal scrapbook, sketchbook and photo album pages, edited with paint. Lambert leaves windows and suggestions of moments, faces, and places from her life. She explores the blurred line between her life and her work and causes the viewer to question what it is that she has created through her imagery. As in all of her work, Lambert makes herself vulnerable while revealing almost nothing at the same time.

Video Wall: Sara Meltzer Gallery is proud to present the premier of New York-based video artist Ursula Hodel’s Fat. This three-channel video installation depicts the disturbing aspects of obesity presented as satire. Hodel applies one hundred pounds of lard to herself, sculpting her body into a globular, cake-like dress.