Collar Works is pleased to announce, Informal Language, a show of painting, sculpture, and installation curated by Jenny Kemp with works by Nadine Beauharnois, Danny Ginsburg, Kelsey Renko, and Christine Snyder. Motivated by continuing interests in abstraction, Informal Language brings together four young artists that work in playful and inventive styles, creating within their chosen forms a language of their own, but also one that speaks collectively to a mood concerned with the present.

Created through a seeming filter in which emotional and aesthetic information twists, bends, and permeates, these works present themselves in lively patterning, vivid color combinations, seductive surfaces, and humorous shapes. They possess a fresh and tactile immediacy that draws us into their colloquialisms and ultimately entice us.

Nadine Beauharnois makes sculptures that examine the nature of human experience as a combination of the awkward, painful, and humorous. These are humble objects that occasionally sag and bend and some may appear to be injured or have parts missing. Often, a sculpture begins in response to the memory associated with a visual experience- like intently concentrating on someone’s richly patterned sweater during an uncomfortable conversation. Some members of this cast of characters appear to be in a state of motion or change: running, lurching, or collapsing, and often possess attributes like eyes, hair, and nondescript appendages. Gestures tentatively reach and awkwardly balance, recalling the unsettled humor and ever-shifting discomforts of existing in a human body.

Danny Ginsburg uses the sensuous qualities of color and material to explore how semiotic meaning is made. Differences in form and space generate odd, unplanned meaning in layers of action and reaction, until each part satisfies the next and its whole. He draws inspiration from mundane experiences, spiritual ideologies and critical theory to create objects using techniques learned through a formal art training and his occupation as a heavy construction laborer.

Kelsey Renko creates paintings as a way to process through visual ideas by manipulating color, shapes and layers. For her, events are portrayed subconsciously and memories of form or color appear as a reference to manipulate.

Christine Snyder draws on an ever-growing collection of visual references, creating playful drawings and sculptures. Though primarily rocks, minerals, and mushrooms, references may be anything from a piece of cake to a radiator. The forms created become far enough removed from the original referent that they take on their own identity. While they often appear as man-made, inanimate objects, they may also resemble a creature or a plant-like growth. Though each piece may be oddly familiar, they remain in a state of ambiguity.