Hosted by Big Friendly Gallery

Casual attire

Free

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Big Friendly Gallery is proud to present its last painting exhibition! “Dreaming Together: seven years of collaborative art”, featuring the works of Baltimore artists Chris Balint, John Bowman, and Vianney Paul. “Dreaming Together” encompasses a period of seven years of collaborative art-making. The show features both small and large scale collaborative drawings and paintings by the trio, as well as some solo works. First Fridays/Opening Reception: May 5th 7-10PM Closing Reception: May 26th 7-10PM A/V performance: New Age Video Aquarium, at 9PM About the collaborative process: “Our approach is typically intuitive, improvisational, and non-verbal. Often, we’ll work on a canvas or drawing at the same time with no to few parameters. Mark-making is a central aspect of the process. As marks appear organically and forms gradually emerge on the surface, we engage and react to each other’s additions to a piece, collectively discovering each works’ unique form, and characteristics in real time. Some pieces are made in quick bursts in one or two nights; larger pieces can take longer and sprawl over a period of several months. The result is often an organic mass of colorful marks, undulating lines, textures, blobs, and interlocking forms, at times evoking explosions, clouds, or non-linear kaleidoscopic visions. Because our collaborative art is made between friends and in improvisational ways, we feel that our work embodies both playfulness and a spirit of youth, as we engage in our own games of structures and associations. Our development as collaborative artists has also been informed in recent years by our collective living project at the Holy Underground, an artistic intentional community in Baltimore. Through this long term collaboration, we have amassed an arsenal of signs, visual gestures and cues, culminating in our personal visual language – an outward imaging of psychological processes, which keeps evolving as we spring into the summer of our lives. This retrospective is a snapshot of our metamorphosis.” About New Age Video Aquarium: “New Age Video Aquarium” is the name of the experimental audio / visual art project started in 2012 by Chris Balint and John Bowman, now residing in Baltimore, Maryland. “New Age Video Aquarium” draws influence from ideas such as glitch art, the psychedelic experience, noise music, chaos magic, culture hacking, and improvisational performance. Built upon the ethos, language, and experience of live noise performance, New Age Video Aquarium recontextualizes, reshapes, and deconstructs pieces of VHS history through live improvisational performances using contemporary digital technology in the pursuit of transcendental experiences. We believe that unique perspectives and powerful insights on our society can be obtained through the reprocessing of old, or forgotten media. To view each artist’s websites: Chris Balint: http://chris-balint-blog-blog-blog.tumblr.com/ John Bowman: http://johnalexanderbowman.tumblr.com/ and Vianney Paul: http://www.vianneypaul.com/ For an appointment with the gallery, please email: [email protected]