FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 10 - August 24, 2007 Opening reception: July 10, 2007, 6-8pm JOE BRADLEY, ANN CRAVEN, DANA FRANKFORT, KEITH MAYERSON Zach Feuer Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition of new paintings by New York based artists Joe Bradley, Ann Craven, Dana Frankfort, and Keith Mayerson. Bradley's bright canvas panels take Minimalist references and create imposing installations of color and scale, while his casual application of paint forgoes ideas of pictorial illusion. Rather than use the monumental size to suggest a certain grandeur, his paintings make reveal an utterly human, necessarily imperfect quality, which is magnified in his version of figuration. Craven adeptly uses repetition in her serial paintings, which depict familiar imagery often culled from commercial sources, revealing a reinterpretation of the painter's traditional aims of singularity and original composition. She adopts these images of nature from generic representation, in place of the outside world, aware that both have become equally familiar to her viewer. Frankfort's paintings use text and, more recently, symbols to challenge ideas of reading and communication. Obscuring the text as image with brushwork and disorienting color, Frankfort blocks the viewer's facility of interpretation and forges a new relationship between language and audience. Mayerson's lushly painted portraits based on familiar media imagery reduce the iconic to the intimate, and are exhibited in deliberate sequences that suggest larger narrative themes. In the group of paintings for this exhibition, he concentrates on the power of iconic images to portray human agency, spirit, and transcendence in times of crisis and war. PROJECT ROOM: BRIAN BRESS In the project room, Brian Bress will show a selection of videos, photographs and collages. Bress's videos use his constructed sets and props and star Bress as a rotating cast of improvised and often odd characters. The scenes reference, employ and alter traditional tropes of film and television and engage the viewer in absurd performative exploration. Bress's photographs and collages continue and extend themes of the videos through documentation of the sets and props. Bress's work uses everyday and ordinary objects and their seemly chance combinations and chaotic arrangements lend an uncanny quality to the images, asking to be decoded and simultaneously resisting interpretation. Brian Bress was born in 1975, in Norfolk Virginia. He received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1998 and his MFA from University of California, Los Angeles in 2006, and is currently attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Drawing. Bress will be included in upcoming group exhibitions at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and Los Angeles Contemporary exhibitions. He lives and works in Los Angeles.