HOMECOMING
JOERG DRESSLER + BILLY FROLOV
Two person exhibition of new paintings by Joerg Dressler + Billy Frolov
Exhibition Dates:
November 4 - December 23, 2022
Opening Reception:
Friday, November 4, 2022, 5:00-9:00pm
Artist Talk:
Saturday, November 5 @ 11:00am
Both artists will be in attendance for the opening reception + artist talks.
On view at Rivalry Projects, Homecoming: Joerg Dressler + Billy Frolov brings together two artists with expatriate ties to Western New York. Their individual art practices seek to define location, lineage, and inheritance through altered landscapes, and objects recalled from memory. This exhibition is on view November 4-December 23, 2022, with an Opening Reception on First Friday, November 4, 2022, from 5:00-9:00 PM.
The artwork within this exhibition includes paintings which communicate and mutate around naturalistic space, with specific visual emphasis given to Niagara Falls. The inclusion of the world-famous waterfall allows each artist an inlet to speak through biographical narratives tied to our region, while also emphasizing the importance of geography and human interventions as keys to understanding the constructed-ness of our world.
Joerg Dressler’s artwork in Homecoming uses flora and geographic landmarks such as Niagara Falls to pin a specificity of place to the landscapes he alters through painting and dimensional interventions. Dressler’s artwork operates in the direct lineage of landscape and plein air painting and is tied largely to a Hudson River School tradition. His landscapes, specifically from the “Nature Interrupted” and “Untold Stories” series within this exhibit, pair meticulously rendered slices of landscape and paragraphs of color with blips of painting to the effect of displaced or dislocated space, held aloft and removed from the rigors of our climate collapse. Additional work within Homecoming is drawn from his “Hybrids” body of work which bridges two and three-dimensional space, moving the landscape from a hypothetical dislocation into a realized interruption of how landscape is communicated and mutated within a fine art reading.
Billy Frolov’s artwork within Homecoming revolves around the conceits of kitsch and play as a means toward recovering memories and familial narratives tied to Western New York. Her work, often taking the form of painting, assemblage, collage, and small-scale interventions speaks through an economy of visual vocabulary and a diminutive scale to explore the layering, dislocation, affect and construction of memory both as an individual affect and a communal bedrock. Frolov draws upon childhood memories of Western New York and familial linkages to migration to understand her past. As it relates to place, Frolov uses Western New York as a psychic and physical locus upon which new narratives and material connections are forged within her practice. Her work within Homecoming scaffolds outward, inviting viewers to interpolate the work while also slowing down their reading of pieces long enough to register the delicacy and degradation of materials within the finished artwork. Much as a tool of memory, Frolov’s artwork highlights its own instability within the face of an ineffable future.
WORKS
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
Billy Frolov (b. Buffalo, New York) is an American painter whose work explores the interior landscape of memory, the home, and the objects that inhabit them. A student of craft and hobbyist tradition, Frolov builds her paintings with tenderness from a wide range of art and non-art material, processes, and tools in order to indicate the function and psychic nature of their subject.
Frolov earned a BFA from ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles California, where she now resides and paints. Other professional highlights include work published in New American Paintings, a solo exhibition at Monte Vista Projects in Los Angeles, and co-founding The Hermitage LA, a tiny artist-run project space in Eagle Rock California.
Joerg Dressler (b. Hanau, Germany) received his MFA from the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach, Germany, in 1994. Additionally, he studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, France. Joerg moved to the United States in 1996. Dressler’s work is driven by nature and how we perceive it. He is presenting his experiences of reality filtered through his perception. As a result, disjointed experiences of the seen and unseen are reassembled, creating in the work a reality of its own. Joerg’s evocative, sensual paintings derive from a sincere dialogue between the representational and the abstract, the conceptual and the purely spontaneous.
He is a recipient of the Romanos Rizk Scholarship, and was awarded the Mass Cultural Council 2020 Artist Fellowships Program: Finalist in Painting. Joerg’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York.
