SALLY BEAUTY

link to Press Release as pdf

Tomato Mouse is very proud indeed to welcome you live and virtually to WELCOME an exhibition of the installation Familiar Memories that Aren’t Your Own by Ronan Day-Lewis and paintings by Yifan Jiang, Johanna Robinson, Mia Hause, Sally Beauty and Charlie Koenig.  The show features young artists and new personas.  The opening party on May 29 will run from 1-9PM and feature live music form local performers to be announced.

The danger of welcome and comfort are implicit in the domestic setting.  If a home is four walls Ronan Day-Lewis’ Familiar Memories that Aren’t Your Own has three, more or less, like walking onto a stage or into a dollhouse.  His recollections form an altarpiece to the Fall; Innocence, Rebellion, Exile.  Home is a setup, and object lesson that civilizes, but it’s clear that the beginning contains the end.  Nature invades the home in the form of snakes, grass, all of these objects upholstered in incongruous domestic fabrics.  Mia Hause’s You decorate my life, it’s like Christmas lights, not the ones you see now but the ones you remember from when you were a kid. It was a lot brighter and meant more then piles gift wrap and stickers on carpet with a fancy bow gelatinous enough to fall through.  A drawing from Charlie Koenig’s notebook is the spontaneous expression of significance and potential.  The process of reconstructing our childhood is an old venerated tradition at this point, but someone young now may be well situated to dismiss the nostalgia of that process.

Outside the house the wilderness is full of paintings of animals and the gravitational pull of the moon.   Plaza Monkeys, looming into sight through the open door, shows primates gathered at the base of a monumental derelict building, reaching for an image.  Arising from friction between different scientific and philosophical modes of thought, Yifan Jiang’s painting addresses the problem of our situation through quotidian means, the human through animals.  The moon, the animal, light and perception refract through the work of Johanna Robinson.  Polarity creates light, but there seems to be some misconception.    A mythological beast erupts from the confines of Pell Street in Sally Beauty’s The Birth of Tragedy as the fanciful evades the rational.  These stripes are where Sally Beauty's paintings assail the pragmatic preordained for the aesthetic improbable. Inside of everything is its opposite.  Civilization is a discontent.  They used to think that building houses separates us from animals. 
 
Tomato Mouse is a House that turned into a Mouse.