Enough: Work by Joseph Rizzo, Joe Sinness and Joel Starkey

Enough explores how fragments, collections, dreams and memories reassembled and drafted onto a unified field reveal personal insights into our collective histories. With expert mark making technique Joseph Rizzo, Joe Sinness and Joel Starkey explore a rich reservoir of images ensconced in our lexicon of visual culture. Striping away the origins of images and creating new textures and definitions, these artists provide a microcosm of minute lines unified onto reflective surfaces and human forms. Each artists’ constructions, both impulsive and planned, can pull the viewer in and out of a two-dimensional sheet of paper as if it were a vast world all of its own.

​

Joseph Rizzo combines collisions of form and color into cataclysmic landscapes bringing to life nightmares of massive earthquakes. Rizzo’s collages find beauty in the violent rending of newly formed landmasses as they expose layers of multi-hued rock formerly hidden beneath the surface. Rizzo intersperses serene woodland vistas within the tumultuous upheavals and connects them with street art inspired graphics and delicate line drawing, allowing a riveting tension to emerge. Joseph Rizzo is an artist and educator who lives and works in San Francisco, CA. He has exhibited at Paper Boat Gallery, the Soap Factory and The Lab in San Francisco. In addition to his fine art practice, he also works with children and adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

​

Joe Sinness creates complex still life drawings filled with layers of gleaming objects of fetish, celebrity and the glossy promise of sex. Each meticulously directed arrangement is full of double-entendre, humor and obsession, seen as “melancholic tributes to queer performance”. Sinness’s seductive use of colored pencil tempts the viewer in with his lush palettes and striking ability to capture the tactile qualities of objects, both animate and inanimate. Joe Sinness lives and works in Minneapolis and has exhibited extensively throughout Minnesota including the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Rochester Art Center and Tweed Museum of Art. He also has an upcoming solo exhibition at Ace Art in Winnipeg.

​

Joel Starkey’s large-scale drawings drip with ink and energy across the paper. Boulders and mountains climb up the page in vertiginous perspective, intersected with mysterious geometric shapes and inspired by the landscapes of 18th century Japanese masters. Mostly limiting his palette to blacks, grays and browns with punctuated shots of red, his landscapes are nature at its’ most raw, hovering “near the place of collapse”. Joel Starkey lives and works in St. Paul and along with the Twin Cities he has exhibited work in Austin, New York and Philadelphia.

​