"Strangefolks" presents new work by three artists working LARGE, with paint on canvas, but it is more than formal concerns that creates what we see as a very interesting dialog between their work. John Copeland, Logan Grider and Elizabeth Huey each bring a peculiar, multi-faceted vision of a complex world to life in their art a world that has perhaps gone over the deep-end, physically, psychologically, and technologically. Each artist depicts recognizable objects from our everyday inner and outer lives, but set into dynamic, often dysfunctional, fragmented and chaotic new relationships to each other.

John Copeland received his BFA from California College of Arts and Craft in 1998. In Copeland's hands, mortality, physicality, and a past that seems to be shadowing us take form in a manner that is fluid, fleeting, and at the same time, meaty, undeniably present. His liquid style and muted palette create a contradictory sense of reality and irreality within each canvas. Skulls, rabbits and rope all figure in his work, as do war and cartoons; in an interview on fecalface.com, he explains, "How we get along or don't, social issues, conflict, how we manage to keep going, this crazy place we live in, are all things that I'm trying to talk about. Trying to laugh, have fun and move ahead with it, let things evolve."

Copeland's work was included in the group show "We are near," curated by Eddie Martinez at Allston Skirt Gallery in April 2007, in "Are You Having a Good Time?" at Galerie de Meerse in the Netherlands, October 2007, and "Undercurrents" at 31 Grand, Brooklyn in Spring 2006. He currently lives and works in New York.
Logan Grider received his MFA from Yale University in 2007, and his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. His large canvases employ a bold, even garish, palette and shifting perspective to bring to life highly visceral figurative elements, as they interact with the wires and tangles of our existence " Physical? Metaphorical? In Grider's words: "The paintings have separate subjects but nearly all hinge on an organized mess, which is about to collapse. Much in line with my beliefs about the potential trappings and downfalls due to the rapid growth of technology on the communications front, the paintings usually present this collapse of machinery as inevitable."

Grider was a fellow at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2006, and his work has included been in "School Days" at Jack Tilton Gallery, NY and "Summer Group Show" at Baumgartner Gallery, NY in 2006. He currently lives and works in Kentucky.

Elizabeth Huey received her MFA from Yale University, and her BA in Psychology from George Washington University in Washington, DC. Her paintings and installations are full to bursting with the kinds of images we try to keep from overrunning our minds figures from our dreams, and from history, from Victorian postcards, science textbooks, military manuals and sci fi movies composed as if trying to tell us an urgent tale of possible harm and despair. The narratives are fragmented and disjointed, but the themes are consistent and powerful. Curator Elizabeth Dunbar described a single, recent Huey work:The coexistence of good and evil, progress and recidivism, romance and trauma also underlies The Inquisition (2005), a foreboding fantasyland development of Tudor houses populated by biblical characters and medical personnel from different eras, all anchored around what the artist calls a "Cathedral Asylum. And that's just a tiny taste of the intense epics that Huey masterminds in her elaborately constructed work.

Huey's recent solo exhibitions include "Chronophobia" at Quality Pictures in Portland, OR, June 2007, "The Inexplicable Thing Between Us" in Allston Skirt Gallery's Mini Skirt in 2006, and "The Kirkbirde Plan" at Feigen Contemporary, NY, 2005. Her work has been on view in group exhibitions including "Phantasmania" at the Kemper Museum, Kansas City, 2007, "Conservatory" at Byron Cohen Kansas City, 2007, "You Have To Be Almost Gifted To Do What I Do" at Alexander & Bonin, NY, 2006 and "We Build the Worlds Inside Our Heads" at Freight and Volume, NY in 2006, and she has been awarded an artist research fellowship at the Smithsonian Museum in March 2008. She currently lives and works in New York.