We are pleased to present the first solo exhibition of paintings by Joe Bradley, a New York-based painter whose work was first seen in Boston in January 2000 in Allston Skirt’s exhibition "Here Comes Rhody," curated by Dike Blair and featuring a selection of artists who were, at that time, just about to receive undergraduate degrees from the from Rhode Island School of Design.

In this new group of paintings, Bradley has created a collection of wonderfully romantic scenes that include seascapes, mountain views, and ramshackle piers, continuing his examination of the wide world of landscape painting. On first glance, his expressively painted canvases recall the work of a Sunday painter or an untrained artist, as Bradley captures the sun glinting off the water with a few blobs of thick pink and white paint, or the grandeur of a mountain range by way of blurred blue and green streaks. Yet these swift gestures are intentional references to the picture postcards, folk art, yard sale canvases, and cheesy snapshots that Bradley loves, as well as to the sophisticated abstraction found in the landscapes of fine painters from John Marin to Alex Katz. Bradley paints with wit and facility, confidently walking the thin line between the trite, Sunday painter’s representation of a magnificent sunset or copy of an exotic travel postcard, and the sophisticated vocabulary of contemporary abstraction -- in some cases, the work becomes almost entirely abstract. Bradley’s love of his medium is apparent in these works, and his rich experimentation with brushwork and gesture has a freshness and sincerity to it, even while his subject matter reveals his fascination with some very cliched forms of representation.

Kim Pashko may be best known for her series of sculptures and paintings that point up the formal elements of architecture and design as we run into it in our daily lives, from gift boxes to magazine-rack presentations, breaking these elements down into repeated units, invoking the language of minimalism and of geometric abstraction with vibrant color and variety.

In this new body of work she calls "Memos from the Vault," Pashko trains her focus on the physical and psychological elements of the way we work, and in particular, the way SHE works, based on her experience of many years in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s bustling Registrar’s office. As Pashko attends numerous meetings and engages in incessant phone conversations related to organizing and planning the travel paths of works in the MFA’s collection, she takes notes in the form of drawings, reflecting both the unconscious working of the creative mind, and the business-like details of getting a job done in the modern (art) world. As she reads architectural diagrams and makes plans for objects to travel to points she has never seen, and sets out the specifications for crates to contain and protect art from the world during its journey, Pashko explores the intersection between her experiences with art as an artist and as an administrator. Her digital drawings and canvases explore the drawn line both as an expressive device and as a practical tool, while an array of tiny boxes -- once used to store precious coins -- have been transformed into the archivally-sound repository of the artist’s most intimate marks.

ALLSTON SKIRT GALLERY is located at 450 Harrison Avenue, #303, Boston, MA. We are open Wednesday - Saturday, from 11 a.m. - 5 p.m. For more information, please call Randi Hopkins or Beth Kantrowitz at 617-482-3652. www.allstonskirt.com