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Five International emerging artists now living in NY/NJ featured in Emerged at Riverdale NY Gallery

Elisa Contemporary Art gallery in Riverdale (NY) is celebrating the fresh vision of five (now) local emerging artists in a the Summer Group show, Emerged. The exhibit runs though September 12th.

Come enter the inspiring worlds – both real and imagined – created by these young artists. Featured artists include:

You’ll meet new faces, encounter new ideas and be wisked away to many whimsical and wonderful places.

Special Closing Reception will take place at the Riverdale Gallery: 5622 Mosholu Avenue, Riverdale NY on Tuesday September 7th from 6-8pm

5% of gallery commissions from sales will be donated to one of the support charities helping underserved children heal through art. We currently support Free Arts NYC or Creative Arts Workshop for Kids.

Elisa Contemporary Art is located at 5622 Mosholu Avenue (near 256th Street/Riverdale Library), Riverdale NY. Gallery Hours: Friday/Saturday 10am – 6pm; And by Appointment.

Contact: Lisa Cooper, Elisa Contemporary Art (www.ElisaContemporaryArt.com). Lisa@ElisaArt.com or 212.729.4974

About the Artists:
About Michael Barletta
Michael is an emerging artist at the vortex of a thriving underground art community in Syracuse, New York. Though self-taught, with no formal art education, Michael has been an avid student of the arts since childhood — absorbing and transforming the energy, chaos and emotion of the streets, the media and of his immediate environment drawings and paintings that pulse with raw emotion and energy.

For Michael, painting is a multi-sensory organic engagement with his immediate surroundings. Michael’s work is inspired by the interactions between people, the mutual flow of energy, the counterpoint of action and reaction.

Take the work of Takashi Murakami, Matthew Ritchie and Inka Essenhigh and mix it up with the music of contemporary artists and you might find some of Michael’s influences in terms of composition.

Michael’s artwork has been exhibited in the 2008 Everson Museum of Art Biennial, Syracuse, NY, the Warehouse Projects Gallery, Syracuse, NY and the NYU Kimmel Windows Gallery in New York, NY, as well as several international art fairs in New York and Miami.

Michael’s work is currently on exhibit in a solo show, Improvisations: Sound in Motion in New York City at 153 East 53rd Street, NYC (the Atrium Shops & Café (formerly Citicorp Center)) through August 30, 2010.

About Yasemin Kackar-Demirel
Yasemin Kackar-Demirel was born in Istanbul, received her MFA in DeKalb (IL), and currently lives in New York. Her work is a fragmented and reconstructed journey through the places she has lived and traveled, both real and imagined.

In this latest series, Yasemin brings in text from her Facebook pages, along side her fragmented landscapes. According to Yasemin:
“I’m influenced by my physical and emotional encounters of places, and in my works I depict my reactions to the several phenomena housed in these places. In my current series of works, I am inspired by Facebook. I gather texts from my homepage on Facebook and write them over and over with a gestural manner in fast pace so that they start to form a motif. This way, I’m using the text as a visual imagery. Through this process some text may fade away, while some may still remain legible. I extract and mark shapes out of these text-based patterns and combine them together with color, various paint media and collage materials to form a composition. Through these series of works, I’m recycling these publicly exposed virtual conversations, information and momentum by presenting them in a new context, perhaps in a new abstracted narrative.”

Yasemin has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in the US and Turkey. Her work is also in the Ipek-Ahmet Merey Foundation in Istanbul, Turkey.

About James Chen-Feng Kao
James Chen-Feng Kao is an emerging, Taiwan-born American artist. He is a graduate of University of California Berkley and Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design in London. He recently returned from an artist residency in London, at The Florence Trust and is currently living in New Jersey.

His characters touch on his own identity – blending Asian and American cultures, as well as visual and literary references. He is also interested in the concept of blending cartoon-like characters with abstraction.

His recent series of work is “The Skullscape.” These sculptures and works on paper include a pattern James developed where each shape is an abstraction of the human skull – wider on one side and narrower on the other. Each shape and color is unique, yet part of a greater pattern (all part of a visual language). The original idea came from James wanting to portray a field of skulls but in a more cartoon-like and less representational way. In the beginning, he painted in simple shapes to represent eyes and teeth, but over time, became more abstract. The colors are bright to contrast the idea of skulls related to death.

About Krzysztof Pastuszka
Kris Pastuszka is a dynamic, emerging artist and recent graduate (2008) of School of Visual Arts. His family originally from Poland, now live in Brooklyn.

His work starts with an idea, a “curiosity”, a word. He then turns them into definitions, and maps out the process. Through books, old magazines, image searches, journalizing ideas he research topics and his images and compositions begin to take shape. He is part mad scientist, inventor, astronaut and all artist.

According to Kris:
“I am influenced by the romantic idea of an inventor – stumbling upon an idea, researching it, documenting it in detail, then twisting it – noting any peculiarities (real or imagined), and incorporating a bit of humor or whimsy. I gravitate toward the eccentric, the reclusive person that thinks up things and makes them happen.

For me, art is a way of life, an adventure of those moments when something happens, connections are made and everything seems to make sense. Most of my work is not so much about subject matter as it is about learning things, documenting things, and acquiring skills. It is about my obsessive and meticulous process of recording every step. I often incorporate some type of manually-operated mechanical feature in my work. My art revolves around the highs and lows of discovery, adventure, and chance. I am inspired by the ridiculous, the whimsical world of invention, nonsense, and complex machines in a playful atmosphere – to create an adventure of the unknown.”

Kris has exhibited his work in Brooklyn and New York City.

About Rosa Ruey
Rosa Ruey is an emerging artist who creates fantastic, utopian worlds that are as much a product of her Chinese heritage as her California upbringing. Her urban landscapes invite the viewer to dive in and explore these new worlds, to suspend reality and enjoy the ride of discovery.

Organic machinery, viral landscapes, mutated transportation devices and cyclical systems are the worlds that Rosa creates and inhabits. Steeped in naïve ideals of a utopian designer or a mad inventor, her work involves depictions of fantastical landscapes or spaces composed of organic shapes and structures that are architecturally influenced. Her complex yet whimsical works takes the viewer to a place between the fantasy of Dr. Seuss and the architectural precision of a master architect.

Rosa Ruey recently had her first international show at the Juming Museum in Taipei, Taiwan and was part of last summer’s AIM program at The Bronx Museum. She has also recently been in several group exhibitions in England, Morocco, Greece, Italy and Ireland and NY. She currently lives in Brooklyn and works in a studio in New York.

About Elisa Contemporary Art
Elisa Contemporary Art was founded in 2007 by Lisa Cooper and represents a portfolio of both emerging and established contemporary artists, many of whom have work in the permanent collections of major museums and corporations.

The gallery is dedicated to promoting the appreciation and collection of art as a way to enrich and heal our lives, our communities, and the world. A portion of every sale is donated to philanthropic organizations that help children and families within underserved communities heal and grow through their experience with art.

Elisa Contemporary Art exhibits at International Air Fairs in New York (AAFNYC, Red Dot), the Hamptons (ArtHamptons), Boston (BIFAS) and Miami (Bridge), curates public and private exhibits, and has a gallery space at 5622 Mosholu Avenue, Riverdale NY (and is Riverdale’s only Contemporary Art Gallery). Gallery Hours: Friday/Saturday 10-6pm and by appointment.

For more information, visit the website at www.ElisaArt.com or contact: Lisa@ElisaArt.com or 212.729.4974