Artists: Sheila Ross and Eric Trosko

June 21 - August 2, 2003

Sheila Ross and Eric Trosko explore abstraction through the integration of different visual languages and historical references.

In her collages, Sheila Ross combines rectangular brick forms, motifs from vernacular architecture, tin ceiling patterns, faux wood, marble finishes and wallpaper to create her own abstract interiors. Depth and pattern are given equal presence, often creating optical illusions. Utilizing paint, contact paper and colored masking tape, Ross’ multilayered images play with the viewer’s eyes as structural compositions deconstruct, change and resurface among lines and bright colors.

Eric Trosko’s carefully and laboriously prepared canvases display elements of an abstract visual language. Bringing to mind Guston’s alphabet, Trosko’s deadpan humor, underlying eroticism, and isolation of the mundane is the narrative element in his paintings. Meticulously rendered on a smooth as silk canvas, characters abstracted from everyday life are mutated and amalgamate in low contrast coloration, pattern and line elements. Reductive and deliberately ambiguous forms morph from their familiar visual origins into playful, iconic symbols unique to Trosko’s translation.