The crowd at the opening at Pierogi, on North 9 Street off Bedford Ave in Williamsburg last Friday night was consistent with expectations–older and very white–but the art was far from predictable.

The first room featured seven paintings by the San Francisco based artist Yoon Lee. From far away, the paintings all look fairly similar, but on close inspection each is based on a unique color scheme and architectural conception. Lee’s paintings are analog reproductions of images that originate on her computer, done with precisely layered, thick lines and dots of acrylic paint. From close up they look machine manufactured, but take a step back and you will see a more chaotic, expressive image.

In the second room, a husband and wife duo with a single moniker, J. Fiber—a concatenation of the two artists’ names: Jane Fine and James Esber—have fifteen works that combine acrylic, colored pencil, graphite and ink. Each work is a complex arrangement of limbs, flowers, guns and abstract shapes, along with a few phalluses thrown in here and there. The result is something consistent with many recent independent comic book artists’ interpretations of anatomy (see Dash Shaw, Gipi), M. C. Escher, and fantastic story telling. Each drawing presents a self-contained world, where violence and masculinity appear at war with feminine imagery.
–Owen Roberts