Don’t miss a chance to see David Dorfman Dance perform in Gallery 2 on February 3 in conjunction with the First Friday Gallery Reception. Performance times: 7:15, 8:15, and 9:15. Presented in collaboration with Center Stage.

Microcosms/Macrocosms presents the work of two artists exploring similar concepts, though utilizing vastly different media and techniques. Amy Gross’ two- and three-dimensional works are stitched, sculptural fiber works, while Sparkman’s mixed media works incorporate printmaking and painting techniques.

Gross’ works are an attempt to merge the natural observable world with her own inner life. Gross notes that she is “trying to remake nature sieved through my experiences. I’ve always been attracted and frightened by things that are in their fullest bloom but on the verge of spoiling. There’s beauty and sadness in them, heightened by the undeniable inevitability of their ending in death. This fascination and fear describes my own psychology more than I would like to admit.” The process forces Gross to consider that which she would rather not – the heedlessness of time, of aging, and of the stealthy undermining of illness. Works similar to those exhibited at Artspace began when some people closest to Gross were diagnosed with illnesses that at the time were mostly unknown. With few symptoms or signs, Gross began a process that made the microscopic – essentially the invisible – real. Her current stitched works mimic both the microscopic and life forms in our human eye scale. These forms grow, take over, and climb. Though they diagram stages of decay and change, the different is that these forms are not corporeal – they cannot evolve or die. Gross recognizes that making these objects doesn’t alter reality, but for the artist, it freezes time, if just for a little while.

Sparkman uses abstraction to suggest the sense of a subconscious universe. Lines and shapes twist and stream through multicolored environments to create the sense of a fourth-dimensional space accessible through the artist’s imagination. The spiraling tendrils and wave-like forms often seem to allude to living organisms; the ambiguous space they inhabit simultaneously suggests a microcosm and a macrocosm. While his imagery typically arises spontaneously, based upon formal or emotional impulses, more recently he has been inspired by images from biology, particularly microbiology. He often works subtractively when creating his oil paintings, laying down paint and then scraping off lines and layers to create complex, textured surfaces and subtle color effects. His recent monoprints have provided another means for layering colors and textures through the use of photo-silkscreen. The swirling, colorful, other-worldly environments that he creates are simultaneously beautiful and alien, even while the organic and spatial elements refer distantly to our more familiar, mundane world.