Secret Garden

September 8 - October 8, 2011

Roberley Bell
Peter Bynum
Sara Crisp
Erica-Lynn Huberty
Ysabel Le May
Christopher Reiger

Denise Bibro Fine Art presents Secret Garden, on view September 8th through October 8th, 2011. Nature plays the perpetual muse for six contemporary artists in this exhibition. Featuring work by Roberley Bell, Peter Bynum, Sara Crisp, Erica-Lynn Huberty, Ysabel Le May, and Christopher Reiger, each artist offers their own innovative, distinctive response to the sublime wonder of the landscape, flora, and fauna, inviting the viewer into their own secret garden.

Roberley Bell’s ebullient sculptural works conjure fanciful, Technicolor topiaries bursting with blossoms. Utilizing cast foam and plastic forms adorned with artificial flowers, fruit, and birds, Bell explores the relationship between the man-made and the natural in landscape focusing on the artifice of nature.

Peter Bynum celebrates the connection unifying all life forms. Illuminated by LED light boxes, multiple layers of painted glass depict elegant capillary patterns evocative of delicate ferns, coral formations, or oscillating seaweed. Myriad imagery and shadow weave an intoxicating three-dimensional space.

Incorporating meditative, mandala-like designs and botanical elements such as flower petals, stems, and seed pods, Sara Crisp’s delicate mixed-media encaustic works are a quiet spiritual homage to plants as the embodiment of the life force.

Erica-Lynn Huberty’s intimate narratives are fashioned from vintage textiles embellished with embroidery, needlepoint, and paint. Figures frolic among elegant toile de jouy foliage, birds and butterflies. The utopian veneer is subverted by menacing creatures threatening the peaceful idyll.

For Ysabel Le May, the landscape is a divinely ordered universe. Combining hundreds of individual photographs, edited and meticulously restaged in the digital arena, she creates elegant, fantastical tableaux and ornamental rosettes, home to humming birds, lilies, and heavenly light.

Contemplating man’s mutable conception of nature and our place in it, Christopher Reiger’s works on paper incorporate scientific and mathematical symbols, hieroglyphs, animals, and plant life. Mysterious equations are drawn, creatures peer out from unlikely vegetation, and the garden becomes curiouser and curiouser…