P·P·O·W is pleased to announce our third show of art works by James Esber. Esber creates painting and sculpture that defies art world genres. The pieces he has created recently are both painting and sculpture at once, art works that defy the conventions of either medium. Using plasticine, a highly texturized modeling clay, Esber models his hybrid forms into tactile renderings of Hummel figurines, muscleman magazine photos, playboyesque girlie shots and car crash disasters. His paintings are mounted directly on the wall, suddenly emerging from the wall’s neutral white space, insisting on their existence as objects. The pictorial field is rendered in fragments, colorful implosions of acrylic paint and 3-D reliefs pushed directly into the gallery wall. With each piece Esber creates figurative hybrids, chimeras that combine the innocent with the naughty, the sublime with the beautiful. The cartoonish painterly style of Guston, for instance, is rendered in a highly original three dimensionality. The figures he paints are hyper-biological, even more so for being pushed up against totaled automobiles with hoods agape and motors out: cars disemboweled. In Esber’s work the tactility of the image creates a distortion effect; the plasticity of the image makes it pop into life. Each figure flaunts an excess of corporeality that results from Esber’s cartoonish un-self-conscience style. Doodle-like digressions edge the image toward abstraction. In this exhibition, the car wreck (referencing both Warhol’s silk screens and Cronenberg’s crash film) is represented in a style that is equally pictorial disaster and high art perfection. Esber renders the picture plain of conventional painting as fragmented cartoon forms that bend and bulge toward the viewer. With each stroke of the brush, Esber beckons the viewer to look closer and let his or her eye linger over the surface of the image. He challenges you to find a single ninety degree angle. In addition, punctuating the gallery space, Esber presents a series of Abraham Lincoln portraits where the face becomes a texturized terrain testing the limits of recognition and historical memory. James Esber has recently shown his work at the Brooklyn Museum in The Culture of Anime and in New-Economy Painting, ACME Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. He has also been shown at Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn and the Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina in Greensboro. He has been exhibiting nationally since 1992.				Hummel Boy/Muscle Man 2002
		In P·P·O·W’s Gallery 2, Fred Holland uses found and organic materials, like onion skins and black-eyed peas to create syncopated rhythms, abstract optical effects and astronomical maps. His labor intensive process transforms these materials into art works that re-interpret the processes historically associated with African-American traditions. His repetitive acts of slicing, hammering and layering are personal testimonies to the magic embedded in black folk art, rooted in southern sensibilities of migration, longing, domesticity and comfort. Holland uses materials that have the potential to fade and decay as starting points for art works of an ephemeral beauty that he often presents in heavy steel frames. His enduring objects, whether on the wall or on pedestals of various heights, stress the durability of art by way of its very fragility. Fred Holland has exhibited throughout the United States and internationally. For his visual and performance-based work, he has received extensive support from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, Creative Capital and New York Foundation for the Arts, among others.