SARAH BEDFORD, MEGAN BOGONOVICH, EMILY MULLIN, ROSE NESTLER and SARAH PALMER

Felix Art Fair
The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel
Los Angeles, California
Room 1124

February 28 - March, 3 2024

 

Press Release

Mrs. is pleased to announce our participation in the Felix Art Fair 2024, with works by Sarah Bedford, Megan Bogonovich, Emily Mullin, Rose Nestler and Sarah Palmer; on view at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles, California, February 28 - March 3, 2024.

Sarah Bedford’s paintings incorporate abstraction of floral still-life compositions, alternately schematic and mystical, organic and hard-edged. The ghostly outlines of dead plants, auratic haloes of color, reflective textiles, and loamy glitter in Bedford's works illuminate the same dark and mysterious realm.  While modernist references to the work of Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Fernand Léger abound, a more intuitive and esoteric hand can also be seen — one inspired by the likes of Hilda Klimt and Martin Ramirez. Taking form through the lens of a feminist conversation, her works summon a new narrative behind this traditional art form.  

Megan Bogonovich draws her aesthetic from the natural world, yet not one recognizable outdoors. Her lavish, wild, lascivious botanicals are a nature produced in the recesses of her mind rather than the garden or forests. At times her work reads as alien, like a flora found sprouting under the sulfur-rich rains of Venus. In other moments, pieces connect to a humanness reflected in the natural world with phallus and mammorial curves embedded just under the lush vegetation. Bogonovich presents sex as a technical, even aesthetic facet with blossoms nestling bodily details among the fecundity of a stubborn weed. The sheer pleasure of these works may include a hint of critique as a world of imaginary nature calls caution to a future world of nature imagined.

Rose Nestler often revisits historical artworks to question the shackles of patriarchy and its effects on the appropriation of the female figure. Through her striking albeit comical sculptures, the Brooklyn-based artist makes explicit the potential of power that resides in the materiality of textiles. By playing with scale, color, languages of sexuality and humor, and by blending craft-based sewing techniques with historical canons, Nestler subverts our reading of art history and the conventional, trite, feminine characteristics entrapped within it, presenting their revised, bold forms as attributes for liberty.

Emily Mullin’s work stages handmade ceramic vessels bearing live flowers on both wall mounted and freestanding sculptural displays. These haptic and optic pieces explore form, firing, pattern, composition, installation, and the potential of the frame--photographic or otherwise--to elevate and interpret ceramic objects. The vegetation further accentuates the fecund aspects of the vases; with them, she is able to extend a universal gesture – the offering of a flower as a conduit for the meaning of a moment: celebration, grief, hope, regeneration.

Continually printing, rephotographing, and modifying; Sarah Palmer lays images together.  She collects vernacular nudes, portraits and catalog images; both found and realized in the studio.  Holes are cut into prints, allowing some pictures to become apertures while others recede into the assemblage.  Using gridded strobes, color gels, or handmade cucoloris shapes, she creates areas of color and deep shadow, which give the final photographs a deceptive depth – they are flat yet appear to rise from the substrate.  Palmer’s work resists the purported truthfulness and grounded representationality inherent in photography, while remaining rooted in the lens, camera, history and varied modes of the photographic process.

For more information please contact hello@mrsgallery.com.