Chelsea Seltzer
You Can Brush My Hair
11/11/22 - 12/11/22
IRL Gallery
15 Monroe St
New York, NY 10002
In You Can Brush My Hair, Seltzer explores themes of consumerism, cultural ideals, and conformity through a pastel candy colored lens. With a painterly use of the airbrush Seltzer creates dreamy images that are both humorous and disquieting.
The genesis for much of this work was found on eBay images of dolls for sale. These initially benign images are transformed into gallows humor narratives through Seltzer’s adept airbrush work. A doll laid out for display on the floor becomes a girl over-served at a party staring up with blank eyes and a moronic grin, a display of doll accessories becomes a shrine to shopping and the excess of plastic crap we all find ourselves with in 21st century America.
In Seltzer’s monumental landscape (Dreamscape 2) she borrows the pastel palette found within the dolls vernacular to create a space that is both enchanting and eerie. Like so much of American culture it dazzles with vivid colors, bold tastes and exciting forms but it hides a fetid swamp.
Theo A. Rosenblum
Just Deserts
11/11/22 - 12/11/22
IRL Gallery
15 Monroe St
New York, NY 10002
Theo A. Rosenblum’s Just Deserts is a meditation on mortality and despair.
Four watercolors in frames made by Rosenblum surround a central sculpture (A Dream Within A Dream) that depicts a vulture eating a snake, that is eating a mouse, that is eating a scorpion. Titled after the Edgar Allan Poe poem this sculpture explores the transitory and illusory nature of life. As the serpent’s coils unwind like the gyri of the brain we understand that all we experience takes place in the mind, with all of its wonders as well as limitations, and reality is just a matter of personal perception.
The desert theme throughout the show reveals the inhospitality of the world and the shifting sands reflect the ever changing nature of our condition. Albeit an insectoid and alien life, even in the desert, life will go on.
