December 2024
WallFlower Wawa
Nickolas Roblee-Strauss & Jacqueline Strauss
December 4 - December 21
Opening Reception on Arts Night Out
In a mother-son duo exhibition, Wallflower Wawa turns our gaze toward the watchers on the perimeter. Silenced by their own shyness, welling up in tears, passed over for more popular blooms, this exhibition mines figuration’s capacity for introspection. Transforming the Barn Door Gallery in an explosion of color, these paintings and wall sculptures from Nickolas Roblee-Strauss and Jacqueline Strauss seek to understand the melodramas of less obvious party guests. In both artists' work, a sense of exuberance pervades. Color, pattern, and playful reinvention of form make for celebrations. For some it’s difficult not to dance—as figures swivel and sway before us. Still wallflowers peer out from pulsing surrounds with halted commentary, melancholy creatures of celebration’s fringe. Wallflower Wawa invites its visitor to a party, whose somber messaging incites contradictory interpretation. A mix of weeping dancers and twisters on the edge of temptation, the exhibit asks us to look to the perimeter and see what blossoms sprout from the wall.
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Jacqueline Strauss (she/her b. Amsterdam, 1964) is a textile artist living in rural western Massachusetts. Her soft sculptures explore the spirited nature of seemingly inanimate remnants bringing to fruition a bottomless imaginative population. Playing the wise fool, she probes the puerile medium of stuffed forms for edgie, more complex emotions and shapes. In the past year, she has shown at Greenfield Community College, Greenfield, MA, Club George, Northampton, MA, and the Wendell Free Library, Wendell, MA. Her work has appeared in the local press as well as the Dutch journal Textiel Plus.
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Nickolas Roblee-Strauss (he/him) is an oil painter born in rural western Massachusetts. His work explores themes of queerness, the historicity of the medium, and precarious 21st-century experience. Over the past two years, he has worked under the guidance of established artists in New York City, and his paintings address the evolution of gestural language.
He has shown at 440 Gallery and Thomas van Dyke Gallery in Brooklyn, NY as well as the Granoff Center, List Art Center, Joukowsky Institute, and Salon 149 in Providence, RI. He holds a BA in Modern Culture & Media from Brown University, where he was a Royce Fellow and Brown Arts Institute grant recipient. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.