Facetime #3 :
Matt Blackwell & John Byam

April 13th - May 6th, 2012

Parker's Box is delighted to announce the third Facetime exhibition at the gallery.

Continuing its initiative to propose dynamic pairings of artists, Parker's Box has brought together two artists whose work has a freshness and youthful spontaneity that completely belies their combined ages of well over a century and a quarter. John Byam is a self-taught artist who worked for decades in isolation near Oneonta, NY, making a prolific production of wood sculpture, painted signage, and drawings often inspired by his own experience and the world as seen in TV Guide among other publications. Matt Blackwell is a well-known Brooklyn artist whose knowledge, intuition, and keen eye have pushed him unavoidably toward certain similar preoccupations in gritty and uncompromising drawings, paintings, and sculptures.

John Byam and Matt Blackwell both come from small upstate New York towns, and while it could be said that their shared experience goes no further than that, we might also consider that there is something of a common attitude and atmosphere in their respective practices that may come from comparable early lives and a comparable context experienced in their formative years at least. The common ground between the interests and perhaps even sensibilities of the two artists is undeniable, even though some of the crossovers and parallels in subject matter might be coincidental, though the animals, vehicles, houses and people represented by both artists may seem to carry what we might somewhat jokingly call a common "upstate objectivity" that reveals the richness of humanity through simply transcribing some of the quirks and ironies of what exists.

John Byam, Submarine, Pencil on Paper

Matt Blackwell, Meow, Mixed Media