New York, NY — My Pet Ram is pleased to present As Familiar As Friend, an exhibition of new paintings by J.A Feng and Erin Lee Jones. Please join us for the reception on Friday, November 14th from 6-9pm.

In As Familiar As Friend, Erin Lee Jones and J.A Feng look to the metaphor of Indra’s Net as they explore their own mythologies and origin stories. Represented by a vast jeweled web, this Buddhist spiritual construct hinges upon the connections between every person in the universe. Each individual is represented by an independent gem, but even the slightest change to their existence creates a subtle cascade throughout the entire network. These shifts can be negative or positive, each bit of damage or kindness interacting with every other to create a system of infinite, ever-evolving change.

J.A Feng’s practice highlights the open-ended process of creation. Giving visual form to her
exploratory acts, she often begins with poetry, everyday observations, or other stimuli that instigate a movement of her brush. A smiling tyger (channeling William Blake), a jeweled arachnid, or a glowing, fantastical landscape are at once familiar and enticingly otherworldly. Melting into their hallucinatory environs, Feng’s subjects adhere to an internal logic outside of our own daily existence that nevertheless beckons us inward.

Erin Lee Jones explores both personal cosmology and the wider implications of communing with the past in her sculptural monoprints. Looking toward the carved seals and reliefs of ancient civilizations, she collapses the distinction between history and the present. Within the confines of her constructions, mystic figures and contemporary idols jockey for control, creating hybrid subjects that merge with the bold patterns and inky lines. Formed in hydrocal, the resulting stones present a mystic mixture of collage, drawing, and the chance intersections of their formation.

At the core of both practices is an interest in materiality and its part within a larger conversation on the malleability of our physical and visual worlds. Recognizable imagery is transformed by each artist’s choice of media just as the materials are shifted by the images they comprise. Drawing upon the creative act as a means of transformation, and the alchemical urge to transmute one thing into another, Feng and Jones embrace the interstitial vibrations that exist between objects, images, and our own understanding of existence.

Looking at the world today, it may seem that many have forgotten our interconnected nature. Society does not function when the whims of the few outweigh the needs of the whole. Like a stone lodged in a spiderweb, the entire apparatus sinks downward until its original purpose is lost and its strands are destroyed one by one. It is heartening to see then, that an amplification of our protective natures, our vulnerabilities, and our shared benevolence can counter the disintegrating web and rebuild connections to the past, the future, and ourselves.

The gallery is located at 48 Hester Street on the Lower East Side. Gallery hours are Thursday–Saturday 12–6 PM, and Sundays by appointment. For more information, contact info@mypetram.com.

Press release by Graham W. Bell