Vultures at Midnight
February 7 - March 6, 2020
St. Louis, MO — Monaco is pleased to present Vultures at Midnight, organized and featuring new work by Edo Rosenblith, alongside St. Louis based artists Janie Stamm, Jon Young and Brooklyn based artist Erik S. Peterson. The exhibition will open on Friday, February 7, from 7:00 – 10:00 pm and run through March 6, 2020.
Rosenblith conceived Vultures at Midnight as a way to provide a platform for four wildly different artists who he has collaborated with in the past, to come together to show their newest work. For Rosenblith, an important part of being an artist is knowing one’s limitations, engaging with a community of trusted peers, and sharing resources in order to support one another. This is how artistic communities survive and thrive. Rosenblith asked each participating artist to provide a brief statement about their work.
Janie Stamm: This body of work is a peek into my life as a queer, Floridian dyke. It’s an exploration of the rage and frustration that comes from not feeling seen as a queer person in the wild. Using objects familiar to queer symbology and Florida, I present a passive-aggressive version of myself.
Jon Young: My…fabric sculptures, which I call “waymarks,” use historical symbols taken from Paleolithic cave paintings, Greek pottery, and even the line in the sand from Hollywood Westerns and Looney Tunes cartoons. Through the use of popular imagery of the West, I ground my waymarks in the histories and mythologies of the frontier, an ideological concept popularized by the historian Fredrick Jackson Turner, which has signified both European opportunity and indigenous genocide. Reflecting this dual nature of the American West, my work is informed both by my nomadic childhood in a constantly uprooted US military family and by the cultural displacement of his Native American heritage.
Edo Rosenblith: The two new bodies of work I am exhibiting were made in collaboration with Erik Peterson, an artist who lives in Brooklyn, but we first got to know each other freshman year at the Rhode Island School of Design. Last year we began collaborating on the sculpture Milk & Honey (2019), which is based on a painting of mine called “I’ll Huff & Puff & Blow Your House Down (2017). With the Double Rainbow, After Spectrum II (2019-2020), I created a series of 13 text paintings that have been placed onto feet that where fabricated by Eric. The sources for the text paintings are as varied as articles about Andrea Fraser and David Hammons, my own life/artwork, misremembered lines from poetry and short stories, and museum text panels. Together both bodies of work are interested in presenting the human body in new surprising ways that are at once uncanny, funny, and revolting.
Jon Young was born in Winston Salem, NC (1981). A tribal member of the Catawba Indian Nation in Rock Hill, South Carolina, Young now lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri. He received his MFA at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art at Washington University in St. Louis and his BFA from the University of Wyoming.
Janie Stamm was born and raised on the edge of the Everglades in Broward County, Florida. She is a craft-based artist currently residing on the western banks of the Mississippi River in Saint Louis, Missouri. In the spring of 2019, Janie received an MFA in Visual Art from Washington University in Saint Louis. She was most recently the recipient of the 2019 John T. Milliken Foreign Travel Graduate Award, a Regional Arts Commission grant, a Dubinsky Scholarship to study at the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Frida Kahlo Creative Arts Award from Washington University in St. Louis. Her work was featured on the cover of the December 2016 issue of Poetry magazine. She recently was in an artist in residence at ACRE in Wisconsin and the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris.
Edo Rosenblith was born in 1988 in Tel Aviv, Israel. Rosenblith received his BFA in painting in 2011 at the Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA in Visual Art at Washington University-St. Louis, in 2017. Rosenblith has exhibited throughout St. Louis, New York, Chicago, Miami, Los Angles and Frankfurt. A two-year survey of Edo’s sketchbook drawings became the content of his first book, PINK, published by Fort Gondo Press in 2013. Rosenblith lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri. He became a member of Monaco in 2019.
Erik Peterson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1987. Peterson received his BFA in painting in 2011 at the Rhode Island School of Design. Erik lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
