July 9 - July 22 2015

Matt Sesow | Dana Ellyn | Jennifer Camper | TABBOO! Stephen Tashjian | Juan Pablo Echeverri | Mike Miraglia

Opening Reception: Friday, July 10, 6-9 pm.

Matt Sesow

Trip to Here

Trip to Here brings a new group of paintings inspired by Sesow’s experiences in Provincetown over the years. This will be his third exhibition at AMP Gallery.

Matt Sesow, without formal art education, discovered painting as a hobby while working at IBM. In the evenings and on weekends he played with painting and began selling his work to Self-Taught and Outsider art collectors in 1995. Throughout the 1990’s he continued to paint and participate in art exhibitions while working full-time at a variety of computer firms including AOL and Netscape. Returning from a stint with the Peace Corps in 1999, Matt began to focus on his love of painting and developing a path to create art full-time.

In 2001, after establishing himself within the art community as a powerfully diverse and independent painter, Matt Sesow retired from his computer career to pursue his art full-time. With the ability to focus entirely on his painting, Sesow exhibited and traveled across the United States while also securing new collectors internationally including significant exhibitions at the American Visionary Museum in Baltimore, Barcelona, Spain, several cities and towns in France, Australia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Bologna, Italy. In addition, Matt was honored by having one of his paintings made into a United Nations stamp. It was released in September 2013.

Currently living and painting in Washington, DC, Matt celebrates his 21st year as an independent artist. www.mattsesow.com

Dana Ellyn

Happiness is ...

As a vegan and animal lover, many of Dana Ellyn’s paintings feature compelling, and often challenging narratives for/of creatures big and small. For this show, she will additionally draw keen inspiration from her past trips to Provincetown, and her natural affinity to New England where she was raised. This will be Ellyn’s third exhibition at AMP Gallery.

Dana Ellyn is a full-time painter who lives and paints in her studio in Washington, DC. She committed herself fully to painting in 2002 when she decided to leave her corporate job and pursue her art. Ellyn’s style sits on the fence between social realism and expressionism. Having spent her childhood and college years honing her skills and striving to be technically correct, she now constantly tasks herself with unlearning those restrictive habits. Dana Ellyn has recently had solo exhibits in Barcelona, Spain, and Gold Coast Australia, an upcoming solo in Rehoboth, DE and several two-person exhibits with her husband (Matt Sesow) in Washington, DC, Boston, MA, Spain and France. www.danaellyn.com

Jennifer Camper

Busts

Busts is a wallpaper design by Jennifer Camper originally commissioned by the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, Minneapolis, MN, where she had a show earlier this year. AMP Gallery is thrilled to exhibit it here in Provincetown.

Jennifer Camper’s comics explore gender, race and class from an outsider’s (female, queer, and mongrel) perspective. The work also celebrates sexy women and ridicules stupidity. Camper became a cartoonist because she likes making art with both words and pictures. Also, all the tools of the trade are small and easy to shoplift.

Her books include Rude Girls and Dangerous Women, a collection of her cartoons, and subGURLZ, a graphic novella about three twisted women living in abandoned subway tunnels. Camper is also the founding editor of two Juicy Mother comix anthologies. She edited the Queer Pin-Ups playing cards and is the creator/coordinator of the Queers & Comics Conference, CLAGS, CUNY Grad Center, NYC, 2015.

Her comics and illustrations have appeared in magazines, newspapers, and comic books, including The Village Voice, Ms. Magazine, The Advocate, Out, Gay Comix, Wimmin’s Comix, Young Lust, World War 3, and Funny Times. Her work has been published in many comix anthologies and she is the cartoon editor for The Women’s Review of Books. Her cartoons have been translated into French, Arabic, Spanish and Korean.

Camper’s art has been exhibited internationally, including at The New Museum, (NYC), Festival International de le Ban Desinee (Switzerland), The San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum, Kyoto Manga Museum, LadyFest (UK) and Högkvarteret (Sweden).

TABBOO! Stephen Tashjian

Tiles

In 1997 Tashjian had a show in Positano, Italy. Having never been to Italy, but “loving the whole beautiful tile thing that they've got going on over there,” he was inspired to create a wall of 20 black and white paintings. Whether seen individually or as a whole, perceived as a wall of ceramic tile or not, the paintings coalesce beautifully in a kind of democratic design – the result of which is quite striking.

TABBOO! Stephen Tashjian has been working as an artist, writer, and performer for almost 60 years. He lives in New York City, but spent his childhood in Massachusetts. Tashjian has exhibited his paintings and performances in London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Hollywood, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Memphis, Miami, Baltimore, Boston and Provincetown. Some recent shows include Paul Kasmin Gallery in 2006, Participant, Inc. NYC in 2008, Contemporary Art Museum in Satiago de Compostela, Spain in 2009, Vox Populi, Philadelphia in 2010, and the Matthew Marks Gallery NYC in 2014. In 2013, a retrospective monograph collection of Tashjian’s career works was published in Italy by Damiani.

Juan Pablo Echeverri

Homoticons

“HOMOTICONS is a series I did in 2013. Although it had been in my head for many years, I had still not found the way to make it happen. I became obsessed with emoticons since they came out in the MSN messenger era. They were very basic then... and at first we had only 16 options. I always found it fascinating how these very basic faces could give a tone to our online conversations.... and with time it has become even more intense the way we communicate through these basic faces. Using my mouth and eyes I remade these 16 expressions that became this series HOMOTICONS.”

Juan Pablo Echeverri was born in 1978 in Bogotá, Colombia, where he currently lives and works. His work has been part of numerous group and solo shows in galleries and museums around the world, such as The Photographers Gallery in London, The Havana Biennial in Cuba, Itau Cultural in Sao Paulo, Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá among others. He has taken part of Residencies in England, Mexico and Brazil, and his work has been included in Publications such as Younger than Jesus Directory published by the New Museum and PHAIDON in 2009, and his work is part of the permanent collection of Banco de la República in Colombia and CA2M in Madrid, Spain as well as other private collections. He was recently a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Mike Miraglia

Over Hard

“Over Hard” is two porcelain eggs in an iron skillet. The two eggs are part of a larger installation. The installation includes hundreds of eggs, in stacks, and in individual form like the ones presented.

Mike Miraglia received a Boston Globe Scholastic Art Award in 1997 for his water-colour painting titled, “Who’s the Boss Applesauce”. He received his associates degree in visual arts from Cape Cod Community College. At UMASS Amherst, he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture. In 2007, he settled in San Francisco, where he continues to produce sculptures at Ruby’s Clay Studio in the Castro District of San Francisco. He also composes music and performs with his band, Club Meds, in San Francisco.