Jason Roskey’s solo exhibit, Stay Or Pass On Through Or Whatever, at 33 Bond Gallery in Manhattan opens this week. The Texas-born Brooklyn transplant’s works are composed of pencil, paint, ink, and collage on paper. His themes are derived from the New York City environment: urban life, architectural ruins, decay, identity, and the American Dream. Like many collage artists, his images are collected from recycled magazines and periodicals. In an interview with NY Arts, Roskey explains his image searching process, claiming to have a specific preconceived database of images that he wishes to utilize, which generally includes war-torn areas, political iconography, and images from fashion shoots. Stay Or… is a fresh body in comparison to his heavy handed paintings and drawings of his past life in Texas. The show demonstrates Roskey’s conceptual maturing and (spatial) adjustments in his art making. Roskey has no formal training as an artist but attended Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas.

Dirt Mansion, a Judith Supine solo show, is exhibiting in Brooklyn at Bushwick’s English Kills Gallery until June. The graffiti artist’s large-scale collages consist of magazine cut-outs and photographic images which he has digitally enlarged and painted. His palette is bright-hot pinks, neon yellows, greens, and blues that stand out on the urban canvas. Supine’s figures are fantastic, distorted images of people, animals and situations mostly created from rubbish and found objects. In Dirt Mansion, he creates a gallery-wide installation of his contorted figures and imagery, set in a black box which adds to the eeriness of his convoluted sculptures. In addition to his dark side, Supine is playful with his environment, he once created a floating sculpture in the East River, a large-scale hanging banner which hung from the Manhattan Bridge, and he has pasted an anti-war collage onto the walls of Time Square’s army recruitment station. In this, Supine inhibits the role of the street artist, remaining mysteriously under-the-radar. Although little is known about his background or his motives, Supine is considered a member an elite group of Brooklyn-based street artists, which include Bast and the duo Faile. In January, he exhibited with Bast in a show titled, Booby Trap, at the Leonard Street Gallery in London.

Currently at OKOK Gallery until May 4th is “While,” a two person show with works by Mauro Altamura and Anna Von Mertens concerning the passage of time. Both artists examine political and historical occurrences from various perspectives.

Altamura is exhibiting 144 (out of 1000) photographs from his series, “Anonymous,” which he began during the presidential elections of 2000. Altamura collected images of anonymous people in the background of published pictures in the Friday New York Times. The artist then re-photographed and enlarged these faces, displaying them in a grid-like pattern, reminiscent of institutional methods of photographic indexing. Together they become a shrine of anonymity and obscurity, with the enlargement of the faces causing the original image to dissolve into a dot pattern. This partial portraiture creates a sense of loss and powerlessness, familiar feelings in our current political atmosphere.

Von Mertens will be exhibiting three works from “As Stars Go By,” a project that displays the star rotation patterns above violent and dramatic events in American history. The artist hand stitches the patterns into quilts, with each stitch becoming a marker of time and a silent reminder of past and future. Events depicted include the Civil War Battle of Antietam, Hiroshima, and the morning of September 11th. All took place during the daytime hours, thus concealing the star patterns above from those affected below. The stars serve as passive spectators and suggest nature’s transcendence above human interactions and indiscretions.

Altamura received an M.F.A. from the Visual Studies Workshop/SUNY Buffalo and a B.A. from Ramapo College of New Jersey. He has received several grants, including those from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Von Mertens received a B.A. from Brown University in 1995 and her M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts. She has displayed her work at Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco, the Berkeley Art Museum, and White Box in New York.

Munich-based artist Tom Schmelzer describes himself as a concept artist who uses brilliant aesthetics in his illusionary sculptures and moving objects to “make a point” to the viewer. After being drawn in by the theatricality of the object presented, the viewer soon discovers a message. These messages concern social and cultural issues such as in Show Off, an enormous engagement ring followed by a woman. In this piece, composed of silicone, silicone paint, polyurethane, 925 silver, diamond, french nails, and metal, Schmelzer addresses the cultural expectations surrounding success and its manifestations. For example, men are expected to make more money than their fathers and to purchase engagement rings for their fiancees worth approximately three month’s salary.

In a 2006 installation, Schmelzer took on the expectations of the United Nations, who at a 2005 summit declared that individual states were responsible for protecting their people from crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and the like. If a state is unable to do so, the international community should step in. In Responsibility to Protect or To Whom It May Concern, Schmelzer asserts that collective action is only taken when whites are involved, when Christians are involved, when petroleum is involved, or when natural gas is involved. The installation consists of a white oil drum with Jesus figures encircling the rim of the drum, which contains petroleum and a pump to create gas bubbles. A literal but quite successful way to “make a point”. Schmelzer’s seductive sculptures immediately capture our attention, a task that is becoming increasingly difficult in the 21st century. He does this by moving past the aesthetic neutrality of previous conceptual art and reinforcing his appealing objects with sound conceptual statements.

Jozsa Gallery in Brussels is currently featuring Schmelzer’s work in their exhibition Let’s Call it A Year until May 10th. The artist has previously shown at the Riviera Gallery in New York, White Trash Contemporary in Hamburg, and Galerie Jaspers in Munich.

Through in-depth self-examination artist Su-en Wong challenges issues of identity in relation to nationality, ethnicity, gender, adolescence and sexuality. Wong’s self-portraits take place in a variety of coming-to-age environments, such as schoolyards, roller rinks and swimming pools. The artist casts her characters in these stereotypical scenes to reveal the close boundaries between adolescents and adulthood for a woman. Juxtaposing ideas of fantasy and reality with power and vulnerability, the artist’s work speaks to the awkward stages of life where emotions and rationality run together. Wong was born in Singapore. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and is a M.F.A. graduate of the School of the Art Institute Chicago. She is a recipient of both an artist grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and from the New York Foundation of the Arts. Last year, the artist exhibited with Danese Gallery in New York and Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica.

Grant Barnhart, a previous DailyServing interviewee, is preparing for an upcoming exhibition entitled “Spread Eagle,” on view from May 2nd – May 31st at Leslie’s Art Gallery in Luxembourg. This will be the Seattle-based artist’s first European exhibition. Barnhart investigates American archetypes of masculinity and heroism through wit and tounge-in-cheek humor. For his upcoming show, the artist will be using the images of cowboys and football players in absurdly vibrate color-field backgrounds. The newer metaphors of masculinity such as football players and cowboys are coupled with the artist’s previous imagery such as urinating tanks. Together the images offer a glimpse into contemporary American culture and humorously sheds light on the current aggressive and confrontational nature of the U.S. Barnhart uses humor to disarm the viewer and allow for reflection on the American identity. Barnhart is a graduate of the Columbus College of Art & Design and is currently represented by OKOK Gallery in Seattle. The artist has a forth coming exhibitions with OKOK in 2008 and under their new gallery name Ambach & Rice in 2009.

Saul Becker is a contemporary landscape painter who incorporates fragments of different places and sources to create dream-like natural scenes that are both beautiful and foreboding. Titles like “Last Look”, “Entropia”, and “Ghostland” give urgency to his compositions, which lack any human presence. His drawings are particularly evocative, showing incredible detail in the natural landscape as seen above in Ghostlog. Becker chooses a muted palette except for the leaves and branches in the foreground, which appear to be seeping green, a metaphorical reference to our slowly fading ecosystem. The fallen log in front is pushed into the picture plane as a strong symbol of destruction and life past.

Becker received his B.F.A from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax and his M.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. He has had solo exhibitions at King County Art Gallery in Seattle and at Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax, and has two upcoming exhibitions. The first is Works on Paper at Sunday L.E.S. in New York from April 24-May 25 and Eden’s on Fire! at the Platform Gallery in Seattle from May 8-June 14.