Press

"Photographer Tyler Haughey compares visiting the motels of Wildwood, New Jersey on the off-season to wandering onto a film set after the cast and crew has departed. For nine months of the year, the lights are switched off, the windows are shuttered, and the doors are locked.

"The now-iconic doo-wop motels of Wildwood, North Wildwood, and Wildwood Crest popped up along the New Jersey coast in the mid-20th century, when post-war American families could hop in their cars and escape to someplace magical."

In works with a visceral, spontaneous feel, Deborah Dancy explores the amorphous zone between abstraction and representation.

With Miles Davis’s moody, improvisational Stairway to the Gallows blasting away in the background, Deborah Dancy layers thick gobs of blue oil paint onto a just-begun abstract painting in her spacious, light-filled Storrs studio. She uses a brush to add a sinuous green line, then coats on yellow paint with a plastic spatula. Pausing, she stands back and inspects her work before hurriedly scraping off much of the paint she’s just added.

Oblivious to a friend who has quietly walked into her studio, she’s lost in the moment, caught up in what she has called the “conversation” or “orchestration” she has with every painting and drawing she creates. Dancy, a much-lauded painter who lists a Guggenheim Fellowship among her many awards and grants, stands back and considers her painting.

"Maybe it helps to know that Fran O’Neill has a deep past in figurative painting rooted in perception and drawing from life: that would make sense of the compositional acuity, vivacious economy and voluptuous sense of bodily connection in her beefy, boisterous forms. It might also explain why they sometimes recall Howard Hodgkin though they are far less polite in dispatch. Or why the brushstrokes remind us of Juan Uslé but with more generational purpose. But the highest compliment one can pay to these audacious paintings is that the artist’s formal groundings aren’t beaten into them. They are abstract, hard and fast."

"Worldwide, the words Jersey Shore have become synonymous with bulky guys and busty girls partying hard and shaming themselves in so many different ways (thank you, MTV). For the non-American, Jersey Shore is actually the common name used for the coast of the US State of New Jersey, a popular summer destination since the 1950s, when many new resorts were constructed to host the influx of tourists. American photographer Tyler Haughey’s beautiful series Ebb Tide captures the unique architecture and mood of these resorts during the off season, when the tourists are gone and the motels sprinkled with snow."

"The Wildwoods, a group of small shore towns situated on a five-mile-long barrier island along the southern New Jersey coastline, are home to one of the most important architectural collections of the 20th century. They contain a trove of midcentury modern motels that make up the largest concentration of postwar resort architecture in the United States. These motels remain fully functioning and virtually unchanged since their original construction, in many cases over fifty years ago."

"Jen Wink Hays is from Maine and now lives and works in the relative calm of Philadelphia with her husband, fellow painter and designer Tyler Hays. The American artist uses opaque oil paint to obscure earlier layers of colour and form, creating what she calls “a-story-within-a-story” experience. The layers allow her to explore the idea of concealing and revealing, both adding and taking away to reveal a story behind the piece.

"Although the works are abstract they’re not conventional by any means, this method of obscuring gives them a unique twist that I’ve not seen before. Some even come across as pixelated because of the small bite-sized coloured squares."

Simone Solodnz posted this article about Bo Joseph's solo exhibition A Season of Psychic Noise, Sears-Peyton Gallery, New York, October 27-December 10, 2016.

"Malibu, Sahara, Monaco—it sounds like an exotic world tour, but you can go to all three in New Jersey! These mid-century modern motels named for sunny locales pepper a five-mile stretch of the Jersey shore, just north of Cape May, known as Wildwood. Tyler Haughey first visited the area one January, after the throngs of people had packed up their beach towels and dusted the sand off their feet, leaving these architectural gems to sit lonely and shuttered."

"On the first day of his exhibition A Season of Psychic Noise, I had the pleasure of speaking with fellow painter Bo Joseph. Bo and I were born the same year and attended New England colleges where our initiation to art history in the late 80s was through Louise Gardner’s encyclopedic tome Art Through the Ages. We were in agreement that the book had been useful (we still own our copies), and that it was regrettable to have professors skip entire chapters on Africa or Asia in the service of presenting a linear Western leaning history. I was fascinated to learn that he’d remedied this with extensive travel and research, a journey that has enabled him to define art on his own terms."

"Five years ago, Tyler Haughey, then a student at Drexel University, was driving along the coast when he happened to pass through the Wildwoods. A Jersey Shore native, he’d heard about the Wildwoods but had never been to any of them before. It was February, and the motels were deserted, but he found them captivating, and so he stopped to photograph some of them.

“'It felt like I’d happened upon an abandoned film set,' he said."