Opening this Saturday at Joshua Liner Gallery are two solo shows featuring new wave surrealism by Mike Davis (Stories From the Other Side of the Bridge) and Heidi Taileffer (An Uncanny Lineup of Serendipitous Connections).  We’ve been into Mike Davis’ work for ages and are pretty amazed by what we are seeing from Taileffer.  that being said, the show has mad promise.  Check it out for yourself.

Joshua Liner Gallery is pleased to present Stories From the Other Side of the Bridge, an exhibition of new paintings by the San Francisco-based artist Mike Davis. This is Davis’ first solo show with the gallery.

The suite of eighteen oil-on-canvas paintings takes clear stylistic cues from the Early Netherlandish and Flemish Masters—Bosch, Bruegel, Van Eyck, etc. Each work carries motifs, characters, and settings from one canvas to the next. Across large landscapes and intimate interior details, this shared content creates a community of images, though depicting a community like no other.

Walking fish and die-playing scorpions, gregarious snakes and giant butterflies, and human figures with bird heads inhabit this curious universe, made seductive by Davis’ lush oils and Renaissance palette of reds, ochers, and blues. The paintings depict a world of myth, fantasy, and colliding timeframes, a land “on the other side of the bridge,” but one that resonates with our own—not as memory but as dream.

In The Eighth Road, a boatload of peasant men sleepily contend with an assortment of symbolic challenges – a floating corpse, an enormous egg hatching a human hand, bird claw, and snake. Forward, Not Straight features a skeleton with a birdhouse for a head, paused on a dirt road against a beautifully scumbled sky and scenic, “low country” horizon. In The Other Side of the Bridge, another egg hatches a leg and a cannon amid an oenophilic scene of wine casks, grape-bearing birdmen, ladybugs, and a burning zeppelin in the distance.

In Davis’ imaginative world, the interaction of signs and symbols is a means of communication between species. Ravens bearing letters and pen-wielding ladybugs are not what they seem but what they symbolize, available to the unconscious interpretations of each viewer. But the presence of die, cards, and other games of chance suggests a universe where meaning is provisional, arranged and rearranged depending on the players and fate (with skeletons waiting patiently nearby).

Born in 1961 in Jacksonville, Florida, Mike Davis currently lives and works in San Francisco. Solo exhibitions of his work include Solo Flight at White Walls, San Francisco (2008). His work has been featured in group shows such as Blood Royale, Galerie d’art Yves Laroche, Montreal (2008); Locked and Loaded, Joshua Liner Gallery, New York (2008); We’ll Make A Lover Of You, ArtCenter/South Florida, Miami (2006); and Everything But The Kitschen Sync, La Luz de Jesus Gallery, Los Angeles (2005).

Joshua Liner Gallery is pleased to present An Uncanny Lineup of Serendipitous Connections, an exhibition of new paintings by Canadian artist Heidi Taillefer. This is Taillefer’s first solo show with the gallery.

Reflecting on life as a mixture of discovery, inevitability, and coincidence, Taillefer’s suite of twelve oil-on-canvas works presents a literalized depiction of destiny. Her dreamy paintings describe chimerical beings: humans with animal and mechanical parts, or animals with multiple limbs, wings, and utterly fantastical provenance. In each, Taillefer puts forth a coded, highly personalized origin myth—an “uncanny lineup of serendipitous connections” that for the artist shapes identity and purpose through transformation.

Birth of Venus is an updated riff on Botticelli’s iconic work. Here, “Venus” is a common tabby, newly sprung from a broken shell and bearing mechanical wings. Amid intergalactic dust and a spiral of cosmic fireflies, this relaxed kitty is more concerned with cleaning itself. Taillefer suggests that instinct and attitude are just as important to development as our genetic birthright. The Most Proximate Cause also comments on the elements that compose and constitute “destiny.” Taillefer offers a modern-day Damocles, cowering under a canopy of choices. Hanging above this anonymous nude, male subject is a crushing load of gears, blades, cogs, and other mechanical parts, an analogue to the pressures and excesses of modern life. The Angels of our Nature is a visual summary of Taillefer’s personal creation myth. Bringing together the realms of sea and land, air and matter, animal and human, the painting depicts life transformations that occur in body and spirit, with the central image of the individual as warrior.

Born in 1970, Heidi Taillefer lives and works in Montreal. Solo exhibitions of her work include: Muses and Heroes, Irvine Contemporary, Washington, DC (2008); Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, Thompson Landry Gallery, Toronto (2007); Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places, M Modern Gallery, Palm Springs, CA (2006); Pyrophoric, Galerie Yves Laroche, Montreal (2004); Solipsism, O Patro Vys, Montreal (2003); Inner Workings, International Museum of Art and Science, McAllen, Texas (1997). Selected group exhibitions include: Aspect: Ratio 1, Irvine Contemporary, Washington, DC, and Locked and Loaded, Joshua Liner Gallery, New York (2008); Mother Home of the Dolly Bird, The Shooting Gallery, San Francisco (2004); and Brave Destiny, Williamsburg Art and Historical Center, Brooklyn (2003).