TRAVIS DEMELLO

Travis DeMello was born on a small farm in upstate New York and grew up in Ithaca, NY. He studied Illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He currently lives and works in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. 

Travis’ intimate paintings and painted objects are painstakingly constructed using multiple layers of hand-cut gouache on paper within a shallow shadowbox. Despite the cacophony of nature Travis assembles, the paintings remain tranquil windows into dreamy afternoons only slightly shadowed by hypnagogic hallucinations.

Work by Travis is not currently available, please check back for availability or contact creative@brooklynfireproof.com to be put on a waiting list.

CRAIG DRENNEN

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ABOUT CRAIG DRENNEN
2005 | HELEN SLATER AS SUPERGIRL
2015 | NEW MISTRESS VS. OLD ATHENIANS

ABOUT CRAIG DRENNEN

HELEN SLATER AS SUPERGIRL

Helen Slater as Supergirl was Atlanta-based artist Craig Drennen's first New York solo show. The show ran from February to March 2005 at Brooklyn Fire Proof's previous location on Richardson St. in Williamsburg (the gallery progenitor of the larger complex of businesses in Bushwick/East Williamsburg that now comprise BFP). Drennen focused his studio practice on Supergirl, the failed 1984 spinoff of the successful Superman franchise, for over five years. 

Copied below is the press release for the show, and a gallery of images of the work.

Helen Slater as Supergirl is Craig Drennen’s first solo exhibition in New York City. The exhibition consists of paintings, drawings, and sculptural multiples all based on the 1984 movie Supergirl. Drennen organizes his entire artistic practice around Supergirl, which starred Helen Slater in the title role. It allows Drennen the opportunity to comment on the ascendancy of film from the vantage point of traditional media, and to refer to a subject that “is familiar to everyone, but not truly known by anyone.”

10 PM Live Music Opening Night Featuring 18 the Brooklyn-based band with a potent mix of music for your kundalini. 18 is Bob, Derrick, Tucker and Boss.

THE SUPERGIRL PROJECT

Ten years after his first New York solo show with BFP, Craig Drennen returned with a new show from a new body of work. After concluding more than five years of studio practice dedicated to his Supergirl project, Drennen switched to a very different cultural goldmine--Shakespeare. More specifically, Shakespeare's failed and unfinished play, Timon of Athens. Rarely performed and rarely considered critically (or always critically, never considered by critics), Drennen felt that he would have the freedom to claim this uncharted territory for his own purposes.

RYAN MICHAEL FORD

Ryan Michael Ford grew up in North Carolina and attended the Savannah College of Art & Design. He now lives and works in Bushwick, NY.

Work by Ryan will be available soon, please check back for availability or contact creative@brooklynfireproof.com to be put on a waiting list.

CHRISTOPHER K. HO

Hong Kong-born Christopher K. Ho employs diverse formats to explore often-invisible social forces implicating contemporary art. His solo show Demoiselles d'Avignon (2013, Y Gallery, NY) refracted Western abstraction through the eyes of a future class of refined Chinese princelings, while Privileged White People (2013, Forever & Today, NY) examined the sensibility of artists who grew up during the affluent Clinton presidency. He has had solo exhibitions at Winkleman Gallery, NY (2010, 2008); FJORD, Philadelphia (2013); and Galeria EDS, Mexico City (2009). His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Modern Painters, Artforum, and ArtReview. He participated in the Incheon Biennial (2009), the Chinese Biennial Beijing (2008), and the Busan Bienniale (2008), and produced site-specific pieces for Storm King (2013) and the Cranbrook Art Museum (2011), where he was the 2010 Critical Studies Fellow. He has additionally taught at Virginia Commonwealth University and at RISD. His forthcoming solo show, Leadership, opens at Present Company, NY, in May.

NILS KARSTEN

"Originally from Hamburg, Germany, Nils Karsten apprenticed as a cabinetmaker in Berlin before moving to New York in 1995. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1999, participated in the Skowhegan program in 2002, and received his MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2003. Since then, he has been a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His work has been shown in galleries and museums throughout the US, and internationally; including Contrasts Gallery in Shanghai, China, Earl McGrath in Los Angeles, Gestalten Space in Berlin, Germany, Marvelli Gallery, Ubu Gallery, the Museum of Art & Design in New York, the Islip Art Museum on Long Island, NY, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX, the Pera Museum in Istanbul, Turkey and the Museo Valenciano de la Ilustración y la Modernidad in Valencia, Spain. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY."                             -From the Artist's personal site.

ELIOT MARKELL

Originally from Boston, Eliot Markell lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Eliot's sculptures originate from walks on New England beaches, collecting washed up remnants of the fishing industry. These objects, bleached and salted and twisted by the ocean, travel back to Eliot's Bushwick studio where they co-mingle with the tools of his artists' trade. 

Work by Eliot will be available soon. Please contact creative@brooklynfireproof.com to be alerted when the work is online.

DON PABLO PEDRO

Don Pablo Pedro, (b. 1986, Florida) lives and works in New York City. His contorted, hermaphroditic figures explore sexual angst and gender identity through the lens of religious idolatry. While recovering from an Inguinal Orchiectomy, or removal of his left testicle due to twisting and subsequent necrosis, Pedro was bed-ridden and began to use pen, watercolors, and acrylic on the hospital sheets he lay in. This led to a use of muslin as a medium, a cloth most commonly used for clothing mockups, similar in look and feel to bed sheets. Don Pablo Pedro currently utilizes a Thangka style on linen, working through the relationships, successes, and failures of a pawn in the contemporary art environment. Pedro’s new work reveals the ugliness of self-loathing masked by a blissful public persona where the desire to prove yourself to your own inner demons comes to life, taunting players acting out the artist’s inner tragedy on a public stage.                 -courtesy of the artist

Work by Pedro will be available soon. Please contact creative@brooklynfireproof.com to be alerted when the work is online.

Recent work by Don Pablo Pedro:

HIBA SCHAHBAZ

Hiba Schahbaz (born Pakistan, 1981) is a Brooklyn-based artist who works in the centuries-old art form of miniature painting. She trained in miniature painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan and received an MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in New York City. The traditional Indo-Persian painting technique and imagery Schahbaz uses was developed by men to tell the stories of antiquity, and her work challenges the medium’s inflexible rules by embracing a new female perspective. Schahbaz says, “I speak an ancient language in a contemporary feminine voice.”

Referencing her own image, often nude, she paints elegant vignettes and more elaborate scenes. Through the stories she creates, Schahbaz contemplates what it means to be a woman. These works addresses issues of personal freedom, destruction, sexuality and censorship by unveiling the beauty, fragility and strength of the female form. 

Meticulously ornamented and vividly colorful, the miniature draws the viewer in. This delicate allure is underscored, however, by an unsettling tension. Things are not quite what they seem. 

In addition to exhibiting her work internationally in galleries and fairs including the Vienna Art Fair and Scope NYC, Schahbaz has curated exhibitions of miniature paintings in Pakistan and India. She was an artist-in residence at the Vermont Studio Center and The Wassaic Project and has taught miniature painting as part of the Alfred Z. Solomon Residency at the Tang Museum. She is a teaching artist at the Art Students League of New York.

JACKIE SKRZYNSKI

Born: Rochester, NY Studio in Newburgh, NY

Jackie Skrzynski [pron. skrin-ski] grew up one of eight children in a family that transplanted from western New York to North Carolina. She believes her southern childhood and Polish Catholic roots contributed to her somewhat gothic sensibility. She earned her undergraduate degree from UNC-Chapel Hill and her MA and MFA from the University at Albany, NY. Her drawings have recently been exhibited at Theo Ganz Studio in Beacon, NY, Morehead State University in Kentucky, the Arc Gallery in San Francisco, and Les Abattoirs d’Avallon in France.

Jackie is inspired by what she perceives as an arbitrary boundary between humans and the natural world. Whether she is riffing on mythology and parenthood or hunters and their trophy animals, she intends to make works that are both beautiful and unsettling. Her drawings range in scale from a few inches to several feet, and engage the viewer with the physical properties of charcoal, pencil and pastel.

Art Historian Carol Duncan wrote that Jackie’s imagery “avoids completely the cute, the cuddly, and the sentimental…If she breaches the boundary between the human and the animal, she does so to challenge its veracity and retrieve something of value on the other side.”

CLINTEL STEED

Clintel Steed lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

He has most recently curated a show of figurative paintings for BFP Creative, (Human Mysteries).

JEANNE TREMEL

Jeanne Tremel lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Jeanne's work will be available soon. Please check back, or contact creative@brooklynfireproof.com to be notified.