A Crude Touch: Alex Schmitz and Sydney Ewerth 

Sheherazade
February 2nd to February 28th, 2019

The following text was written by Julie Leidner for the exhibition A Crude Touch by Alex Schmitz and Sydney Ewerth at Sheherazade in 2019:

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Alex Schmitz and Sydney Ewerth are two strangers working in painting and sculpture, respectively, whose works are forms of visual personal diaries. They cross over into one another’s space in A Crude Touch.

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Not unlike scrolling through an Instagram feed of dissociated images, Alex Schmitz’s paintings are made up of an excess of “fragmented moments within a short story that have been chopped up and rearranged.” His canvases are layered with oversized depictions of erotic desires and other fleeting notions. Alex Schmitz hails from Northern Kentucky and now lives in Brooklyn, NY. He is founder and curator of Taaffe Gallery, an exhibition space adjacent to his Clinton Hill art studio. Alex received his BFA in Painting in 2007 from the University of Louisville, and his MFA from Syracuse University in 2011.

 

Sydney Ewerth’s abstract sculptures play physical awkwardness, distortion, and memory—reflecting “a longing to connect and create a physical dialogue between lived and imagined space.” These feelings are realized in the amplification of her sculptures’ cast shadows, which stretch out over walls and floors in saturated hues, making monuments out of fleeting moments.  Sydney is currently a visiting Artist-In-Residence at Indiana University Southeast in New Albany, IN. She received her BFA from Augusta University in Georgia in 2013 and her MFA in Ceramics from the University of Alabama in 2017.