Fellow Travelers at PeepShow Space

Photo Story

Partial installation view

Fellow Travelers, PeepShow Space’s fifth and final exhibition, features the work of Joshua Rosenblatt, Jason Phillips and William Norton. The three artists reflect on travel, which at this moment is impossible in their lives as they shelter, wait and dream about places that no longer exist, except in memory.

William Norton’s Ghosts in the Machine: 3 Figures and a Potted Plant Celebrating Spring in the Subwayis a dramatic twenty-foot-long charcoal and pastel rendering on paper, drawing on hundreds of photographs taken during his NYC subway commute. Norton’s subway resonates with Dante’s Inferno─ stairs leading to the underground, from sunlit surfaces to dirty, noisy, and overcrowded meat wagons, or as Norton says, “the exit from this chosen purgatory, and our industrial society’s sins, the cogs in this machine are duly represented with figurative, playful contrasts.”

William Norton, Ghosts in the Machine: 3 Figures and a Potted Plant Celebrating Spring in the Subway, 7 feet X 20 feet, Charcoal, Pastels, Tape on Paper, 2016-2021

During the past pandemic year Joshua Rosenblatt produced a group of hotel room drawings, which he considers as one piece portraying a single hotel room in a Chicago business hotel where he (once) frequented. As in many hotel rooms, the design is meant to make travelers feel at home, but the generic colors and forms are also designed to avoid interfering with anyone’s sensibilities. Every day, housekeeping recreates this set-like environment for later dishevel, only to be repeated the following day. Rosenblatt’s drawings depict emptiness, “the space between pillows, the small slice of light slipping under the door, the black void of a TV screen. Now, the hotel room is an empty set with few visitors,” “the artist says.

Joshua Rosenblatt, Hotel Room #42 (Chicago) 2020, Charcoal and pastel on paper mounted on canvas 36″ x 24″

Joshua Rosenblatt, Hotel Room #39 (Chicago) 2020, Charcoal and pastel on paper mounted on canvas, 38″ x 50″

Joshua Rosenblatt, Hotel Room #40 (Chicago) 2020, Charcoal and pastel on paper mounted on canvas, 38″ x 50″

Jason Phillips makes paintings that use panorama and miniature to create scenes that emphasize scale and distance on a physical and metaphorical levels. The images depict places and events from our current world, or a possible future. The influence of nature over human endeavor is ever present and the effect of humanity on the natural world is rendered as unavoidable. Phillips says, “these paintings represent the ‘going wrong’ aspect of our collective choices, and position a central question: what can be done?”