Regina Rex - 221 Madison St. New York, NY 10002

Sarah Gerats
Julia Hechtman
Tina Kohlmann
Karla Wozniak

OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, April 5, 6-9pm

�Nomexy, Nivecourt, Charmes. A man took me in his car the last few miles, but after a short distance I switched over to a dilapidated van, in which empty glass bottles were rolling about in the back. I declined the offer of a cigarette, my body slowly warming up and steaming from the dampness. The windows of the car fogged up instantly from my intense steaming, so much so that the man had to stop to find a rag to wipe them, since he couldn�t see anymore [�]

In the morning I reached the edge of Paris [�] I walked there on feet so tired that I had no more consciousness left. A man wanted to walk through the forest and never appeared again. A man went for a solitary stroll on a broad beach with his big dog. A man had a live duck in his shopping bag. A blind beggar played the accordion, his legs covered with a zebra-striped blanket below the knee��

-Werner Herzog, Of Walking In Ice

The artists in Souvenir actively engage with, extract from, and re-present their surroundings so as to extend the moment of impact with the environment. Tchotchkes and mementos, such as snapshots taken from car interiors, sprawl into artworks that simultaneously reflect on and distance us from their origins in landscape. Through video, painting, sewing, and carving, they mediate environmental experience that is alternately mundane, hallucinatory, and sublime.

Sarah Gerats relates to her work as an exercise in possibilities. Through video, storytelling, rumors and performance, her work focuses on experience and distance. She likes the word vicarious. Sometimes she examines these ideas as a photo-moving with a spotlight in the dark until her body resembles a moon, or as a promise inviting the viewers of an exhibition to come visit her in the far North, waiting at the airport for every incoming flight for the duration of the show. Sarah Gerats is based on Svalbard, an island halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole.

Julia Hechtman makes work that subtly alters the familiar and ordinary to create a state of renewed interest in images, objects, and events. Her works conveys the contradictions and tensions that exist in active experience, and points to places we may not always pay attention to. Hechtman has widely shown nationally and internationally in New York, Boston, Chicago, L.A., Germany, Iceland, and Australia. She is currently based in Boston, MA.

Tina Kohlmann questions the metaphysical, the hallucinatory, the organic and inorganic. Her work is found at the crossing of a road, the loud concert area, in haunting lab experiments and psychokinesis. She draws our attention to the mundane, the trite, the beautiful and the discarded. She spent five years operating a dance club in Germany, and is currently located where ever she is located.

Karla Wozniak�s paintings are inspired by the landscape of the southern Appalachian regions of the United States. Since moving to Knoxville, Tennessee in 2011, she has shifted her gaze to depict places where the development and industry butts up against the natural world. These paintings are based on memories, photographs, and drawings of specific places and are transformed through the act of painting. Her use of paint varies drastically within a piece�transparent spaces abut flat areas of color and sections of molded and carved paint. These shifts in the surface of the painting echo the changes to the landscape that occur over time. Wozniak is based in Knoxville, TN.