On June 19th from 7-10PM, Lucky Gallery is pleased to host opening reception for “Front End to Back End” a Lucky Gallery Artist in Residence Exhibition, a group show presenting the work of three Lucky Gallery artists residents, Maria Baraybar, Stephanie Homa, and Kathleen Murray and special guest artist Hiroshi Shafer.

In keeping with our mission statement, Lucky Gallery’s Artist in Residence program provides affordable studio space and an opportunity for artists to interact with the community and with each other, sharing creativity and ideas in a supportive environment, and an opportunity to showcase their work in a gallery setting.

“Front End and Back End” a computer science and technology concept, is a generalized term that refers to the initial and the end stages of a process. The “Front End” is responsible for collecting input in various forms from the user and processing it to conform to a specification the “Back End” can use. The “Front End” is an interface between the user and the “Back End.”

“Lucky Gallery’s resident studio behind the gallery is the ‘Front End’ in this analogy,” says Laura Arena the Director of Lucky Gallery. “The studio is where the artists are creating and collaborating in preparation for the ‘Back End’, which is the actual gallery itself. Even our guest artist, Hiroshi Shafer will have his studio webcasted with the other artist’s working spaces. The exhibition in Lucky Gallery will act as the interface between the public and the artist.”

Maria Baraybar’s works for this show involve a juxtaposition of her own poetry and Artie, her comic-style drawings. Her search for meaning and absurdity shares one space whether it is comfortable or distressing to the human mind.

Stephanie Homa’s work aims to explore the endless rigid things that spook her with their insignificance, lightness and disappearance, carrying the simple title “reality”. Her practice as a painter transforms thought to a sort of visual copy, revealing emotions and ideas that are neither right nor wrong, mean everything and nothing and in the end, create a fraction of the whole, like a missing piece of a puzzle.

Kathleen Murray’s prints and paintings are all of urban environments with the benefit of the absence of people. Murray re-interprets urban structures as clean, crisp landscapes of muted colors and abstracted lines, breaking them down to their simplest components (a square, a rectangle, a curved line) then rebuilding them, removing whatever feels unnecessary. In the end, we are left with a simple structure that can be understood at its most basic levels.

Hiroshi Shafer, a Japanese artist now living in Brooklyn, is the guest artist for the resident exhibition. His conceptual use of video, sculpture, the human body and movement compliments the resident’s artist’s two dimensional works. Shafer’s most recent work “Your Future Camera” mixes playfulness, fantasy and function, with the debut of his wearable and functional camera obscura.