James esber
jane fine
J. Fiber
Tracey Goodman
Jim Lee

James Esber, Jane Fine, and J. Fiber (a pseudonym for the two artists’ collaborative drawings) will present three intertwined bodies of work that exist at the border between figuration and abstraction, each a stewpot of pop culture and art historical references. James Esber uses a variety of media to disassemble and distort the emotionally charged and often clichéd images of Americana, prodding figuration into abstraction. The characters he’s drawn to, pawed-over icons of popular culture, include gunslingers, flag-wavers, dimpled children holding flowers, tattooed hipsters, and himself. His paintings, built through hyperbolic mark-making, are done with a myopic focus on each part, shifting between scales and allowing for improvised digressions that turn faces into abstracted landscapes of meandering marks.

Jane Fine’s brightly colored paintings are rooted in the history of abstraction yet drift toward figuration. They are landscapes of imaginary worlds with giant flowers and picket fences. Like scribbles on a young girl’s notebook, scattered throughout are simple words made of bubble letters. Over the last few years, the artist has reexamined her early memories after a recreational DNA test, which led to the discovery that she had been raised on a mountain of secrets. Recently, she has repetitively painted her name: two short words nearly synonymous with 20th-century American normalcy. Painting her name has been a way to re-anchor herself in the present. It is an act of self-definition and also a feminist assertion of strength.

In the work of J. Fiber, abstraction and figuration smash up against each other. Esber and Fine approach the paper as if navigating a battlefield. Made with poured acrylic, colored pencil, graphite, and ink, their drawings are rife with drama. Ruggedly masculine passages bump against petite strings of flowers, and the boundary between his and hers is always meaningful. Working quietly, section by section, the couple passed the drawings back and forth, challenging each other at each exchange. The process can be as fraught as an old married couple’s argument over whose turn it is to do the dishes or as magical as balancing a two-sided coin on its edge.

Tracey Goodman works with familiar relics from everyday life, adjusting these objects--cutting, sewing, adding material, dye, and arranging the altered forms in subtly skewed vignettes that reflect culturally embedded views of sexuality, identity, and class. Literature informs Goodman’s practice, with this exhibition title “Choose any hour on the clock,” taken from the Paul Harding novel Tinkers, exploring ideas around the metaphor of the interior of a clock as encapsulating a period and what was lost between then and now. Having visited Livingston Manor in October 2023, Goodman witnessed high water levels in the surrounding streams and tributaries and learned of the town’s history with flooding. Climate change informs this work, with images of plaster puddles and cast fish spilling into the galleries. Reading and research ground her work in history, while objects and images allude to memory and sensory experience.

Jim Lee created physical and formative new bodywork for his exhibition at Catskill Art Space in his pursuit of exploration and process. Lee’s aversion to refined or polished results in cobbled compositions of part painting and part sculpture. His playfulness with materials is often both formal and practical — for example, the stapled lip around each canvas’s edge acts as a guide for stretching them. In other instances, rather than painting a line, Lee allows it to form where two swaths of canvas are stapled together. This dedication to confusing the viewer’s visual perception of the piece with its physical actuality is an enduring concern across the artist’s practice. Lee’s interest in what can be communicated with minimal visual information results in paintings with more questions than answers.

About the Artists

James Esber’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally for over three decades, including a 25-year survey show at the Clifford Gallery at Colgate University and a solo exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. He has had multiple one-person shows at PPOW in New York City, Bernard Toale in Boston, Pierogi in New York, and Leipzig. James has been a fellow at Yaddo, MacDowell, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and The Hermitage Artist Retreat. He participated in the Bucknell Artist Summer Residency and Central City Artist Project in New Orleans. He has received multiple grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. James lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Jane Fine, and their son, Abraham.

Jane Fine received her B.A. from Harvard University and an M.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. She receives grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and The National Endowment for the Arts. Jane has been a fellow at MacDowell, Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center, The Golden Foundation, The Hermitage Artist Retreat, Millay Colony, and Skowhegan. She has had nine one-person shows in New York City -- at Casey Kaplan, White Columns, and Pierogi. There have also been solo shows of Jane’s work in Houston at the Barbara Davis Gallery, San Francisco at the Michael Rosenthal Gallery, Boston at Bernard Toale, Pierogi Leipzig in Germany, and A/R Contemporary in Milan. Jane Fine’s work has been included in group shows at The Brooklyn Museum, The Neuberger Museum, The Tang Museum, The Drawing Center, and numerous commercial galleries in the U.S. and Europe. Jane has lived and worked in Williamsburg, Brooklyn since 1986.

J. Fiber is a drawing project by painters Jane Fine and James Esber. In 2007, after two decades of sporadic collaborations, Esber and Fine launched J. Fiber as a formal and ongoing project. The first exhibit of J. Fiber drawings, World War Me, was in 2008 at Pierogi in Brooklyn. Drawings by J. Fiber have been included in group shows at the Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Los Angeles, Art on Paper at The Weatherspoon Gallery in North Carolina, The Front in New Orleans, and Freight and Volume in New York City. In 2009, J. Fiber was commissioned to produce a print by Dieu Donné Papermill. In 2010, J. Fiber was artist-in-residence at The Central City Artist Project in New Orleans. Other “one-person” shows of work by J. Fiber have been at The Wesley as part of Prospect 1.5 in New Orleans, The Flood Gallery in Asheville, North Carolina, and The Brick Gallery at the State University of New York at Potsdam.

Tracey Goodman is a New York City-based person who works in the Bronx. She is an Installation artist who makes site-sensitive installations generated through physical activity and material investigation. She has participated in numerous residencies, including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, LMCC Workspace, MacDowell Colony, the AIM program at the Bronx Museum, and Yaddo. Goodman received an NYFA Grant in 2013 and has also had solo exhibitions at LMCC’s space on Governor’s Island, Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, Regina Rex, and Locust Projects in Miami.

Jim Lee has exhibited internationally at Galerie Vidal Cuglietta, Brussels; Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris; Motus Fort, Tokyo; and Galerie Markus Winter, Berlin. Additionally, Lee’s work has been included in exhibitions at Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Lamar Dodd School of Art at University of Georgia, Athens, GA; the Center for the Arts Gallery, Towson, MD; Ratio 3, San Francisco; LAND, Los Angeles; Islip Art Museum, NY; Galerie Lelong, New York; Andrae Kaufmann Gallery, Berlin; IMOCA, Indianapolis; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta; and the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, NY. Jim Lee lives and works in Brooklyn and Claryville, New York, and is represented by Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, NYC.