MYSTERIANS
Michael Kukla
Jackie Mock
Suzanne Goldenberg
MYSTERIANS will be on view from Saturday, December 17, 2016 to Sunday January 29, 2017 at PROTO Gallery’s main exhibition space at 66 Willow Ave. in the R. Neumann and Co. leather factory in Hoboken, NJ. MYSTERIANS is a further exploration of work by presented by PROTO for the Sluice_ Exchange Rates Expo in Brooklyn, NY at The Buggy Factory in October of this year.
Jackie Mock creates humorous sculptural narratives, simultaneously sincere and contrived, that elaborate on the small thoughts and gestures of everyday life. They are personal curios of her own making, which highlight the artist’s travels and social interactions, solidified as skillfully-crafted chests and boxes, labelled and cataloged with a 19th-century quirky absurdity. Jackie Mock holds a BFA from Parsons The New School for Design and has exhibited her work recently at Denny Gallery, Matteawan Gallery, PROTO Gallery, as well as the Portal and SPRING/BREAK art fairs. She is currently converting a vintage ice cream shop storefront into a curio shop that will blend her sculpture and social-practice pursuits.
Suzanne Goldenberg is a Brooklyn-based sculptor and interdisciplinary artist who transforms recognizable scavenged materials into non-narrative sculptural objects and installations. The work is both free-verse and formal; the source objects often retaining their real-or-imagined histories and identities as they are assembled into improvised compositions. She has widely exhibited her work in the New York region and abroad, including solo and group exhibitions at Gallery Molly Krom, CANADA Gallery, Long Island Museum, PROTO Gallery, and many others. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from McGill University and a Master of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She is currently a fellow in the Chashama studio program.
Michael Kukla received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Castleton University and a Masters in Sculpture from the Hochschule der Künste (now Universität der Künste Berlin, UdK) in Berlin, Germany, and now lives and works in New York City. His work invites the viewer to consider organic processes in the context of architectonic structures. In contrast to the hard-edged geometry typical of our built environment, he interjects cavities and openings that suggest some of nature’s more capricious habits. Kukla has exhibited his work in Europe, South America and the United States and is represented by DM Contemporary in New York City.
