GARDENfresh is pleased to present David Lowman, Aaron Nather and Michael Pajon three artists whose otherworldly spirit images tread a winding path through torment and joy, despair and love, the cherished and the abject.

David Lowman's recent work highlights perceived natures of god and self.  “God’s First Blowjob” served as the gateway to the series, as did prevailing themes of grappling with ultimate power, personal dualities, the life force of sexuality, and humanized imagery of god.  By placing gods or god-like creations in incongruous or earthly settings, he portrays the often conflicting relationship between divine power and individual understanding. David Lowman hails from Seattle, WA. Soot Covered Reverie marks his return to art making after a four year absence making punk rock with his band the Hopscotch Boys. Previous shows include Happiness at GARDENfresh and Division at Ideotech both in Chicago.

Aaron Nather creates his otherworldly characters and their surreal environments late at night in his Pasadena studio, where radioactive paint rains from tiny clouds floating overhead and octopus tentacles tickle his toes through the floorboards. The current work shows an awkward beauty lurking beneath the surface of beings who struggle with elemental forces in their dreams and nightmares. Their faces express the bittersweet wonder of being alive and wide-awake in a savage, alien, and sadly beautiful universe. Aaron Nather is an artist based in Pasadena, CA upcoming shows include Art Dorks Collective curated by Brendan Danielson at Thinkspace Gallery in LA and Don’t Wake Daddy II, Curated by Heiko Müller at Feinkunst Krüger, in Hamburg. Nather’s work has been featured in Juxtapoz, Belio Magazine (Madrid) and DPI (Taiwan).

Michael Pajon’s work is rooted firmly in the real world. Pajon deploys a range of images from The Standard American collages that merely hint at the dark side of glossy Americana to the series of Narrative Works. Rural mythic landscapes that display a humanity deprived of inhibition, lawless and chaotic. In these scenes, mobs of frightened angry people mete out violence on solitary victims alone in the woods. These works of fracture are not eased by his Animal Menagerie series where portraits usually reserved for the great and good are supplanted by hogs and crows. Michael Pajon, lives and works in Chicago, IL, recent exhibitions include group shows at Ann Nathan Gallery in Chicago, La Luz De Jesus in LA and Adam Baumgold Gallery in NYC. Pajon also had a booth at the Artist Project during Art Chicago.

Project Space: PST “Osculum Infame.”
The centerpiece of “Osculum Infame” are a series of “blood contracts.” As an installation, “Osculum Infame” invites questions as to the darker mechanics of the creative imagination, its role in the achievement of “justified true belief,” and the necessity of duplicity for self-knowledge. It’s in these subjects that we find the answer to the age-old question: “On what do our lives depend?” - PST is an acronym for post/send/tell, the most common forms of communication in massively multiplayer online gaming environments. PST’s embodied identity is encoded in the DNA sequences of the blood-written language of the contracts themselves. PST makes art of and about role-playing and video games. For more details about PST installation "Osculum Infame" click this link.