Color Coded: Opening First Friday, March 6

In the upcoming March exhibition, ‘Color Coded’, Grizzly Grizzly presents a group exhibition of artists who use color as a framework for understanding everything from emotions to food to finances. Through drawing, video, performance, social practice, and text-based interventions, the works in ‘Color Coded’ employ this age-old tool of bureaucracy and efficiency for a different kind of communication. Michelle Levy and Sharilyn Neidhardt, two Brooklyn-based artists, take inspiration from self-help gurus and fortune-tellers, using color to find meaning in our personal lives and relationships. DL Alvarez creates highly detailed paint by number drawings, in which the numbers correspond to emotions rather than colors. Massachusetts-based artist, Danica Phelps uses color to categorize and find order in her spending habits, creating a visual document of the expenses and income of a working artist. New York-based Tattfoo Tan’s community-based projects create a visual system inspired by the colors of fruits and vegetables. Philadelphia artist, Ruth Scott Blackson and Detroit artist, Corrie Baldauf, use color to create a new understandings of the lives and texts of Edgar Allen Poe and David Foster Wallace. D-L Alvarez lives and works in Oakland, CA. He has had participated in exhibitions at the Drawing Center, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Participant Inc., New York; Schwules Museum, Berlin; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He has also created performative installations for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Highways, Los Angeles; and The Lab, San Francisco. Corrie Baldauf is a 2011 Kresge fellow. She received her MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan and her BFA at Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri. Her artwork has been internationally exhibited and is included in major collections such as Daimler Financial Services, Farmington Hills, Michigan; and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. She is a professor of art, theory and practice at Eastern Michigan University. Ruth Scott Blackson studied at Norwich University of the Arts, The University of Sunderland, and Goldsmiths College, London. She obtained two English Arts Council awards for projects, which culminated in residencies and exhibitions hosted in Russia and France. Her work has recently been selected for the 2015 exhibition series at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. Michelle Levy is an artist and arts organizer based in New York City. Levy’s artistic practices consists of performance-lectures, visuals and text that muddle the distinction between fiction and reality. She has received mentions in Flavorpill, The Gothamist, Hyperallergic, LAist,The Sundance Channel Blog and others. Levy has performed at venues including Glasshouse Gallery, Gowanus Studio Space, Secret Project Robot, Spectacle Theater, in Brooklyn; Flux Factory in Queens; and Machine Project in Los Angeles. Sharilyn Neidhardt is a Brooklyn artist working in painting, printmaking, and photography. Ms Neidhardt draws on her training as a photojournalist and as a paintmaker to create images describing celebrity, human conflict, urban alienation, mythology, and passion. She is the creator of the Human Scale Chess Game and toured with her band Weapons of Mass Destruction in 2004. Danica Phelps received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has won numerous awards and grants including Rema Hort Mann emerging artist grant, New York Foundation for the Arts: Individual Artists Grant, and the John Jones Art Prize, Zoo Art Fair, London. Her work is in numerous international collections including the Yale Art Museum Collection, Daimler Art Collection, Berlin, Germany, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Phelps lives in Colrain, MA, and works in Colrain and Brooklyn. Tattfoo Tan is an artist who collaborates with the public on issues relating to ecology, sustainability and healthy living. His work is project-based, ephemeral and educational in nature. He resides in Staten Island with his hens, named S.O.S.5p.m. Ruth Scott Blackson, Michelle Levy, Sharilyn Neidhardt, and Tattfoo Tan will be in attendance during the opening reception from 6–10PM. Sharilyn Neidhardt will be offering visitors personal readings from her ‘Chromatic Bible’ cards during the opening reception. For further inquiries, or to arrange an interview with the artists at another time, please contact Talia Greene at talia@taliagreene.com.