You Are Here/Here You Are or how to get lost in paintings by Steven P. Perkins

Set aside your cellphone GPS or your Google Maps for just a moment. Imagine a cross between old school navigation and a multilingual board game, throw in a few cultural collisions, and you have the playful micro/macro world of You Are Here/Here You Are, a series of mixed media works by Steve Perkins at Recologie’s Vistro Café.

Steve Perkins is a suburban dad from Rye Brook, NY, who cooks and makes art. Along the way he manages to squeeze in travel both foreign and domestic. With an interdisciplinary arts background and a well-stamped passport, Perkins chose anticipation and confusion as themes for this series of gleefully colorful works. Perkins says, “In these maps and scraps,
I see anyone who have ever emigrated and everyone who has bungled speaking a foreign language. This series goes out to my people: perpetual travelers, immigrants, students,
and seekers.”

Camilla Russell of The Bangkok Post wrote that Perkins creates “…a refreshing dialog of contrasting mediums that helps express the artist’s recollection of a foreign country.” New York curator John Everett Daquino describes his work as “…the burst of excitement and creativity unleashed when our perception is flooded with new stimuli.”
Stimuli can come from unexpected places—physical ones, perhaps as familiar as the house you call home—or mental ones, spaces where ideas collide. Even with your feet in one place, your head can be far off in another. In this case, “here” may be Recologie’s Vistro Café, but “here” is also wherever this exhibition sends your mind wandering to.
You Are Here/Here You Are is a transcultural mélange, or a lesson on how to get lost in a painting without really trying. If part of the fun of looking at a painting is discovering something new each time you look at it, these paintings are like winning the lottery.

Recologie is a vibrant destination for anyone who appreciates the inspiring combination of creativity and social responsibility in the New York metropolitan area. Recologie’s Vistro Café offers a deliciously healthy vegetarian/vegan farm-to-table dining experience.

To coincide with the opening of You Are Here/Here You Are, a very special evening of food, music, art and performance, Devour @ Recologie, will be Saturday, February 7th at 7pm. Entertainment, drum circle and a dinner buffet are included in the $40 charge for Devour @ Recologie. Space is limited; reservations highly recommended.

To contact artist Steve Perkins: sp@originalmind.com www.originalmind.com
For more about DEVOUR: www.devourNY.com