Neon Moon

Dan Attoe, Alison Blickle, Caitlin Cherry, Zbiok Czajkowski, Ben Godward, Alexis Mata, Nathan Ritterpusch, Michael Staniak, Eric Yahnker, Jon Young The Hole presents Neon Moon, a group exhibition staged as a nocturnal environment of charged color, artificial light and heightened atmosphere. We wanted to give Bowery a taste of key works from our Los Angeles program as that location fades into memory. Bringing together painting, neon, and sculpture, the show explores how images behave after dark when things take a turn towards the cinematic and melancholy. The exhibition takes its title from the 1992 Brooks & Dunn song “Neon Moon,” a meditation on loneliness and dive bar broken dreams under a neon sign. That tonal register carries through the works on view, where light is something felt, absorbed and held onto. Our goal is a distilled mood: night scenes, neon color, and a persistent tension between spectacle and solitude as we reflect on our time out West and the road ahead. Caitlin Cherry’s massive installation anchors the exhibition. Four canvases, stretched into a circular metal frame and mounted above eye level, form a continuous loop of Black pop cultural figures—femme entertainers and muses rendered in saturated color. The structure recalls a zoetrope, creating a sense of motion and surround. Eric Yahnker exhibits two panoramic drawings from his Lost Angeles suite of works that show a gorgeous L.A. skyline at night with a cowboy astride a Jeff Koons Balloon Dog. Dan Attoe’s two neons from his LA show light up our darkened galleries and draw you to their humming glow. They’ve attracted a Nathan Ritterspusch vintage cinematic cowboy and a “maenad of the Hollywood Hills” looking at her phone from Alison Blickle. They make the metal sheets of Caitlin shimmer and activate the upholstered iridescence of the Jon Young piece. A line of tiny club kid monsters by Zbiok Czajkowski lurk across the room. Michael Staniak exhibits painted bronzes that look like literal moon rocks, sprayed and dusty with neon, fragments from a different reality. A black resin flower by Ben Godward and two oil paintings of psychedelic cactus landscapes by Alexis Mata round out the group and if you’re picking up Western vibes, dark neon and lunar surfaces, that is indeed what we are putting down. Seeing these works here in New York in a new setting for a new and larger audience just might be buoyant enough to lift our melancholy mood.