Metaphor is pleased to open its' 2009 - 2010 season with the exhibition, Slippery When Wet, featuring new paintings and photographs by Suzan Batu, Susan Homer, Nancy Manter Joanne Mattera, Andrew Mockler, Don Muchow, and Peter Schroth. The exhibition will open Friday, September 18 with a reception for the artists from 6-9 pm. The show will run through November 22, 2009.

For humans water has a timeless fascination. Covering 2/3 the surface of our planet, water nourishes, cools, cleans, entertains, and inspires us. And no wonder, as is commonly known, 96% of our bodies is comprised of water, we are literally made of the stuff. In our embryonic state we develop while floating in a sort of inland sea, sporting the gills that suggest our own distant evolution from the enveloping oceans. As a subject for artists, water is an endlessly fluid metaphor presenting an ever-changing surface of reflection, complex color, and translucent mystery. Its' varied nature can be seen as a mirror to our own mercurial moods. Rain can be soothing or pelting, a stream can murmur gently or roar with destructive force. Water is the only element that we know well in all its' different states frozen, liquid, and gas, but it is the liquid state flowing, turbulent, or still that most attracts us. In Slippery When Wet, 5 painters and 2 photographers explore this liquid realm bringing the stillness of art and a variety of sensibilities to bear on the the restless motion of this most common yet still elusive element.

Joanne Mattera's paintings employ flowing layers of near transparent encaustic which build into rich and subtle color experiences that reveal hidden depths. Her group of square paintings from the Silk Road Series shimmer within their carefully crafted, softly textured surfaces like so many small ponds. In her painting Vicolo 52, she carves through these layers giving a hint of her process in a painting that is bright with flickering lights.

Andrew Mockler creates precise and complex abstractions that here seem to capture in one place all of the colors that might be seen over the ocean during a day at the beach from pale mid-day blues and muddied greens to late afternoon violets and pinks. Mockler alternates passages of impasto with transparent glazes calling attention to the paints' physicality while constructing insistent horizontals that lead our eye deep into the matrix of his carefully calibrated and refreshing color studies.

Suzan Batu, from Istanbul, makes paintings that present a sharply; focused and highly contemporary take on the ancient Turkish art of calligraphy. Her compositions evoke water or wisping steam with a crisp, sinuous line that reels and puddles as it moves over and across the canvas. Her use of high keyed pop colors locate her paintings squarely in the present while the eloquent beauty of her line exhibits the timeless flow of dance.

Peter Schroth is a painter with a strong affinity to the traditions of plein-air painting. His group of ocean studies were painted on site near the Atlantic Ocean and retain the immediacy and accurate color made possible by his proximity to his subject. The viewpoint in these paintings hovers just above these turbulent surfaces and seems to have us standing beside the painter in the middle of the rush near the shore. On close viewing the images dissolve into skeins of calligraphic marks and the bravura brushwork of pure painting.

Don Muchow makes intense and quiet photographs that are filled with a rich sense of place. Working in black and white or near monochrome he invests his landscape studies with the carefully edited simplicity of Chinese brush painting. These are elemental landscapes that reward patient viewing with their pared down, subtly balanced composition and elegant tonalities. Suggesting settings for an existentialist film these haunting images draw us into their contemplative moods and provide stages for daydreams.

Nancy Manter is a photographer and also an accomplished painter. Here she uses her camera to document a series of water drawings made by pulling her fingers through dew that has gathered on windowpanes. With a nod to the dominant window configurations of contemporary architecture, her impromptu marks drip and slide across the pane's slick surface, playfully echoing the grid of the outside screens while clearing our view to sunlit exteriors.

Susan Homer makes delicious paintings with lush painterly surfaces that are rich in romanticism. In her new painting for this exhibition, her protagonist, as in so many of her works, is a small bird, here caught in a downpour of juicy grisaille. Homer references pioneering naturalists like Audubon, and the stylized flatness of Japanese prints and the decorative arts, merging such disparate sources into giddily organic paintings that present intriguing avian fables.