Curator and contemporary art impresario Jordan Faye Block (former Director, Gallery Imperato) had a simple goal: assemble the best damn painters in the area, period. The result is an exuberant collection of fourteen younger painters, a powerful statement about the medium’s continuing significance, and a cross-section of trends in painting today.

Trawick Prize winner James Rieck reproduces fashion ad photos, slyly critiquing them and making them even more desirable. DC-based Isabel Manalo bases her lush semi-abstractions on news photos of tragic events, and Rob Jones uses photos as a jumping off point for lyrical narrative paintings. Elizabeth Brady trolls the urban landscape for “found compositions,” and Michael Hurst makes bold, graphic paintings that are snapshots of intimate urban scenes. Erin Cluley uses pattern and surface treatment to suggest the veiled tension between religion and eroticism, and Dawn Gavin points to in-between spaces, by constructing new territories from found maps and paint on paper. Julie Jankowski also considers how we locate ourselves, with dreamy images based on satellite photos, or pictures of cellphone towers. Cara Ober’s quiet, drawing-oriented paintings, and Randi Reiss-McCormack’s robust canvases both use collage to mine an encyclopedia of imagery for ironic effect. Kate Mackinnon’s modish patterns and sensuous surfaces suggest paintings as objects of desire, while Michael Sandstrom uses petroleum products to construct paintings as queasy objects of political contention. Lori Larusso and Ron Smyth’s carefully cropped compositions both celebrate and transcend the objects they depict –cakes and confections in her case, antique pocketwatches in his.