What's In The Box!?

Established in 2008, Last Rites has become a premiere gallery for the Dark Art movement and a haven for artists who prefer to explore the ominous, uncomfortable, and eccentric in their work. Striving to showcase some of the most thought-provoking art in contemporary surrealism, Last Rites creates an atmosphere where the artist can harness limitless expression and the observer can reflect inward, inspired to understand that which resides in us all. The uniqueness of Last Rites, aside from its focus on such work, is the collaborative effort between founding director, Genevive Zacconi and Paul Booth. The fact that they are both accomplished artists as well, allows for a stronger relationship with the exhibited artists, and a more understanding and creative approach to the overall presentation of their work- enhancing the experience for everyone who visits Last Rites Gallery. Last Rites Gallery is located at 511 W 33rd Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues (3 blocks from Penn Station), 3rd floor, New York, NY 10011. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 2pm to 9pm, Sundays 2pm to 6pm. Dave MacDowell’s work deftly combines satire, irreverence, and seething wit. A self-taught artist, MacDowell combines popular cultural references with the magnetism of the “dark hook”, creating unexpected plays on popular culture that inject the familiar with blistering hyperboles. Seeking to unveil the feared and the reviled, while expertly weaving critical commentary with hilarity, MacDowell’s work is an effective combination of complicity and critique. Appropriately in keeping with the movement, MacDowell’s pieces combine a pop surrealist aesthetic with deliberately recognizable popular cultural references gleaned from movies, cartoons, and music, among others, and transforms the known into powerful generational odes to discontent and dystopian irony. His work combines humor with criticism and an acerbic wit, unearthing the nightmares that lurk just beneath the veneer of celebrity culture and the cult of Disney. His work fearlessly taunts the obsequiousness of popular culture, and its iconographies, by creating unexpected inversions and re-combinations that gently tug at its unraveling strings. MacDowell’s technical execution is highly detailed and seductive, contributing to the hallucinatory pleasure and draw of the work. In keeping with the tendency of the genre, the more highly refined the execution, the more effective the irreverence of the content, and this certainly is the case Acrylic paint is fast drying paint containing pigment suspension in acrylic polymer emulsion. Acrylic paints can be diluted with water, but become water-resistant when dry. Depending on how much the paint is diluted (with water) or modified with acrylic gels, media, or pastes, the finished acrylic painting can resemble a watercolor or an oil painting, or have its own unique characteristics not attainable with other media.