Opening Reception on Saturday, January 7, 2012, 5-7 pm.
Performance to follow at City Garage Theater at Track 16 Gallery at 8 pm.

ROBERT BERMAN GALLERY is pleased to present HOME.SWEET.HOME: a collaborative exhibition of images by artist/photographer Gerald Slota with captioning by celebrated playwright/filmmaker Neil LaBute.

The exhibition first debuted in New York City in the fall of 2010 at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery and is the result of an email correspondence between Slota and LaBute from 2008-2010, initially born as a greeting card series that developed into an eighteen text-and-image photographic print narrative of innocuous, suburban domesticity gone subtly and deeply awry.

At the beginnings of their email pen-pal-ship, LaBute suggested investigating a “family affair confessional” as a central theme and soon after offered this evocative thought: “the baby stopped crying hours ago. i’m afraid to go upstairs and check it.”

Thus began a rich back-and-forth that produced a darkly familiar world inhabited with twisted characters branded with each artists’ unique point of view. Slota’s layered, collaged imagery blurs and then brings into focus the disturbing consequence of LaBute’s seemingly innocent dialogue with a latent one-two punch. The final outcome as coined by Fluence Magazine is “inescapably provocative and decidedly memorable.”

HOME.SWEET.HOME opens January 7th in conjunction with City Garage Theater’s west coast premiere of LaBute’s 1980s play Filthy Talk For Troubled Times subtitled “scenes of intolerance” at Track 16 Gallery also in Bergamot Station Arts Center. Originally set in a topless bar, City Garage, working with LaBute, is presenting the play in the entirely new setting of a high-end art gallery opening. Tickets and more information available at www.citygarage.org.

Neil LaBute is a writer/director for theater, film, and television, and, on occasion, writes short stories and non-fiction. His newest play, IN A FOREST, DARK AND DEEP made its debut in London in March of 2011 and his play REASONS TO BE PRETTY is currently playing at the Almeida Theater in London.

Gerald Slota has been widely exhibited across the US and abroad. His work is included in collections at the LA County Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of Art. His images have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, BOMB, Blindspot, ARTNEWS, and Art in America.