SNOWMASS VILLAGE, CO.- Imaginary Home Exhibition features three young painters, Mala Iqbal, Tom Andersen and Paul Jacobsen, whose work stretches the narrative form into exciting new terrain, exploring psychic poles by harnessing the nostalgic forms and images of their upbringing.

Mala Iqbal paints acid-toned landscapes utilizing the graffiti and hues of her upbringing as a Pakistani American in Staten Island, New York. A native of Glenwood Springs, Colorado, Paul Jacobsen's work features vast images of new age mountain scenes—the lyrical majesty of alpine surroundings infiltrated by the contemporary myths and designs of the men who have populated them. Tom Andersen, a former Anderson Ranch Artist-in-Residence, references the craft forms and architectural imagery of his native upstate New York while creating psychedelic scenes with satirical undertones on reverse painted glass.

Mala Iqbal's curious landscape paintings suggest a mash-up of Caspar David Friedrich and graffiti taggers. Airbrushed highlights and illegible but vaguely alphabetical marks double as dappled light on picturesque ruins. Mala is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design (MFA '98) and has exhibited her work internationally. Her solo exhibitions include: Super Natural, Artists Access Gallery, Snug Harbor, 2001; Where, Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, 2002; Misty, Bellwether Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, 2003; Washed Away, PPOW Gallery, New York, NY, 2008.

Paul Jacobsen spent his childhood in the mountains of Colorado where he lived in a log cabin. At the age of eight he moved with his mother to Brooklyn, New York. At the age of eleven he began attending his first figure drawing classes. At the age of fifteen while living in Glenwood Springs, Colorado he began to study drawing and subsequently painting with the realist painter Daniel Sprick. At the age of nineteen he attended the Istituto Lorenzo De Medici in Florence, Italy where he continued to study painting but left school after only three semesters. In 2000, he was included in a group show curated by Dean Sobel at the Aspen Art Museum. Finally in 2001 he moved back to New York where he showed with Cornell DeWitt Gallery and Yvon Lambert Gallery, New York and worked first for Jeff Koons and then Rudolf Stingel until present. Jacobsen is currently part of the group show, Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape, at Mass MoCA, MA on view thru April 9, 2009 and is now represented by Sara Tecchia Roma New York.

Tom Andersen received his BFA in Painting from Alfred University and his MFA in Painting from Yale University. He currently lives and works in lower Manhattan. He has previously shown his work at Andrew Kreps and Bill Maynes Gallery, where much of his work featured techniques such as airbrushing, stenciling, reverse painting on glass, flocking, and veneering. As New York Times art critic Ken Johnson concludes, Andersen "makes amusing, Pop-surreal parodies of folksy wooden antiques. He uses faux-wood graining, stenciling, sponge painting and other techniques to simulate the look of centuries-old furniture… Upon closer examination, you can distinguish curious anachronisms, like the logo of the Buffalo Bills, a goofy cartoon reindeer or a dancing telephone… In this zany mix of pseudo antiquity and contemporary kitsch, Mr. Andersen spoofs the commodification of nostalgia and the dreamy confusion that popular consciousness makes of history."