EXHIBITIONS
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Artist Reception: Sunday, 2/16/14, 3-6pm DRAWING ROOMS, downtown Jersey City’s art center launched last May after Sandy damage, opens its new season with an exhibition that explores how we look and what we see. JUST LOOKING Art and the Act of Seeing How can an artist convey not only what it is they are seeing, but how they are seeing it? This exhibition of works in drawing, painting and photography explores the concepts of looking and seeing. The emphasis in these artworks is on how the artist sees, over the importance of the object itself. Each of these artists has created bodies of work concerned with the experience of seeing; elements of observation, distortion, reflection, movement and chance are all engaged to not only create their imagery, but to bring the viewer into their experience. Through these works, the viewer can share in the view of the artists and make discoveries of their own. Curated by James Pustorino and Anne Trauben, JUST LOOKING features artists Edward Fausty, Jennifer Krause Chapeau, Agnes de Bethune, Susan Evans Grove, Leona Strassberg Steiner, Robert Preston, Janet Tsakis, Sandra DeSando, James Pustorino. Agnes de Bethune presents her Art in America Painting series– large, complex paintings of multi-layered imagery taken from the artist's photographs of NYC streets. Agnes's works beg the question “Do we actually see what we think we see?” In Edward Fausty's At Home in the Woods photographs, he uses a round-format “fish-eye” lens, to make his encompassing compositions. Ed creates a subtly beautiful blend of color and atmosphere using stones and trees, grassy hills and winter skies, his dog and occasionally parts of himself. James Pustorino's Place in Space Drawings start from photos taken while flying across the US and seek to recreate not only the forms of the land below, but to re-construct the space between the viewer above and the earth below. Janet Tsakis's Metaphor Drawings are are drawings born from photo self-portraits with the addition of fantastically imaginative realities. In these images, the artist looks directly out at the viewer through self-obstructed vision, and is engaged in looking at us, just as much as we are looking at her. Jennifer Krause Chapeau's Road Series Paintings engage the experience of moving through a landscape. The artist sees “ever changing compositions as one travels through space. I am intrigued by the geometry, abstractions and distortions that I see emerge from this experience.” Leona Strassberg Steiner presents her Kefitzat Haderech photographs. From a Kabbalah word meaning a miraculous jumping off point, these intensely dark and brilliantly colored reflective images have multiple allusions to both the inner world of memory and the observed occurrences of shadow and light, obscurity and clarity. Robert Preston's Diana Paintings are taken from online images of Princess Diana in a hotel elevator on the night of her death and seen through the indifferent eye of a security camera. Preston’s straight-forward, simple paint-handling forgoes the details and creates an elegant, yet hauntingly claustrophobic picture of what at the time seemed like mundane details, but in hindsight accounted for the last hours of her life. Sandra DeSando's A + B = See, The Palisades Drawings is a large drawing installation of minutely detailed pencil drawings which translate the rock and shadow of Jersey’s line of cliffs into a mythic, textural world of light and shadow. Susan Evans Grove's Used Cars Photographs have titles that echo the aspirations of car designers (Legend, Eagle, Pathfinder). These steel-backed photos blend the sheen and shape of auto-bodies with the reflected, distorted world they move through. |
