EXHIBITIONS
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Artist Reception: Sunday 5/31/15, 3-6pm Workshop/Talk: Saturday & Sunday, 6/13/15 & 6/14/15, 2:30-5:30pm LITTLE HAND, curated by Anne Trauben, features works in painting, drawing and sculpture by Christina Tenaglia, Ravenna Taylor, Mark Brosseau, Fran Shalom, Patricia Satterlee, Michele Hemsoth, Becky Yazdan, Ky Anderson. Tenesh Webber's PHOTOGRAMS are in a SPECIAL PROJECT ROOM. LITTLE HAND: quirky, bashful / bold, naive, odd childlike but sophisticated, organic forms/shapes that are animated and humorous, drawn by hand, hand is significant, takes on a personality, secret narrative. LITTLE HAND features eight artists creating organic and animated abstracted painting, drawing and sculpture, each in their own way. Drawing from a pop sensibility, a lil' humor, kinda awkward and bashful (yet at time same time also bold & confident) with a bit of a quirk factor- these 2d and 3d works seem familiar, yet they are not and allude to a narrative, yet there is no narrative. (Does this unique imagery come from a sort of collective unconscious?) What we've got here is a new language of abstraction that’s being explored, invented and extended. SPECIAL PROJECT ROOM features Tenesh Weber's black & white photograms, drawing-like images from objects the artist makes in the studio out of thread, marker on plexiglas, and paper. Fran Shalom uses shape to contradict itself, to confuse the viewer’s eye and mind. Her use of shape is an uneasy amalgam of cartoonish, somewhat figurative forms and minimalist clarity. Through Christina Tenaglia’s work, she shares her private, internal banter in an engaging conversation with the viewer, leaving us delightfully puzzled and charmed. It’s a pleasure to be privy to these clever inside jokes. Becky Yazdan often begins a painting with a color or shape idea that is related to a memory of something I saw, read about or experienced. Some paintings happen very fast, and others take years to resolve. They often don't make sense to me until well after they are completed. Mark Brosseau’s paintings are spirited narratives, some possessed of an architectural exactness, others full of excited gesture--all of them characterized by animated conversation edging toward declaration. His sense of color is musical, his black brushwork, calligraphic. Decades of painting have led Michele Hemsoth to her concise and arguably elemental vocabulary, yet she has resisted the mandate to subordinate pictorial content to spatial or discursive context. Far from practicing a naïve retro-modernism, Michele makes an historically-informed argument for possibility, even disruptive possibility, in abstraction. Ravenna Taylor says, "while ranging over multiple types of media, my work is consistent in its pictorial abstraction, employing oil paint, watercolor, or collaged torn materials. Color and geometrical form are the essentials of a personal language derived from observation, informed by a fascination with human systems, as found in signage, measures, time pieces, game boards and maps.” In Patricia Satterlee’s paintings, a hard-edged central form is placed on a gray background on top of an intricately layered field of gray almost like a blackboard. The imagery evokes a figure, but it is primarily abstract. The figures are playful, humorous, and alien, but at the same time familiar. Ky Anderson’s visual language is minimal: simple geometrics, gentle washes of color, canvas-spanning arcs, obvious brush strokes. The tactic is effective, alternately making the viewer's eye dive into a landscape's implied distance or, depending on what's in the foreground (or missing from it), read the painting as flat. mostly symmetrical composition of deep-green curvilinear forms and pale-gossamer filaments emerging from a central blue-diamond shape, answers the eye's question with its title. |
