On Thursday, June 24th, a group of artists will open with a medley of exhibitions for the Main Galleries, Sculpture Garden and Carriage House. The gallery will have five solo exhibitions (a sculptor, three painters, and a photographer. The work will be on display through July 18th.
Main Galleries:
Roberto Juarez
Summer Show: Oil Paintings
"Over the years, my paintings have focused on a dialogue of mark making between different layers of paint, paper, and collage. The current group of oil paintings continues this dialogue of layering and contrast with a
generous amount of color after a winter of black and white. The strict geometry of the work is loosening up to a more emotionally based under-painting on a smaller sized canvas which allows for a quicker pace and evolution from painting to painting. Also included will be oil studies on gessoed cardboard. By showing this group of small work my purpose is to exhibit my working process in a gallery situation."
Roberto Juarez
2010
Sculpture Garden:
Ben Butler
Sculpture
"In my work, I attempt to create unnamable objects. I employ rigid systems that dictate the accumulation of many small pieces of wood. The resulting form may be surprising and novel, but the system that generated it is startlingly clear and simple. The focus is on an unseen force at work, on the ambiguous source. I am interested in how the mind understands these forms, in the perceived boundary between simplicity and complexity, between clarity and chaos, between the human and the non-human. I balance these contradictory notions, hoping to render them useless. Ideally, my objects offer a contemplative experience in which language gives way to a physical understanding, and slow looking is rewarded."
Ben Butler
2010
Carriage House:
Second Floor:
Laurel Sucsy
Paintings
Sucsy paints clusters of forms that attempt to describe light. As these fractured moments collect in proximity to each other, a certain kind of visual chaos is unleashed. For Sucsy the process of reining in this infinite dance of relationships is a complex operation, an intuitive process of addition and subtraction. Marks oscillate, describing light and then subvert that description to announce themselves as unassuming paint. In this way, Sucsy's paintings share an affinity with those of Morandi. They embody a quiet relentless pursuit of a perfect tension.
Third Floor:
Pamela Cardwell
Paintings
Ethnography and the study of the ancient arts of Turkey and the Caucasus countries form the vocabulary from which I work. The repetitive, rhythmic elements in these art forms: carpets, vessels, cave architecture and calligraphy can originate in the shape and structure of organic life. Color in these arts comes from the minerals and ores of the earth. Similarly, I begin by painting the shapes and markings on organic forms. I work the whole painting all over, rhythmically building up and scraping off layers over a long period of time.
I try to retain an uncertainty within the framework of my paintings so that I am dealing with something unknown. This means keeping open the possibility of contradictions: slow and fast, smart and stupid, hard and soft, earthy and airy. At some point the painting tells me what to do, forming its own archaeology of shapes and colors. Whatever idea I had in mind for the painting dissolves. I am never sure whether I finish the painting or whether it finishes with me."
Pamela Cardwell
2010
Fourth Floor:
Paul Hamann
Photographs
Self-taught photographer Paul Hamann has been making black and white images since 1968, exploring through various camera formats and printing techniques, the aspects of the natural landscape.
Inspired by the work of the great landscape photographers and armed with a keen interest in the natural mathematics of order/chaos, Hamann's photographs seek to reveal the patterns and sequences in the exterior natural landscape in a way that transcends the subject matter and draws us into a space that surrounds the subject of the image.
Working first with a 35mm camera, Hamann began taking pictures with an eye to the details and abstractions that captured the essence of what he saw. He soon began to explore the greater range and depth of large format negatives-first working with a 5x7 camera and later experimenting with 4x5 and even larger formats. The technical requirements of shooting with the larger format cameras as well as the resulting clarity and definition of the images proved perfectly suited to the detail and precision of Hamann's creative vision.
Susan Sontag said, "The painter constructs, the photographer discloses." This distinction is certainly true of landscape photography. Although Paul Hamann's photographs are essentially disclosing their subject they are also in effect constructed by the almost mathematical imagination with which they are composed, exposed and printed. The images themselves also construct a sort of meta landscape, stringing the tension between what is perceived on the surface of the image and what might be hidden behind, around, beneath or within it-the landscape of the interior.
This tension between what is constructed and what is disclosed is at the core of what Paul Hamann's images are about-revealing the ordered patterns in the chaos, the motion in the perceived stillness, the interior of the exterior.
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