Sara Jane Roszak with Bruce Gagnier, Gillian Jagger, Jen P. Harris, Margaret Carlon, Linda Mussmann, and Osamu Kobayashi

	Main Galleries: Sara Jane Roszak New Work "These days I have been thinking about simple, elemental concepts while painting. I think about water and wind, fire and sand. The night ocean. The reflection of a winter sunset on bare trees. Sea foam and tidal pools. The transitory nature of things ephemeral. The accidental drowning of a childhood friend, an experienced lobsterman entangled in his ropes off the coast of Rockport, Ma. The war in the Afghanistan desert. How these images resonate with my imagination and bring forward the forms of my emotional life are the content of these works." Sara Jane Roszak 2011 Sculpture Garden Bruce Gagnier The sculpture by Bruce Gagnier will be extended for an additional month in the garden and Carriage House, in conjunction with Lori Bookstein Fine Art. There will be small bronzes added to this exhibition. Bruce Gagnier was born in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 1941. He studied art history at Williams College (1959-1963) and went on to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in the summer of 1963 and Columbia University (1963-1967), where he studied under Nicholas Carone, Peter Agostini and John Heliker. "I model figures in clay. These five words isolate elements of my work: myself, the figure, the modeling of it, the clay. Modeling is historical, consistent in technique, painterly, and opposed in its purest practice to carving. Clay can be molded to another identity, made into an illusion through light. The figure has a history of being a form of content, a container for a subject. Sometimes, for me, it seems that its strictly carnal self has taken over and that its body has become the meaning. This difference can become a fulcrum between the then and now. Most often, in my work, I look to the figure as a possible container which embodies a search for a somebody, a person who as another self represents something about all of us; of the human in the environment affected by experience, a record of desire and disappointment, the longing for an ideal and the recognition of compromise. The contents merge to the surface, rearranging the anatomy. I participate in this by trial and error. But these bodies are not me, they are other people and because of that, they are more interesting. The work begins in clay, on a wire armature; I begin close to the wire, the interior. I intervene, gauging the person of the figure along the way. I put myself in the work from the inside out. I go back though, cutting in, to inspect and renew the inner life. One also shifts forms, previously defined, in a collage-like way, to rearrange the combinations and thereby adjust the personality of the (now) other person. It becomes very much a spatial game at this point. Marks, elements of work, etc, are left over, not intended as such and remain only as part of the imperfection at helping a subject find itself in the person; of arriving at a smooth and seamless arrangement to outer space. I give them a name. The inner life and history of this being in reality never completes itself but the work ends when an agreement is made between us that experience for the time being has run its course." Bruce Gagnier 2011 Elevator Shaft Installation Gillian Jagger Reveal, The installation by Gillian Jagger is extended a second month and closes the Carriage House for the season. "I became aware of the reflection of my body in a tree in 1983. It had a tilt in its torso just like mine. In time and scale it differed. But I felt deeply connected. Because the tree was very large and relatively still I could read it by a long, long stare. Because it had occurred again and again in similar form through these centuries and appears just now in my back field I can count on the fact of its existence. This installation came about from the combination of seeing John Davis' amazing horse/carriage elevator shaft and a wondrous enormous hunk of a tree that I have kept for 5 years. By hanging the 15 ft tree between three floors, it can be seen by looking up, and, it will be seen from three levels if one climbs the stairs to the floors above. I have cut the tree vertically into five parts. These strips are similar to the basic segmented construction of all trees which can be seen most clearly when they are in early growth, or when struck by lightning, or in late decay. This tree was in none of those states when it was taken down in full health. It was too tall. It threatened a house. It was cut down. The five vertical parts I have hung slightly apart . I want to see inside this tree. I want it to be transparent to me, despite its solidity. I want to experience the precariousness of its existence as I experience its absolute undefeatability. I want to know it is itself." Gillian Jagger 2011 Second Floor Carriage House Jen P. Harris Light Weight "Light Weight is a collection of figurative works on paper, and one large-scale oil painting. The figures represented seem to either wrestle with or defy gravity and mass. This work reflects my interest in the metaphoric potential of lightness and weight, and the open-ended, reflective quality of the genderless body. The works on paper are black and white and were made by layering ink washes on stretched paper. These pieces have the presence and "weight" of paintings despite the fact that they are actually paper. The process of making them involved an ongoing engagement with control, spontaneity and chance. The majority of the pieces are titled Sleep. These pieces feature images of me asleep, rotated from a horizontal to a vertical orientation, evoking the passages of dreams and the expansion and contraction of time and space. The works investigate a number of interwoven themes: the solitary figure as a traveler through both hard (outside) and soft (inner) space; androgyny as an emblem of psychological and biological changeability and uncertainty; weight/solidity and weightlessness/transparency and their associations with responsibility and freedom; and a confusion of figure/ground and up/down that evokes painterly tropes and functions as the basis of perceptual disorientation and reintegration." Jen P. Harris 2011 Second Floor Carriage House Meg Carlon "These works stem from an Edward Hicks "peaceable kingdom" notion, set in the zoological realm. The paintings attempt to evoke a sense of microcosmic community where animated forms flow in and out of the picture plane. Aggregations of these forms comprise hidden worlds that bustle with swimmers, floaters, gliders, drifters, colliders, hunters, jokers, sleepers and other creatures at large." Meg Carlon 2011 Third Floor Carriage House Linda Mussmann Plaster Pieces These days, Linda Mussmann is thinking about icons: the house, the girl, the tree and the cat. The materials she uses include inner tubing, wire, string, washers, pins, tacks, and plaster. These pieces continue her fascination with images that haunt, puzzle, tell stories or not - silhouettes and souvenirs. She draws inspiration from her childhood experiences on the farm in Indiana where she spent endless hours in the garage of her father playing with and constructing things from all sorts of scrap materials. She also draws on ideas that took shape during her exploration of the house basement where her mother kept remnants and rubble that survived the tornado of 1948 - treasures from 19th century ancestors including buttons, bows, match books, and scrap books. Linda's rich and creative childhood continues to supply her with an inexhaustible inventory of images that she translates into all kinds of visual art including, but not limited to, sculpture, drawings, multi-media pieces, and murals. Fourth Floor Carriage House Osamu Kobayashi "The process of painting is a power struggle. I take my painting one way; it wants to go somewhere else. And when it goes somewhere else; I drag it in another direction. In the end, the painting usually wins. My recent work is reductive in form, compositionally centered, and employs a spontaneous and intuitive array of colors, shapes, and textures. Using these elements I create visual dualities: chance vs. control, organic vs. geometric, warm vs. cool, large vs. small, etc. Like a good story, the elements that comprise each work push and pull off of each other, creating a unified structure that stays contained--but never becomes subdued--within its own parameters. The goal is to create work with a sensation similar to that of a clear thought: the idea has its bases covered; there's no room for argument. In reality, however, these paintings can never be clear thoughts. They are much more open than that. They are more of a confrontation: between what I desire to know and what I can never know entirely." Osamu Kobayashi 2011