John Davis Gallery

2011-12-01T13:41:00.004-05:00

Archibald (Age 9) sends Holiday Greetings.

We both wish you a very special New Year.

- John

Victoria Palermo, RAUM

2011-11-13T13:19:00.003-05:00

I am one of those people who occasionally succumbs to "Stendhal's Syndrome" -that is I swoon, literally experience vertigo, in front of a work of art... at times in front of a painting, especially a Rothko. In this work, I try to wedge myself into that abstract paint space, make it three-dimensional, walk around in it, and see through to the other side.

The layers of translucent colors here are recombinant, varying with the viewer's vantage point. That means you, the viewer, may participate in the work, mixing color and determining composition through your position outside the construction. I acknowledge the visual associations with the machined aesthetic and geometrical shapes of the Bauhaus and De Stilj, but form rejects function in my pieces. Their architectonic ambition is compromised by gravity--they are made of rubber, and closer inspection reveals their handmade origins. The works defy practicality--more like miniature Victorian follies in spirit perhaps--inviting a sense of fantasy to imagine dwelling inside.

Victoria Palermo
2011

"Victoria Palermo's diminutive architectural structures made of silicone rubber engage the senses and the intellect. Constructions that fuse a modernist appearance and ideology with an aesthetic of play found in their small size, bright colors, and illogical spaces, the work engenders a sense of pure pleasure and fun."

--Katie Hauser
Associate Professor, Art History
Skidmore College

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

2011-10-13T13:22:00.000-05:00

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

La Wilson Sept/Oct with Drew Goerlitz, Gillian Jagger, Margrit Lewczuk, Craig Olson and Liv Aanrud

2011-09-23T10:48:00.010-05:00

Main Galleries:

La Wilson
Constructions: New Work

John Davis began showing the work of La Wilson in 1983 in Akron, Ohio and continued with Ms. Wilson when his gallery moved to New York City. Including the 2004 retrospective that Mr. Davis curated, La Wilson Altered Objects (at the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art, Ursinus College), this upcoming show will be the 13th exhibition of Ms. Wilson's work that the artist and dealer have presented together. It will also mark Ms. Wilson's sixth exhibition in Hudson, New York, (the first, having been recognized and reviewed in The New York Times). She visits Hudson, New York from Hudson, Ohio where she lives and works and she has shown extensively in the mid-west and New York City.

Ms. Wilson was given a retrospective of her work at The Akron Art Museum in 1986/1987 titled La Wilson Metaphorical Objects. Kathleen Monaghan (Director) initiated and selected work and Barbara Tannenbaum (Chief Curator and Head of Public Programs) facilitated the installation and supervised the production of the brochure with the late Ellen H. Johnson's contribution of an Interview with La and Ms. Monaghan contributing the introduction. In 1992 Tom Hinson, curator of Contemporary Art at the Cleveland Museum, chose a group of La's works to exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 1993, the artist received the top award for sculpture in the Cleveland Museum of Art May Show. It was in this same year that La was awarded the prestigious "Cleveland Arts Prize in Visual Arts" for sculpture. In 2004 the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College (Collegeville, Pennsylvania) mounted a retrospective of her work, titled La Wilson Altered Objects with catalogue essay by Edward M. Gomez, curated by John Davis.

In the current body of work, La Wilson continues to confound those who have watched her development as an artist over the years with her ability to defy the material and transform everyday objects into visual delights that convey profound meaning and sustenance. In her words, "I try to steer clear of objects that are too loaded with meaning; but then, when I think about it, everything I use is loaded - snakes, pencils, firecrackers, matches, hair pins. What I try to do is free myself from the conscious associations so that the unconscious ones can take over. I am much more interested in what I don't know than what I do know."

Drew Goerlitz

"Containment, concealment, and privacy have been recurring themes in my work. My interpretation of reliquary is not to hold a sacred object or relic, but to engage the viewer with the form and tension of the unknown interior. The adornment of these objects relates to architectural details and the idea of facade. Facade is what we are presented with upon first appearance, whether speaking of people or architecture, and it isn't until we look inside that we discover the true structure.

This body of work developed from a series I began while in residence in Switzerland. During my time spent there I was drawn to the architecture and also to Swiss social and political ideals. All of these observations have found their way into this series of sculpture. The Reliquary series is a new body of work that has many influences both reoccurring and new. During my stay in Switzerland I had limited time, which had me adjust my process in the studio. It forced me to adopt a very candid approach, and react to the sculpture during the process of making. The continuation of the series over the last year has seen an increase in scale and a subtle refinement in the elements of composition. Being back in my studio has afforded me more time to reflect on the form and content of these larger sculptures."

Drew Goerlitz
2011

Gillian Jagger
Reveal,

"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

Gillian Jagger
Drawings

"Drawing for me has always been the place I go to, to begin again. I am not conditioned by the piece I have just completed. I am not controlled by my latest angle of vision. The drawing experience is the one place where I feel close to complete freedom in my life. When drawing we can redefine where we put our gaze. Each one of us are lighthouses of a sort lighting up different areas in the dark. When we are students in art school and seen as changing our vision month to month, we are often seen as being unfocused. But looking back I also see that change has always been the main measure of the breadth of our creativity and flexibility. Lately my own drawings took me to a more vulnerable personal place than I was used too. I went there because, when drawing, I could clearly feel the necessity of doing it that particular way despite the conditioning of what could be a disapproving art world that surrounds us all. A world that right now does not think much of vulnerability. I guess drawing is a place where we can redefine ourselves over and over again."

Gillian Jagger, 2011

Margrit Lewczuk

Lewczuk's drawings offer a glimpse into how the paintings are made. Her colors are vibrant and pulsating, ranging from florescent greens to striking blues, luscious hot reds and fuchsia's with a sprinkle of rich earthly tones. Her travels to exotic lands such as Timbuktu, Bamako, Tunisia, Mexico, Mali & Dogon in West Africa influence the rhythms, colors and mark making in her drawings and paintings. The surroundings of rich textiles, pottery, ruins, ancient carvings all seep into the work; her tribal motifs are painted freehand onto large white linens in lush colors resulting in geometric patterns that twist and bend the planes of space. Roberta Smith says, "Her interlacing, overlapping forms, for the most part organized in grids and other quadrilateral arrangements, balance with distinctive awkwardness between organic and geometric, their boisterous scale held in check by taut layering. The resulting flatness is nearly concave; the shapes seem carved, or maybe nailed down, like abstract animal skins. The resulting tension has a pulsating energy that is visionary..."

Margrit Lewczuk, 2011

Craig Olson
New Hesitation Blues

"I got my hesitation feet in my hesitation shoes,

Believe to my soul I got the Hesitation Blues.

This exhibition is an attempt to address some of the more obscured aspects of my studio over the past several years (and on to the present day). It was, and is, obscurity born of circumstance, a place where necessity and imagination played themselves out into something beyond my control. Most of the paintings did start out with a prevailing idea, or ideal, which quickly dissolved before my eyes and lead to the works you now see.

The aim is not to make any single statement, or to fit the work into neatly defined genres or categories. Many traditions were followed, some going back hundreds of years, while others were conjured in a moment's notice. It's all mashed together: landscape and figuration next to pattern and shape, mysterious invocations next to alphabetic text. Through it all, though, is the desire to follow where the work leads me. And so I'm left asking, like the voice of old Sam Collins crackling through the atmosphere:

Tell me, how long do I have to wait?
Can I get you now, or must I hesitate?"

Craig Olson, 2011

Liv Aanrud

"I grew up on a small farm in the Midwest. There is a quiet tempo there that fundamentally shapes how I understand life. This is where my mind's eye lingers when I begin to paint, when I take a piece of the known world and follow it into uncertainty.

A form emerges underneath the painted surface in a tug of war where size often yields to intent. I like modest might, self conscious usurpations, when a painting captures the moment right before authority is asserted. In these curious events I search for something familiar, and sincere, diffident but determined. These are pictures of the natural, or rather, how the natural might be created."

Liv Aanrud, 2011

Peter McCaffrey, with Ben Butler, Susan Chrysler White, Fran O'Neill, Christopher Walsh, Kristin Locashio and Jenny Snider

2011-08-19T10:13:00.019-05:00

Peter McCaffrey
m a r k i n g s

"A picture of the soul was a crudely drawn circle of chalk on the blackboard in my first year of parochial school. Any transgressions against God were depicted as small strokes marking the surface. A venial sin, like fibbing, was a small peck. Something more serious like murder, a mortal sin, would fill in the circle with a swirl of lines that would completely blacken the surface. I found the little cartoons of animals that my Father drew were much more interesting. They were something to keep, and I longed to imitate the way they were made. My crayon drawings of circus animals had more soul than that chalk circle.

Animals and nature have been the focus of my work. Animals seem gifted with senses that have never been lost, or guided by voices we will never hear. One drifts along with the noise of the herd unconsciously keeping up and not bumping into things. Painting pulls me out of the lockstep by concentrating my attention on the things I would pass blindly by. Spending some time in the country has brought me in closer contact with the subjects I find most interesting. Teaching an undergraduate class of painting animals at the zoo has helped me articulate the groundwork with which I need to start. The drawing is an integral part of the work. Gold leaf has the effect of "canonizing" the subject.

"They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth." (Henry Beston)"

Peter McCaffrey
2011

Sculpture Garden
Ben Butler
On Making

"Everything has a source. When the order of things eludes us, we often mistake complexity for chaos, and therefore miss the wonderful sources of things.

All things, under close enough observation, will reveal the complete stories of their making. My objects simply reveal themselves much more readily than most, and therefore hope to teach us something about looking.

The spirit of science, of discovery and illumination, is central to my art. Ultimately, everything made is first found.

Yet, for both art and science, successful work must allow others not to simply rediscover what you have discovered, but to make, through the work, their own discoveries. The work then remains alive."

Ben Butler

2011

Elevator Shaft Installation
Susan Chrysler White
Yin & Yang,
Kachina (detail) 2010, acrylic and enamel on plexiglass, 14' x 8'

"My Kachinas are two of the first sculptural hanging pieces I have completed that are not site-specific commissioned installations. In these three dimensional pieces I have been researching how my paintings, in my aesthetic vocabulary of excess, have a strong connection with historical and contemporary manifestations of the chandelier. The exploration of light, space, transparency and calligraphic drawing all find a home in these elongated quasi-figural forms. Flat painted plexiglass pieces hang radially, suspended from a central rod, forming dense dimensional environments in which the viewer is both allowed to move around and, in the case of the hanging in the John Davis Carriage House Gallery, will be allowed to view from above and below on different floor levels."

Susan Chrysler White

2011

Second Floor Carriage House
Christopher Walsh
Paintings

"My oil paintings explore a territory that suggests fractal structures, circuit boards and urban landscape. The underlying theme in my art is an exploration of how consciousness and identity are shaped by the rhythms of our everyday experience. On a daily basis, the city is a vocabulary of source material: traffic lights, overpasses, billboards, spires, windows, facades and grids, combine to create a large collage. A collage that has contradictions to it. It has a structural, man-made element, but it's unplanned. There are layers of both growth and decay. For example, I might find myself at the same stoplight every day, at a certain time, with a certain light, and I can't help but compose a picture that's subconsciously stored in my memory of that.

At the same time, this process of identifying with my environment breaks down in the studio into a formal vocabulary that is intentionally ambiguous and fragmentary. There's something neurological about my response to this vocabulary during the process of painting. I search for triggers and synapses, as I struggle to define an image. My visual memory of the city is confronted by an approach to materials that is improvisational and painterly.

With line, fragments of form and blocks of color I build compositions that contain a precarious balance of light and dark, architecture and space, gesture and geometry. Improvising off a grid or axis, I see the painting surface as an arena for a dialogue between thought and action, impulse and intent.

The images that emerge are colorful, rhythmic, and tactile."

Christopher Walsh
2011

Second Floor Carriage House

Fran O'Neill

"The de-stabilizing of symmetry, patterns and the expected within a simple or complex composition is what I strive to find and do. It is the 'rupture' within the presumed regularity of a repetitious field that I explore. I deliberately look for these moments to build upon through painting and drawing; layering and exploring color, through dramatic or subtle shifts."

Fran O'Neill
2011

Third Floor Carriage House
Kristin Locashio
Paintings

"I will be showing new vehicles, made expressly for the unusual interior space in the Carriage House at the John Davis Galler"In these new paintings I utilize a range of tools and methods to broaden and vary the expressive possibilities of paint. Working intuitively I develop structure through the painting process, allowing the composition to materialize and dematerialize in an effort to achieve a wholeness in the painting. Improvisation with paint and its' liquid materiality is the driving force behind these works, the result being a lasting visual reminder of the experience of making."

Kristin Locashio
2011

Fourth Floor Carriage House
Jenny Snider

Made of tinted and painted paper mache, they will hang on walls and stand on the floor, like the wooden vehicles exhibited in 2002 at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. In both color and surface, paper mache echoes the concrete walls of the carriage house."

Jenny Snider
2011

Jon Isherwood with Bruce Gagnier, Dionisio Cortes & Leticia Ortega Cortes, Susan Scott, Michael Volonakis, and Joyce Robins

2011-07-09T09:26:00.006-05:00

June 23rd through July 17th, 2011

Main Galleries:
Jon Isherwood
Vested Interests

Isherwood's new sculptures and drawings represent the further development of his ongoing dialogue with the associative sensations of form and surface. Carving stone such as rosa aurora marble, limestone, and black granite, Isherwood gives his sculpture a sensuality and softness that belie the unyielding nature of the material. Carved lines contour the surfaces to emphasize the form, create the illusion of expansiveness and provoke associations to patterning, layering and veiled imagery. His sculptures are a result of a unique process allowing him to attain an uncompromised precision in the carving of the incised surfaces, which play with and against the swelling, fleshy, soft and yet substantial character of his organic forms. Isherwood's drawings further illustrate and compliment the tension between image, shape and skin that characterizes his carvings.

Isherwood's work has been widely exhibited in public museums and private galleries around the US, Canada, and Europe. He is the recipient of a Jerome Foundation Fellowship, a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of New York at Plattsburgh. His sculpture has recently been exhibited at The Today Museum, Beijing, China; The Museum at Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, NJ; and in Belgrave Square, London, UK. He has had more than 20 solo exhibitions, including Reeves Contemporary in NYC, John Davis Gallery in NYC; Maiden Lane Exhibition Space in NYC; the C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore; Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park and Museum in Hamilton, OH; and the Sculpture Court in Southampton, NY. He has been featured in many group exhibitions, including the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, Italy; The McNay Museum, San Antonio, TX; The Derby City Museum, Derby, UK; and Kunsthalle, Manheim, Germany. His work can be found in more than 22 public collections. Isherwood's work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, ArtNews, The Washington Post, The New York Sun, Sculpture Magazine, Partisan Reviews, The Philadelphia Enquirer, and in The Times and The Guardian, UK. He has made personal appearances on shows featuring his work, including WAMC Public Radio and The Culture Show, BBC Television, UK. He has lectured at numerous colleges and universities in the U.S. and Europe.

Bruce Gagnier
Sculpture Garden

The gallery is very pleased to present, in conjunction with Lori Bookstein Fine Art, the sculpture of Bruce Gagnier.

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
Leticia Ortega + Dionisio Cortes
35,000 drops,
2011, Site-specific drawing/installation for John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY
72"W x 89"D x 33"H
Paper, graphite, acrylic paint, polymer resin

In response to the prevailing and intensified violence in Mexico, which has claimed more than 35,000 lives over the past few years, Ms. Ortega and Mr. Cortes have created 35,000 drops a three-story high, drawing/installation.

On his way from the Philippines to bury his son Juanelo, tortured and killed this past March 28th, Mexican poet Javier Sicilia wrote the following poem:

El mundo ya no es digno de la palabra
Nos la ahogaron adentro
Como te asfixiaron
Como te desgarraron a ti los pulmones
Y el dolor no se me aparta
Solo queda un mundo
Por el silencio de los justos
Solo por tu silencio y por mi silencio, Juanelo.
Es mi ultimo poema, no puedo escribir mas poesia... la poesia ya no existe en mi.
Javier Sicilia, Morelos, Mexico April 2, 2010

The world is not longer worthy of the word
They suffocated it inside us
As they asphyxiated you
As they torn your lungs apart
And pain does not depart me
Only one world is left
For the silence of the just
Only for your silence and for my silence, Juanelo.

This is my last poem, I cannot write poetry any
more... poetry no longer exists in me.
Javier Sicilia, Morelos, Mexico April 2, 2010

On April 2nd Mr. Sicilia stopped writing poetry.

Leticia Ortega and Dionisio Cortes live and work in New York City and in Highland, NY. Their work has been shown in the United States, Mexico, and Italy. Ms. Ortega's work has been included in the I Olga Costa Biennial and Mr. Cortes' in the Monterrey Biennial. Both are recipients of numerous prestigious awards including the Vitro Art Center and the Monterrey Biennial in Mexico. They have taught at several institutions including American School and El Nix in Mexico, and Wet Paint! Art Studio in NYC. Their work can be found in numerous private and public collections

Second Floor Carriage House
Susan Scott

"These are constructed paintings. Because I know the components of each piece are going to be reconfigured over and over again, I make them from new materials with this In mind. Through what can be an arduous process, the parts become compromised, damaged or changed beyond repair, until ultimately something emerges with pictorial and physical integrity. The process of restructuring --- re-finding formal relationships allows a kind of narrative to edge its way into the work without being literal, so the paintings remain open to very broad readings, always subjective. I'm intrigued by the way Image and obecthood speck to each other in a painting, as if negotiating roles. For example, I might use a piece of wood to replace the rectangular plane of the painting, leaving it with no formal boundaries, but sustained as if by an umbilical to the wall. I have a deep respect for the tradition of painting, within which I find plenty of room to address almost anything, sometimes with a tiny dose of Irreverence and humor."

Susan Scott,
2011

Third Floor Carriage House
Michael Volonakis

"The process of drawing and painting I trust is educated yet ultimately intuitive. Within what may seem conflicting motivations lie paths to unexpected compositions."

Michael Volonakis
2011

Fourth Floor:
Joyce Robins

"My work as a reporter has taught me that logical stories, without riddles and holes in them, in which everything is obvious, tend to be untrue."
-- Hanna Krall, The Woman From Hamburg

"I try to use experience of the world, visual memories, to inform my work. Never direct, it is an oblique reference. I am always surprised after completing a sculpture to see that it resembles something in the world. I count it as a success when that occurs because it reinforces an engagement with the environment. Intuition is strong in the beginning of the process. I try to think 'visually' and avoid any kind of narrative impulse in my use of the world. I understand the connections only after completing a sculpture.

Krall's statement is analogous to how I feel about my own encounters in the world. That understanding inspires me to produce sculpture with literal holes. The openings illustrate a concept of time and disintegration. Simple structures that are the ground for a more complicated surface rendering represent a model of this environment.

Slicing a slab of clay from a large block, then rolling it out and starting to shape it with my hands is often enough to suggest the way to proceed. I trust my instinct. It can be a long process to find the shape and longer still to modify and articulate that form. Some of the methods I use to do this include removing material from it, using a wooden tool to mark indentations in the interior and at the edges, using a steel tool to make perforations and, finally, shaping the edge itself. I want light to penetrate through the dense and opaque clay.

Sometimes I stretch it over a form to dry creating an irregular and undulating membrane. After it is fired, then, the form will lift off its supporting surface. Glaze is applied to some indents so color will be held in a different way than on untreated surface.

I grew up at the ocean edge with beaches and salt marshes. It was important for me to see the mix of landscape and water, the colors of the marsh, as well as the encrustation and buildup of repeated encounters of liquid against solid, the evidence of time, of decay and renewal. Memories of being there, looking closely at what landed on the edge have remained a continuing source of inspiration. These conditions are always there when I make art. The holes are metaphors for the bubbles in the foam of a receding wave. They are about a dissolution or disappearance of material. They are also intimating an ordering, not symmetrical, but still a balancing of elements. They provide a framework to integrate color onto the form. The shape of my sculpture is usually something simple, enough to hold a diverse amount of marking"

Joyce Robins,
2011

David Hornung, Pamela J. Wallace, Stephen L. Reynolds, Dale Emmart, Robert C. Morgan

2011-05-27T12:03:00.002-05:00

On Thursday, May 26th, a group of artists will open the season with a medley of exhibitions for the Main Galleries, Sculpture Garden and Carriage House. In celebration, the gallery will have four solo shows (sculpture, painting, and an installation). The work will be on display through June 19th with a reception for the artists on Saturday, May 28th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

Main Galleries:
David Hornung

"These recent pictures, all made with gouache on handmade paper, were completed in the winter and spring of 2010-2011. As usual, they depict scenes from around my home in the Catskills. My usual working method is to create loose sketches from memory and imagination and then translate them into paintings.

The paintings in this exhibition, although small, take time to develop. I make many adjustments and "corrections", mostly in pursuit of a nebulous but insistent sense of balance. Not compositional balance, but the balance of all the various parts of a picture including its tenuous connection to outside reality. I'm preoccupied by the distinction between fact and fiction in what is largely an artificial enterprise. You could say that I am compelled by a pictorial truth, not realism."

David Hornung
2011

Stephen L. Reynolds & Pamela J. Wallace
Sculpture Garden

Pamela J. Wallace and Stephen Reynolds will be exhibiting sculpture in the garden that is a result of their collaboration. The two pieces are titled "Water Capture" and each is 9 feet high.

Excerpts from an industrial dream... On road trips Wallace and Reynolds slow their car down to a crawl when passing a fading industrial structure or farm building. Their idea of a good time is to tour a WWII era factory where submarine propeller shafts were made. These aging industrial structures are filled with textural and formal details that travel with them back to their Germantown studio. There, the sculptures that they collaborate on are distillations of this shared visual experience and are the result of long conversations and many sketches.

The final product is always far from an exact representation of the original source, but their careful selection of details results in a unique object that nonetheless suggests the beauty of industry past its prime.

Pamela J. Wallace & Stephen L. Reynolds
2011

Elevator Shaft Installation
Pamela J. Wallace
Suspended so far, yet somewhere else

"In Suspended so far, yet somewhere else, I am constructing a system in response to the architecture and function of this elevator shaft. For years, this elevator moved countless pounds in and out of this carriage house. I do not know what was lifted or how much weight was carried, but it is this absence of information that motivated me to produce this work.

Using a system of suspended spheres, ropes, bowls and stones, I've created an installation that reflects on the many unknown burdens that have moved up and down in this space. Stopping this movement, I have held the platform on the bottom floor by weighing it down with small stones, forcing it, for the time being, to simply sit still."

This installation was made possible with funding from The New York Foundation for the Arts, Special Opportunity Stipend Project Grant.

Pamela J. Wallace,
2011

Second Floor Carriage House
Pamela J. Wallace

"I combine hard durable industrial materials such as iron and concrete with organic ephemeral materials like paper, thread, fabric and wax. As this is aesthetically appealing to me, I am also interested in working with materials associated with work and gender as I forge iron elements, or sew and use paper to create contrasting organic forms.

Both my installations and sculptures are made up of a continuum of objects, where patterns are often mapped out like constellations. Upon first looking, one sees a distribution of objects mimicking non-linear geometries where order comes and goes. Approaching the work, it becomes clear that the smallest detail is essential, as with the tiny insect pin as it can pierce and display, exposing awkwardness and vulnerability as when a bug is pinned up and studied. Closer inspection reveals unexpected details such as plant fibers encased in sewn plastic bags, iron spoon and bowl forms capturing empty space, or circles held tight to the wall by the tips of pins."

Pamela J. Wallace,
2011

Third Floor Carriage House
Dale Emmart
Pod, Nest, Vine, Sky

"I relish the time it takes to observe, render, and interpret. The slow, incremental process of adjusting formal elements over and over is essentially what brings me the most substantial sense of involvement. I paint to find a place between seeing and invention.

The varied space of the Carriage House offers the opportunity to install pieces with three different, concurrent types of work. The first set of paintings are in oil on panel; the second, stretched paper pulp drawings; and finally, monotype prints with watercolor. Due as much to necessity as inclination the series, through material and visual intention, maintain continuity. I keep a rural Pennsylvania studio for painting and a studio for works on paper in Manhattan. I enjoy the diversity and the cross-pollination of ideas among works of each studio.

Historical landscape, still life, botanical drawings and compulsive gesture drawing have importance in these works; their presence obvious throughout. The Nest and Vine series come directly from still life and observation. 'Pods' rely on the scrutiny of botanical examination. The monotypes merge renderings of popped corn with studies of shifting cloud masses."

Dale Emmart
2011

Fourth Floor:
Robert C. Morgan

"Beginning in 1970, my work as a painter has involved the use of metallic pigments and polymer emulsion in both representational and abstract styles. The centerpiece of the current exhibition involves a diptych, titled Learning To Swim, based on a two-part image I saw in a 1937 swim manual that I painted in 1974. The painting was previously shown at White Columns in New York in 1984. The five smaller paintings are geometric forms, which double as letters, painted in 2011. As with other recent exhibitions, I consistently include a mix of early and up-to-date paintings in order to show a formal, conceptual, and historical relationship between the paintings. I enjoy seeing the present in relation to the past, and enjoy the feeling of a progression in time by painting images and forms that intrigue me. I look for both erotic and ironic content in my work, and hope that this will communicate to my viewers."

Robert C. Morgan,
2011

Leticia Ortega-Cortes Painting

2011-04-28T12:00:00.000-05:00

Tender Grace, oil/gessoed panel, 10 x 8 inches

On Thursday, April 28th, a new exhibition will open at John Davis Gallery. The work of Leticia Ortega Cortes will be displayed in the main galleries. There will be a reception for the artist on Saturday, April 30th from 6 - 8 p.m. and the show will run through Sunday, May 22nd, 2010.

"For this exhibition of my recent work, I am presenting a series of experimental small works that juxtaposes both the abstract and the illusionistic languages. My continuous interest and fascination to render realistically with oil paint, prompt me again to integrate representational elements into my abstract work. I have a very strong, personal connection with fabric as my mother used to sew the costumes for my elementary dance group. I fondly remember my house filled with dozens and dozens of crinolines which frilly covered entire walls. This series is set to explore the formal syntax of drapery. In addition to the method and treatment, I'm attracted to the formal potential of drapery and its possible readings. While addressing the subject of drapery in classical Greece, Sir Kenneth Clark stated the following: 'Drapery, by suggesting lines of force, indicates for each action a past and a possible future.'

The large formats are color fields, directional planes, and gestural marks. Reference to nature is muted, and thus abstract and reductive forms take shape. My approach to the creative process is one focused on insight and emotional awareness. My paintings employ the medium of oil paint on different supports: substrates coated with dry gesso, which yields a smooth, luminous surface; and supports with oil-based grounds which have a different ability to absorb and reflect light. For me, the application of paint and pigments to the supports is of great importance: be through a delicate layering and veiling process, or through thick, resolute layers. The former allows me translucency and depth, the latter opacity and flatness. My conceptual and formal decisions are based on the analysis of color, form, and composition. The final resolution however, is a personal response obtained intuitively when I feel a strong visual composition is achieved."

Leticia Ortega Cortes, 2011

Susanna Heller, Paintings

2011-03-27T08:03:00.001-05:00

Dirty River, 2006, oil on masonite, 7 x 5 inches

On Thursday, March 31st, a new exhibition will open at John Davis Gallery. The work of Susanna Heller will be displayed in the main galleries. There will be a reception for the artist on Saturday, April 2nd from 6 - 8 p.m. and the show will run through Sunday, April 24th, 2011.

Susanna Heller was born in New York, NY in 1956 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1977.

Her work is represented in both public and private collections including: The Art Gallery of Ontario, Air Canada Corporation, Canada Council Art Bank, The Donovan Collection, Mcmillan, Binch, Museum London, National Bank Financial, Oakville Galleries, Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt, Toronto Dominion Bank, Torys and The Woodbridge Group.

"A painting, like a walk, connects the physical experience (feet on the ground/paint on the canvas) to movement, energy, and space. In a painting you enter and travel in a multitude of ways. I paint tactically, not strategically. The work is without a formula and I work with no physical hierarchies or imperatives. This explains the ever shifting surface, mark, texture, density, etc, within each painting and from painting to painting. I don't look at a painting as static.

For the ordinary practitioner of the city or the canvas, the walkers' /painter's/ drawer's bodies follow the thicks and thins of urban space, the ins and outs of the space of a person trapped in bed, or the space of our eye's trajectory as it travels back towards a distant horizon."

-Susanna Heller

Barry Bartlett, Sculpture

2011-03-17T15:18:00.001-05:00

Angels and Animals, 2010, 27 x 18 x 18 inches, porcelain

On Thursday, March 3rd, a new exhibition will open at John Davis Gallery. The work Barry Bartlett will be displayed in the main galleries. There will be a reception for the artist on Saturday, March 5th from 6 - 8 p.m. and the show will run through Sunday, March 27th, 2010.

Barry Bartlett has been exhibited throughout the U.S., most recently in solo shows at the Gary Tatintsian Gallery in NYC; Anna Kustera Gallery, NY and a series of group show -Maryland Art Place, MD, Baltimore Clayworks, MD. Islip Art Museum, NY and the Neuberger Museum, Rotunda Gallery Brooklyn, NY. He is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in the Visual Arts. The work has been reviewed in the American Ceramic and Ceramic Monthly magazines. He is currently a Faculty member at Bennington College, Bennington VT and has taught there since 1987.

"A visit to Bartlett's Hudson valley studio reveals shelves stacked floor-to-ceiling and three deep with used ceramic hobby moulds. Reading their labels, one encounters a kind of found poem: Monk head/ White horse/ Dreams of long ago/ Jesus/ Robert E Lee/ Standing clown/ Eagle/ Elephant cookie jar/ Lighthouse/ Elf. This is just a small fraction of the thousands of moulds Bartlett collected from a craft supplier who was going out of business a few years ago. One might wonder how a serious artist like Bartlett is able to turn such banal, kitschy imagery into meaningful works of art.

Yet Bartlett has been using these hobby moulds as the primary building blocks in his work for the past three years, with surprising effects. "The moulds are like a curse," Bartlett jokes. Beer steins, forest creatures, holiday themes, and religious iconography are the visual vocabulary out of which Bartlett constructs his ceramic sculptures' visual poetry.

Bartlett's work reveals the mutability of images, their susceptibility to reinterpretation, their ubiquity and mystery. It also dares to embrace the most banal forms of the ceramic craft multiple in order to re-appropriate and transform them into unique artworks. The sculptures are so appealing, in part, because they appear to be simultaneously effortless and highly self-conscious. As he navigates the challenges of both medium and content, Barry Bartlett makes ceramic art about politics, while at the same time confronting the politics of ceramic art."

Excerpts from an upcoming review by K E Gover, in Ceramics: Art and Perception

Larry Brown

2011-02-17T15:16:00.001-05:00

Gulf, 2010, oil on canvas, 30 x 25 inches

On Thursday, February 3rd, a new exhibition will open at John Davis Gallery. The work of Larry Brown will be displayed in the main galleries. There will be a reception for the artist on Saturday, February 5th from 6 - 8 p.m. and the show will run through Sunday, February 27th, 2010.

"These new paintings are a continuation of my long term interest in the fundamental interactions of science and nature. While the earlier work was informed by a narrative based in physics, chemistry and astronomy, the new work has evolved towards a dialogue framed within a geological and ecological context. These recent references, coupled with an ever present political arrogance, unconscionable sophistry and predictable denial of climate change ramifications hopefully deepen the serious conversation regarding these issues. Admittedly, these paintings become a small contribution addressing the argument for a more determined focus on a very large problem but a problem that does require acute attention. These paintings are an attempt to examine the alarming ecological processes which seemingly, are well under way.

These are however paintings, and their rather implicit narration and abstract descriptions of potentially catastrophic events are hopefully reconciled and reformed by the affirmation of painting as a process.

As I have said before, in the end, it is the seductive character of the paint and its unique processes that remain the primary and dominant subject."

Larry Brown
2011

Vincent Ciniglio

2011-01-01T15:07:00.001-05:00

Doll in Red Suite, 2010, oil/canvas, 42 x 36 inches

On Thursday, January 6th, a new exhibition will open at John Davis Gallery. The work of Vincent Ciniglio will be on display through January 30th, 2010. There will be a reception for the artist on Saturday, January 8th from 6 - 8 p.m.

Vincent Ciniglio studied at the New York Studio School for three years with Charles Cajori, George McNeil, Esteban Vicente and Nicholas Carone and received an MFA in Painting from Columbia University in 1974. He has exhibited in many venues in Bushwick, Williamsburg, Chelsea (Elizabeth Harris Gallery) and PS 122 Gallery.

"My interests in the human figure, filtered through imagination and experience, are the subject of my paintings. They depict the human form in a number of its infinite manifestations. Through the use of color and dramatic setting, I hope to reveal a psychological and emotional reality. Influences have been many including the work of Soutine, Otto Dix, and every painting that I have ever seen in an Italian church"

Vincent Ciniglio
2011

Happy Holidays

2010-11-26T13:30:00.003-05:00

Archibald (Ago 8) sends Holiday Greetings.

We both wish you a very special New Year.

- John

Peter Acheson: Recent Paintings

2010-11-20T12:19:00.005-05:00

On Thursday, November 11th the work of Peter Acheson was on display in the main galleries and continued into December..

Allen: “What do wasps do?”
Gary: “Mess around”

"Abstract painting to me means the union of opposites- total objectivity and total subjectivity simultaneously. On the one hand completely generic, but precisely specific. Articulated energy. A portrait of a tree, its leaves, its bark, its mortality…its language.

The daily painting of the paintings is really a conversation with yourself. Like the weather, the daily mind stumbles along, happens, has a good day or a bad day, makes coffee. I want to paint with the mind that makes coffee. I’d like to paint the mind that makes coffee!

Paint is colored dirt. It can also be jewels. Also dark night. You can get so lost painting that darkest night seems like brightest day. Getting lost is its own kind of pleasure because it means that the old solutions don’t work anymore."

Peter Acheson
2010

Katherine Bradford: A Collection of Small Paintings. Carriage House: Joy Taylor, Nick Freberg, Rebecca Allan, Jean Feinberg, Renee Iacone-Clearman

2010-10-30T09:23:00.025-05:00

In October 14th, seven artists opened with a group of exhibitions for the Main Galleries, Sculpture Garden and Carriage House. There were six solo exhibitions and an installation in both the front galleries and Carriage House. The work was on display through November 7th.

Main Galleries:
Katherine Bradford
A Collection of Small Paintings

"The cyclist in my painting is just cresting the hill about to coast free. The sun is out, the day is warm; it’s summer. Small in size, this painting is about unencumbered buoyancy, release and immediacy– all things I associate with making a work of art."

Katherine Bradford
2010

Sculpture Garden:
Tim Rowan

"My art work flows from a basic desire to find and create meaning in my life. It is fueled by questions I ask myself concerning the realities I am confronted with.There is one thing that we know for certain- we will die. No manner of conceptual, abstract, or analytical thought can conceal this fact of our existence. No faith or belief in what follows can deny the reality that as biological organisms eventually our bodies will no longer be “alive”. We cannot escape the forces of time.

In this highly technological and capitalist society our perception of time has been radically affected. Time has been measured and fragmented into smaller and smaller increments. It has been broken up, bound, categorized, and commodified. What is the impact of this on society and the individual? What is our relationship with time? These questions which form an important aspect of my art work, are manifested in three main areas; process, tradition, and form.

Process is essential to my work and begins with the medium of clay itself. Investigating and using clays from the local area locates me in a specific place and serves to bring to my awareness time as manifest in the moment. Working with raw clay and prospecting in the natural environment serves to keep me in tune with an earth centered and geologic time. The forming process, working on multiples and repetitively, is not unlike growth in nature. Clay must be worked at its own pace as its moisture is slowly evaporating regardless of the demands from outside. Firing functions in a similar way. The wood kiln must be slowly stoked for 7 days if the work is to be successfully transformed from clay to cultural artifact.

Tradition is the natural growth of culture through time. It is not static but rather in continuous evolution. I continually look to the past with respect in my work in order to appreciate how we have developed as a society. I directly and indirectly reference work of the past that has something valuable to tell me. We continually move in a cyclical direction and cannot divorce our selves of prior experience.The forms that my works take on are simple. They rely on a minimum amount of information and detail. They are constructed with a language of subtly, understatement, and restraint. In contrast to the majority of objects and images that we are bombarded with in our contemporary society they do not easily stand out or compete for attention and in this respect require the viewer to actively slow down. They have the capacity to be engaging on different levels and this is best accomplished when one allows the work to reveal itself over time. Utilitarian objects also require physical participation, such as drinking a cup of tea. These rituals of use are also embodiments of time. When I experience real joy I am aware of my mortality and the preciousness of the moment."
Tim Rowan2010

Carriage House and Project Rooms:Installation Atrium:
Joy Taylor

This project explores the sculptural properties of a strange material I recently discovered: rolls of plastic, about 2" in diameter, hundreds of feet long. Floppy yet strong, creamy white, reminding me of the plastics of the 1960's, it charmed and intrigued me. After experimentation, I found a way to work with it that exploits its lack of structural strength. I've long thought of creating a vine-like structure, in admiration of the vines found in the chaos of forests - a climbing, draping, invasive plant-like thing that creeps and clings, creating an abstract form, a line in the vertical space of the Carriage House."

Joy Taylor
2010

Joy Taylor is represented by Bruce Bergman, BCB Art, 116 Warren Street, Hudson, New York.

All photographs by Andy Wainwright

Second Floor:
Nicholas Freberg

"I use a simple vocabulary of forms that are constructed and deconstructed on the canvas using a process of layering, glazing, and drawing with acrylic paint, pastels, and sometimes, adhering paper. The construction of the under-painting is spontaneous, emotional, abstract and fairly chaotic until I begin to deconstruct the elements that are to become the final composition. The deconstruction aspect of my painting process is a way of editing, and molding the underlying emotion and chaos into a simplified form that emphasizes and supports the underlying structure. The final forms represent fragments or projections of an internal psychology, seeking a dialogue between representation and abstraction, construction and deconstruction."

Nick Freberg
2010

Second Floor:
Rebecca Allan

"Door to the River, Willem DeKooning’s majestic painting of 1960, has been central to my visual life for many years. Essentially abstract, its composition of broad, gestural forms defines a central, irregular rectangle (the door?). DeKooning has enclosed this form with wide swaths of buttery yellow, peach/pink, and black pigment. Traces of indigo emerge from the left edge of the painting, suggesting the movement of water. The force of this “river” is only partially contained by the painter’s brushwork. We sense the unpredictability of the water’s current and its power to erode, overflow, and reshape its surroundings.

As a common point of departure, my new paintings reflect an exploration of the landscape in the presence or absence of water. They were initiated in the high chaparral desert of Dorland Mountain Art Colony near Anza Borrego National Park in southern California, and along the Wappinger Creek in the mid-Hudson Valley. These paintings are part of an ongoing body of work concerned with the interrelationships of the natural world, and my particular interest in the forces that underlie that which we perceive on the surface."

Rebecca Allan
2010

Third Floor:
Jean Feinberg

"This work continues to explore the idea of "color interventions” on found wood that began with my move upstate and a love of the used and worn. The exploration continues with forms meant to be seen in the round rather than on the wall. My interest is in the juxtaposition of found wood with its given texture, material integrity, color, age, dimension, etc. and flat saturated oil color applied with little apparent incidence. These chunky pieces occupy the floor space below eye level and involve more than one piece of wood, but often only one applied color.
In addition drawings explore in another direction – the materiality of papers, varying textures, paint, collage, and charcoal – either with deliberate opposing moves or an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink abandon.”

Jean Feinberg
2010

Fourth Floor:
Renee Iacone-Clearman

"This show represents an exploration inspired by my life at Kinderhook Farm in Ghent, NY. In the past, having lived most of my life in the city, I scavenged for the raw materials of urban life such as rusted metals and broken glass to form and encrust my work. During the last seven years, as our farm grew, with sheep added to cows and chickens the experience of rural life and the everyday materials of farm routines - became increasingly interesting in both practical and poetic way."

Renee Iacone-Clearman
2010

Priscilla Derven, Paintings, "SOA e SONA" with Foon Sham, John Ready, Holly Hughes, Ben La Rocca and Deirdre Swords

2010-09-24T13:06:00.005-05:00

On Thursday, September 16th, a group of artists opened a group of exhibitions for the Main Galleries, Sculpture Garden and Carriage House. The work was on display through October 10th.

Main Galleries:
Priscilla Derven, Paintings
SOA e SONA

"For the past number of years, I’ve alternated my subject matter within my interest in figurative painting. I’ve painted wistful, playful, isolated figures on the beach with all that implies and I’ve painted figures in turmoil in what I have been calling the skirmish series.

Recently, I came across three or four paintings on paper that I’d done a number of years ago. The idea for this series began ten years ago, in fact. I thought I had shelved it, but something in this work grabbed my attention and these images have reasserted themselves in my consciousness and curiosity.

The two new series are titled SOA e SONA. They are the acronyms I have given the work which sound like a foreign language to me so I decided to go with using the Italian “e” for “and” for a little verbal joke. They refer to the sources I used for these images, which I choose to not disclose since I believe that a visual experience must stand alone, without need for semantic reference. I wish for the viewer to draw his or her own conclusion as to what is going on here."

Priscilla Derven 2010

Sculpture Garden:
Foon Sham
Curve, 2010

This is one of the series of works that I have started in 1997, when I wanted to create a large vessel form that allows people to enter inside. Many of the works in this series had an opening on the bottom to allow viewers to walk in and out, to interact with the exterior and the interior. When one gets inside, one would experience the change of temperature, the scale of the surrounding, the view to the sky and the weaving pattern generated by the wood blocks; one could even hear his/her echo inside. This particular piece is smaller in scale and more focused on the aesthetics of the form such as its curvilinear contour, and the visual patterns of the blocks.

The piece is made of cedar, a wood that would last outdoors. The wood was painted with two coats of wood preservatives in natural color."

Foon Sham
2010

Carriage House:
Installation:
John Ready

John Ready lives and maintains his studio in La Crescent, Minnesota. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Art Education from University of Wisconsin - La Crosse, a Master of Arts degree in Metalsmithing/Jewelry from Iowa State University, Ames Iowa and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York. He lived and worked in New York City for several years before returning to the mid-west. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse and is the Director of University Gallery at UW-L.

His work has been exhibited throughout the United States with recent exhibition at the Rochester Art Center, Rochester, Minnesota (2009) and public art projects for the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art / Olbrich Botanical Gardens, Madison, WI (2004-05) and the Milwaukee Riverwalk, Milwaukee, WI (2009-2012).

Second Floor:
Holly Hughes

At John Davis Gallery Hughes will show a selection of paintings, prints, plates and gouaches showcasing an ongoing dialogue between media. Her Italian ceramic work continues to have a significant impact on her entire studio practice.

“Right now, my favorite painters worked hundreds of years ago - in glaze on plates in steep hill towns. They painted things like handshakes and ermine pelts – with a loose and masterful touch and an almost Disney-like clarity.”

Picking up the broken threads of stories told at different historical moments Holly Hughes playfully reweaves them into new fictions. Using “fragments of meaning” collected during her travels and research, as well her longstanding practice of improvisational and recombinatory strategies – she invites viewers to create their own narratives.

“It’s a game of decoding - we are always sorting through the complexity of shapes - some caught between the suggestive and the recognizable, others legible, or in that just sub-noun condition.”

Her activated figure/ground surfaces allow room for the imagination to run wild. Flooded with color, these fresh images invoke their past ancestors. History is a tattletale - with not so hidden “other possibles” lurking everywhere. Nature imagery abounds and the artist humorously toys with heraldic language. In slow, detailed and thought provoking ways Holly’s new work reveals the telling instability of signs.

“Studying ceramic traditions has opened my painting to an iconographic explosion of sorts – but nothing reads as it used to.”

Third Floor:
Ben La Rocco

“My paintings are about my life. Memory, dreams reading and study of form and geometry feed into them, but immersion in feeling and other people is the most important thing. I am trying to get closer to myself, to others and to the world through painting. I want it to take me somewhere closer to reality and to explore new ways of feeling and relating.

If life is about evolution, about improving oneself and being of use to others in whatever measure one is able as one goes along, then painting must be about the same thing, like philosophy - a way of being in the world. Painting must grow and change in unpredictable ways

When I paint I do not plan what I am going to do unless something comes to me from an inexplicable source. My gage for the validity of a moment’s inspiration is in its obscurity. If the sources of imagery are too readily identifiable, I distrust them. It must emerge instead from a dark place and come into the light. I work with brushes, knives and all kinds of mediums. If an image jumps forth and demands attention, then I put it in a painting; if not, I work according to my intuition, associating colors as they occur to me and feeling the movement of the paint through my body and the feelings that move through my insides and mind. I often work from life and images of animals, spirals, branching trees and nebulous clouds recur.

This is a general rule. My larger paintings on canvas take a very long time to develop and the smaller ones come more quickly, often on board, motivating me to continue working on the others. The small paintings derive from momentary thoughts or feelings expressing themselves visually. I think of them as odes. I think of the larger paintings as accretions: things gradually piling on top of one another.

I am inspired by artists - all of them. I find their vulnerability irresistible. I love best those that channel their paintings directly from mysterious sources; those that have great emotional breadth and depth; those who have mystical insight; and those with a vast sense of space.”

Ben La Rocco
2010

Fourth Floor:
Deirdre Swords

Having recently moved to Columbia County Deirdre’s work has taken a new direction. In response to living close to the natural world she has increased her paint quantity and added to the structure of her paintings’ supports. The paintings are more tactile, more like the ground that she walks on. She is motivated by her desire to manifest meaning from out of her unconscious. This meaning is dictated by her feelings and her visual impressions; the new tactile dimension has given the work an element of playfulness and expresses a respect for the physicality of the materials she uses.

Caroline Ramersdorfer at John Davis Gallery with Sam Sebren, Lois Borgenicht, Harry Leigh, Constance Jacobson and Farrell Brickhouse

2010-08-26T12:35:00.003-05:00

On Thursday, August 19th, a group of artists opened with a group of exhibitions for the Main Galleries, Sculpture Garden and Carriage House. Their are six solo exhibitions (sculptors, painters, a printmaker, and an installation artist) in both the front galleries and Carriage House. The work will be on display through September 12th.

Main Galleries and Sculpture Garden:

Caroline Ramersdorfer

Sculpture

Concept alters Reality

"In my sculptures I try to find ways in diminishing the distance the spectator has in observing sculpture by enabling to look in depth - upwards, from top to bottom or in horizontal - revealing the internal structures.

The mental eye of imagination gives endless scale possibilities from small scales - mind spaces - where the viewer becomes an integral part to further experience light, form, compact mass and empty space. A lattice - work of structures build from inside out where the spectators own position within fuse into new experiences of perceiving physical and spiritual spaces, identifying multidirectional moments.

By piercing my materials, stone or wood-slabs, coaxing the finest details and leaving only ligaments and connecting rods, the play of the day’s shifting light appears to dissolve the space and transform it into an ever changing arrangement of light and shadow. The passage of time turns the delicate lattices into translucent assemblies that are constantly created anew, evoking a varied range of emotions.

An accompanying video installation renders the factor of time by focusing on the changing light during the course of a day. Seeing the inside of the sculptures, the apparently limited and defined spaces are turned into an oscillate object of light, radiating from within. The video projections allow access to subtle viewpoints which would otherwise be barely perceptible.

The digital eye directs our attention to fine the textures and subtle shifts of light, which are not discernible to the human eye, at the same time complement and imbue the works adding power that significantly alters perception and thereby the emotional understanding of the sculptures."

Caroline Ramersdorfer

2010

Carriage House:

There are five artists within the carriage house (Sam Sebren, Lois Borgenicht, Harry Leigh, Constance Jacobson, and Farrell Brickhouse) in addition to a continuously changing group show of gallery sculptors on the first floor.

Installation:

Sam Sebren:

Art Lesson #1

"The anthropomorphic shopping bunny has become a zombie, numb to any goal of existence other than to shop & consume. Viewers will be dwarfed by a billboard size graphic as they are invited to sit, connect the dots & color w/ crayons in the interactive “Art Lesson #1”. What are the priorities of our 21st century, corporate-controlled, advertising-blitzed world? Where is the emphasis being placed as we raise children in this world where nature is seen as a commodity or even an inconvenience?"

Sam Sebren

2010

Second Floor:

Lois Borgenicht

Landscapes and Still Lifes

"Last summer I ventured outdoors to paint landscape for the first time in years. I felt like I was at an all you can eat buffet! I had to keep up a little mantra by telling myself "Take what you want; leave the rest! Take what you want; leave the rest!"

My years of still life painting helped to bring some sense of order to the unruly outdoors. Still life painting, often emblematic of the quiet and the eternal can also convey a sense of imminent change and even unrest. The challenge of the changing light, the wind and the passing clouds were exciting and a new aspect of movement began to permeate my still life painting.

I am pleased for this first opportunity to show my recent landscapes and still life paintings together in this exhibition."

Lois Borgenicht

June 1, 2010

Second Floor:

Harry Leigh

"The work exhibited will consist of wood wall constructions in a variety of sizes"

Harry Leigh

2010

Mr. Leigh was born in 1931 in Buffalo, New York, his father a cotton-spinner and immigrant from Manchester, England, his mother, a farm girl from the finger lake district. He was educated in the public school system and attended Albright Art School and SUNY, Buffalo, where he received his B.A. in 1953.

Harry worked as a laborer on construction sites, in steel mills, and on the assembly line of Ford Motor Company. He was drafted into the Army in 1954 and trained as a radio operator. While serving in Europe, he traveled extensively, visiting museums and architectural sites.

Upon return, he studied on the GI bill for a Masters of Art at Columbia University. He studied privately with Richard Pousette-Dart (1956-1960) in painting. He also took a course with Peter Volkus in clay sculpture. While painting from 1955-65, he began experimenting with large works from cardboard, plaster, then plywood in 1960. His sculpture became his main focus with his first solo exhibition representing a full assimilation of his diverse work experiences.

Third Floor:

Constance Jacobson

“These drawings continue my interest in an ongoing exploration of the brain and my fear of memory loss, and of my feeling that we are watery creatures—we came from the primordial seas and ultimately we depend on marine life for our survival. The medium here is water, literally and metaphorically with scale shifts between macro and microcosm.

I am thinking in this work about our relationship with the marine world in a few ways. One has to do with the fact that we evolved from marine organisms and that the fluids in our bodies have a salt composition almost identical to that of seawater. Another has to do with the fact that our health and our lives are intimately connected to marine ecosystems that are increasingly threatened by human behavior, such as by climate change and rising seas. And finally, one has to do with an imagined sense of my thoughts, floating in a fluid medium, seeking connection to other thoughts, perceptions, and memories to form a coherent whole. How can consciousness hope to view itself except by metaphor?”

Constance Jacobson

2010

Fourth Floor:

Farrell Brickhouse

"What I feel I have done these past few years is move my experiment in overt imagery from the initial seminal studies to complete paintings. At first, it was important to just get to see what was possible. I was in a new home and studio in a new part of town. It has been liberating. I've always felt good work was somewhat like a time machine. It opened up one's past body of work to new interpretations and significance and claimed new territory for the future. I now have access to my own history with a renewed understanding of its original content and a deepening understanding of how these images can continue to speak for me in paint. As a mature artist I find I have this large vocabulary to draw from. Imagery found a decade ago is now available and malleable once again. I have also found the ability to speak to everyday experiences, tell stories and paint about current events that is liberating. Even art history looks different to me as I see my concerns expressed in a whole new set of artists and old 'friends' offer new gifts.

I've stated that my paintings are a personal odyssey, a vehicle to carry me forward and find some deeper unity in what is happening in and around me. I believe the making of a painting needs that moment of epiphany and a trace of how the imagery conveyed thru paint was discovered and experienced by the artist. Not a graphic notation of the language of experience but the mystery of it."

Farrell Brickhouse

2010

Brenda Goodman with Ben Butler, Leticia Ortega-Cortes, Dionisio Cortes, Beth Gilfilen, Suzanne Ulrich and Luis Castro

2010-08-01T13:09:00.009-05:00

July 22nd, 2010, Brenda Goodman opened an exhibition in the main galleries of paintings spanning 1990 through 2010. Ben Butler exhibited sculpture In the Garden and the Carriage House will had group show of gallery sculptors, an installation in the atrium by Dionisio Cortes and Leticia Ortega- Cortes, paintings by Leticia Oretga-Cortes and Beth Gilfilen, painted collages by Suzanne Ulrich and sculpture by Luis Castro. The work was on display through August 15th.

Main Galleries:
Brenda Goodman
Work 1990-2010

"My work is about life: the really good times, the really bad times. I paint a lot about loss because painting it is the only way I know to move through it. I paint a lot about the feelings of not belonging. I paint about what makes me sad, glad, angry, peaceful, hopeful or defeated. I paint about life as it ebbs and flows: openly, honestly and from my heart."

Brenda Goodman
2010

Sculpture Garden:
Ben Butler:

"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:

Installation:
Leticia Ortega-Cortes & Dionisio Cortes:
Is where space ends death or infinity?, 2010
Site-specific installation for John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY
Plastic straws, nylon threads
360”Hx 96”Wx120”L

Leticia Ortega and Dionisio Cortes once again join labor to construct another collaborative installation. As in previous years, the Carriage House’s three-story-high elevator shaft at John Davis Gallery is the site housing this new piece. This year the choice of material is as common as plastic straws. Approximately 25,000 plastic straws were strung in hundreds of threads to create two planes in catenary, which intersect randomly.

As in much of the artists’ work, memory and identity informs the work. In the same fashion as in the artists’ 2009 installation “when skies are hanged”, this new installation is inspired on old-fashion Mexican traditions.

As known, the “Day of the Death” is a wide spread celebration in Mexico. Its origin dates back to the Aztec’s belief that when a person dies, his/her sprit continues living in a place called Mictlan. In the altars erected to celebrate this day, four primordial elements are present: Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water. To facilitate the journey to Mictlan to the souls, the altars also include other elements such as Salt to purify, Copal incense as guide, and paths of Cempaxuchitl (Marigold) flowers signaling the way.

Growing up in Mexico, the artists were fascinated by the creativity and ingenuity in which many altars and religious celebrations were decorated. The symbolic guiding paths of flowers were also made out of paper flowers and straws stringed in garlands and arranged as graceful canopies above the participants. It is the ethereal quality of these canopies that directly inspired this year’s piece.

As with the other installation pieces based on these Mexican traditions, it is the artists’ intention to create another playful and elusive piece. In his Book of Questions Pablo Neruda asks “si donde termina el espacio se llama muerte o infinito?” (is where space ends called death or infinity?).

Dionisio Cortes & Leticia Ortega-Cortes
2010

Second Floor:
Beth Gilfilen

"For me, painting is full of risk, spontaneity, potential. As in life, I manage uncertainty through a careful tracking of time, but then allow abandon to engulf reason. The fluid intersection of hand, material and structure always surprises me, and feels absolutely alive. Each movement or mark I make forges an awkward conversation between what the paint is and what it wants to be. I am led astray to pollute material concerns with torquing figures and spatial references. The gesture is animated, churning, gaining momentum until its morphing form is halted."

Beth Gilfilen
2010

Second Floor:
Leticia Ortega-Cortes

"My approach to the creative process is one focused on insight and emotional awareness. My paintings employ the medium of oil paint on different supports: substrates coated with dry gesso, which yields a smooth, luminous surface; and supports with oil-based grounds with a different ability to absorb and reflect light. For me, the application of paint and pigments to the supports is of great importance: be through a delicate layering and veiling process, or through thick, resolute layers. The former allows me translucency and depth, the latter opacity and flatness. My conceptual and formal decisions are based on the analysis of color, form, and composition. The final resolution however, is a personal response obtained intuitively when I feel a strong visual composition is achieved.

References to landscape and atmospheric settings are implied in the large color fields and directionality of the planes. In some instances the reference to nature is absent, and abstract and reductive forms take shape.

My installation work is deeply rooted in my background in architecture, which allows me to aptly understand and utilize space. While working with installations I explore notions of scale and three-dimensionality. Most of my installations are related to nature, memory and identity, however my visual language is based on formal aspect thus the results are abstract configurations specific to the site."

Leticia Ortega-Cortes
2010

Third Floor:
Suzanne Ulrich

Ms. Ulrich thinks of herself as a painter, however, she has been making small cut, torn, gouache painted and pasted paper collages now exclusively since 1997. As a painting major, she was most interested in a design course where she could play with basic shapes. These collages bring her full circle back to that interest. Even as a painter, she worked on painted stripes, large and small, canvas and paper.

The collage works have a small intimate scale. The rectangle both dominates and gives structure to the work with attention to surface detail and layering. With a compositional ordering, avoiding any illusionist references, each piece becomes a composed self-contained presence with consistent high quality and purity of vision.

Fourth Floor:
Luis Castro

"My work evolves from what remains. I have always been drawn to the parts and pieces, “raw” materials and sections of larger things. As an architect and as a sculptor, I am inspired by the piles of raw materials in a construction site, as well as by the fragments and debris of demolition. Each sculpture has a particular material history: the step of a Baltimore row house, a piece of a NYC courthouse, the trunk of a majestic maple.

Through the process of cutting, grinding and sanding heavy, rough pieces of wood and stone, objects emerge that evoke feelings of tenderness and sensuality that belie their coarser origins. In creating smooth surfaces, open forms and curved shapes I intend to instill a sense of lightness and potential mobility to the sculptures."

Luis Castro
2010

Robert Juarez, Summer Show: Oil Paintings with Ben Butler, Laurel Sucsy, Pamela Cardwell, Paul Hamann

2010-07-04T09:28:00.008-05:00

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.

Andrew Dunnill with Roman Hrab, Jennifer Mazza, Jonathan Parker, Philip Heilman and Mark Tambella

2010-05-17T12:08:00.020-05:00

On Thursday, May 27th, a group of artists opened the season with a medley of exhibitions for the Main Galleries, Sculpture Garden and Carriage House. In celebration, the gallery will have six solo exhibitions (a sculptor, painters, and an installation artist) in both the front galleries and Carriage House. The work will be on display through June 20th with a reception for the artists on Saturday, May 29th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

Main Galleries and Sculpture Garden:
Andrew Dunnill

"Drawing is for me the most direct form of visual expression. It enables me to interpret my experiences and observations, to question preconceptions, tap into my subconscious and reinvent my decision making process. Whether my subject matter originates in the ship breaking yards of India, in memories of rural England, or the vast open spaces of the American West, drawing is my foundation, free from the physical realities and practical restraints implicit in sculpture making.

Sculpture demands a different rigor and spatial understanding than drawing and yet the two languages often inform one another. The marks and images, narratives and abstractions that I generate in two dimensions are frequently the genesis of sculptural ideas. The works represented in this exhibition are an attempt to bring the experience of sculpture closer to that of drawing by releasing the potential energy and life that is often restricted in an inert material such as steel. I am searching for a pliant and plastic geometry to imbue the density and rigidity of steel with a new three-dimensional poetry."

Andrew Dunnill
2010

Carriage House:

There are five artists within the carriage house: Roman Hrab, Jennifer Mazza, Jonathan Parker, Philip Heilman and Mark Tambella in addition to a continuously changing group show of gallery sculptors on the first floor.

Installation: Roman Hrab:
Chandelier for Ernst Haeckel (Radiolarian/Jellyfish Hybrid)

Chandelier for Ernst Haeckel (Radiolarian/Jellyfish Hybrid) is a sculptural installation inspired by the observations and studies of 19th century naturalist Ernst Haeckel. In 1866, Haeckel traveled to the Canary Islands where he met Charles Darwin, whose On the Origin of Species had been published seven years prior. A great admirer of Origins, Haeckel also realized that the technical weight of its subject limited the book’s exposure to the masses. Via his own research he gave name to many previously unknown oceanic life-forms; he won his greatest popularity when he began visually documenting the species that he discovered. His drawings and engravings would later be published in collections such as Art Forms in Nature and The Radiolarian Atlas, best-sellers in their day. They highlighted Haeckel’s sense of order and detail, but also drew criticism for their exaggerated hyperrealism.

Like Haeckel’s prints, Chandelier inspires contemplation in its morphing, mandala-like composition. Aspects of Haeckel’s work that further inform Chandelier are the synthesis of art and science, and the systems at work that communicate with each other. Tangential to this is the subculture of parlor microscopy that was all the rage in Haeckel’s day. The well-to-do of Victorian society often gathered to compare slide samples, marveling at one another’s discoveries under the glass. Fast-forward to the 21st century, and man’s impact on nature is increasingly self-evident, with climate change wreaking havoc on populations of fauna and flora around the world. Warming ocean temperatures are causing population explosions in jellyfish, massive bacterial and algae blooms, and widespread destruction of coral reefs. I see the Radiolarian/ Jellyfish Hybrid as a rogue plankton life-form that has mutated and outgrown the microscope, taken over the parlor, or in this case the carriage house elevator shaft, like some architectural parasite. Nature running amok in response to the indulgences of mankind.

Roman M. Hrab

2010

Second Floor: Jennifer Mazza

"I am very excited to share this new series as it represents a great departure from the previous directions my work has taken. I feel these paintings to be some of the strangest images I have yet made, for the very fact of them not being strange – not overtly at least. But I sense that they are subtly covert and they do succeed in knitting together such a great number of the disparate strands my mind has been following of late – springing from art history, literature, philosophy and theater theory among other sources. They are in a sense about the experience of experiencing a painting, and play at this by employing the most minimal means: mundane objects, irrational poses, ambiguous spaces. These new paintings, as I understand them, have something to do with time - the manipulating of time; compressing, halting, or drawing it out - through subject, application, and the implication (or lack of) depth and space.

Many of the paintings and works on paper included in this show come from a series that I am working on called "The Object Removed," which makes direct quotations from paintings made by a number of Renaissance artists including Memling and the Master of Osservanza. Creating images based both loosely or explicitly on masterworks by these artists, I have removed the human form from what was originally either a religious painting or a portrait. Devoid of their intended subject, the new images seem to belong to the genre of Renaissance Landscapes. I mean this ironically as there is no such genre, all "landscape" in Renaissance painting being dependent on or subjugated to the human content. And so even with the human forms removed these landscapes remain entirely subjective, and become projections of interior turmoil abandoned by the paintings' previous occupants or else manifest a sense of absence or longing."

Jennifer Mazza
2010

Second Floor:
Jonathan Parker

"The work I produce is often intimate in scale and simple in design. My own intention is at the heart of each piece I make, but ultimately, each painting speaks its own language. When I make art I have something to say, however, when I stand before a finished work, it has something to say to me. And if the painting works, it speaks not in my voice but in a universal language."

Jonathan Parker
2010

Third Floor:
Philip Heilman

“Source Material…….How do we get our inspiration? Why does one reference stay with us while hundreds of others fall away? I don’t know. There are artists that I go back to for visual sustenance who over years have shown me continuous integrity and honesty. Many I know or knew. Some are dead. Some I’ve never met. Each was for me either a Wowa! moment or a quiet jump off point to a dozen other sources. They have been educational to me. After seeing their work in depth all of the moments thereafter seemed to matter more. In no particular order the names Forrest Bess, Fred Mitchell, Irving Kriesberg, Melville Price, Walker Evans, Lois Dodd, Marsden Hartley, Paul Feeley, Peter Busa, Alfred Jensen, Jean Cohen, Joan Mitchell, Put Brinley, Stuart Davis, Eva Hesse come to mind….on their shoulders stand Carroll Dunham, Peter Acheson, Mary Heilmann, Jonathan Lasker, Amy Sillman, along with a hundred others whose name escapes me now.

In college I started out looking at black & white photographs; my favorites were Avedon, Sternfeld, Kertez, Evans which led me to explore design, which lead me to look at color, which lead to painters. They cast vivid memories in my psyche. Their work is honest and forthright. They each had their Wowa moment much earlier than I. Yet they learned how to create something new & fresh from what came before. So I bind myself to them as guide posts. Thru them I’ve had my own Wowa! moments. My favorite quote goes: “…the only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know”. Nowhere is that more true that in the art world. Nothing is new. Just new source material. Nobody owns it yet it’s all for sale.

Perhaps a painter summed it up best, saying, “We are trying to paint what is real. We are trying to paint what we have never seen before."

Philip Heilman
2010

Fourth Floor:
Mark Tambella

"This exhibition is primarily a sampling of a series of small square still life. They are oil paintings on panel created in one or two sessions, in various studio and outdoor settings. They are supplemental to an ongoing series of portraits.

The content attempts a kind of poetic association of subjects hopefully with delicate metaphorical underpinnings, trying to avoid obvious narrative or cliché. Eh. The compositions are not assembled and copied but are selected within the process of mark making. I have tried to also utilize scale and color to convey underlying characteristics much the way I would paint a portrait, with responses and interpretations with a subject while not just copying its image.

Taking a moment with something simple; how an individual is about people, a spoon is about spoons, a fish about all fish"

Mark Tambella
2010

McWillie Chambers, New Paintings

2010-04-24T08:29:00.006-05:00

McWillie Chambers will open a solo exhibition of new paintings at the John Davis Gallery on April 29th, . The work will be on display through May 23rd with a reception for the artist on Saturday, May 1st from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

McWillie Chambers was born and raised in rural Louisiana. From 1969 through 1971 he attended the Louisiana Polytechnic Institute. He went on to study at the Kansas City Art Institute where he received a BFA in 1973. After graduation he moved to New York City where he attended the New York Studio School (1973-1974). Currently he maintains studios in New York City and Hudson, New York. The current exhibition at the John Davis Gallery will be the 15th solo exhibition of Mr. Chambers’ work. His work has been included in many group shows and his paintings, drawings, and prints are in numerous public and private collections.

The present McWillie Chambers exhibition is composed of two separate bodies of work. There is one group depicting football games and players. The second group is another series of paintings and a painted four-paneled screen with men on sun drenched beaches as the predominant subject.

Both groups are painterly, colorful, affirmative, and sexually charged depictions of men at play. The work explores the male figure and the inter-personal dynamics between men. These paintings are balanced between the "edge of innocence" and the physical awareness of the male psyche. One senses the simultaneous confidence and the vulnerability of these men yet keeps an endearing quality that pervades the work.

Gallery hours are Thursday through Monday, 10:00 till 5:00 p.m. For further information about the gallery, the artists and upcoming exhibition, visit

www.johndavisgallery.com

or contact John Davis directly at 518.828.5907 or via e-mail: art@johndavisgallery.com.

Martin Bromirski: CRO-MIRSKI; In Nega-View…

2010-04-23T08:41:00.000-05:00

Martin Bromirski's solo exhibition of paintingsopened on April 1st at the John Davis Gallery. The work was displayed through April 25th.

In Martin's own words,

"These paintings are small but I think of them as compressed, tight and dense, and that some of them could expand and eat the space they inhabit. As small paintings they are rocks; distressed, grotesque, pocked objects for your study.

When I first started doing abstracts with circles I was eating at Stuffy's Subs a lot. They had a winter sub-of-the-season that was super cheap... a meatball sub. I was eating hot delicious meatball subs almost every day... and started to relate my circle abstracts to the meatballs suspended in meat sauce… nourishing, physical, awkward. It became a little problematic because too many friends started to call them meatballs and were taking it all too literally, like I was really trying to paint meatballs or something.

Each piece is blank canvas and just gets worked… most of the paintings are layers of paint, sand and paper discs… and there is no application order or formula. What in reproduction might look like a final applied paper circle is often something that was re-discovered only after scraping layers of stuff away; and some of them are only the negative space from where the buried circle itself was peeled away, a powerful negative space surrounded by an encrusted field… the background space becomes a solid positive space."

Martin Bromirski

Gallery hours are Thursday through Monday, 10:00 till 5:00 p.m. For further information about the gallery, the artists and upcoming exhibition, visit

www.johndavisgallery.com

or contact John Davis directly at 518.828.5907 or via e-mail: art@johndavisgallery.com.

Claude Carone: Paintings

2010-03-05T11:39:00.008-05:00

On Thursday, March 4th, Claude Carone opened a solo exhibition of paintings at the John Davis Gallery. The work is on display through March 28th.

Claude began his studies in New York at the New York Studio School but he was no stranger to art at that time, having grown up with a father who was a major contributor to the Abstract Expressionist school, Nicolas Carone, a contemporary and comrade of Jackson Pollock, William de Kooning, and other founding fathers of the abstract expressionist movement. After the New York Studio School, Claude continued his education at the Maryland Institute of Art and then, independently, in Rome, Italy. He has exhibited in various cities in England, Italy, and the United States.

Carone is an intuitive painter. He may start a canvas with a gesture and then respond to that gesture with another until he sees and feels the beginning of a visual composition. As he goes back to a painting, he may re-enter into a situation that he then plays into or finds a certain rhythm in the painting or a dialogue between the image and the space and respond to it. He paints on wooden panels with casein, powdered pigment, polymer and wax. The resulting work is sometimes brooding and always energetic painting that emanates from his ability to tap the unconscious and let his body channel these emotions into a rhythmic and dynamic composition.

Yura Adams: The Walking Series, February 2010

2010-02-05T12:29:00.008-05:00

Yura Adams and Sarah LaDuke take you on a audio tour of Yura's exhibition currently on display at John Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY.

Click -here- to listen to interview on WAMC's "The Roundtable".

"I paint the figure in combination with abstract forms and especially the figure in motion. My interest in humans moving and the perceptions I collect on regular walks with my dog, led me to develop The Walking Series, a body of work that is predominant in this show.

Observation is a key element in the work. My source material is from nature and man in my village community. I gather urban occurrences, walkers and movers, structures, signs, light, water patterns, and color shifts; all existing beneath the ubiquitous influence of the river, adjacent to the town in which I live. These sources are collected for memory with sketches and camera files.

The next key element is the more difficult-to-describe practice of using these observations. Imaginative invention co-rules with an obsessive arrangement of shape. In what feels like a wrestling match, I work and rework my paintings until the shapes, colors and relationships satisfy me, discovering the painting as I go. The final work is intensely personal. This struggle is necessary for me to join the images and insights into a vision that forms my paintings. I build up the surface with the opacity of gouache or oil paint, and the subject matter dictates the choice of the final work created on wood, aluminum or paper."

Yura Adams

2010

Geoffrey Owen Miller: The Individual and the Group

2010-01-10T15:06:00.003-05:00

On Thursday, January 7th, 2010, a new exhibition opened at John Davis Gallery. The work of Geoffrey Owen Miller runs through Sunday, January 31st, 2010.

Geoffrey Owen Miller is a New York based artist who explores the sociological meanings of iconic imagery. Through various methods of painting he looks for ways to create spaces for the viewer to actively re-insert themselves in the identification of the icon. By complicating the image through various means of controlled and uncontrolled mark-making, the viewer is pushed to consider the context and definition in their search to identify what they are seeing.

The mind seeks to create closure of form by means of context, experience, and learned biases of perception. In the fractured repetition of his imagery we still try to see what we have been conditioned to see, and that is where one’s own perceptual filters can emerge. Those subconscious tendencies we color our perception that then shape our culture and institutions.

Dividuals explore the divide between the individual and the group. While Gilles Delueze states with concern that “[i]ndividuals have become ‘dividuals,’ and masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks,’” Arthur Koestler sees our whole-ness or part-ness as dependent on the point of view. Instead of the atomistic view of distinct parts, he proposes the concept of a Holon: a unit that is simultaneously a whole and a part.

Archibald, age 7, sends Holiday Greetings. We both wish you a very special New Year --John

2009-12-01T12:02:00.000-05:00

Photograph by Michael Fredericks

Colin Cochran, New Work

2009-11-29T11:53:00.005-05:00

On Thursday, November 12th, a new exhibition opened at John Davis Gallery. The work of Colin Cochran was displayed in the main galleries and the show runs through Sunday, December 6th, 2009.

"In my art I am striving to get down to the essential nature of things. In form, content and use of materials, I seek a kind of precarious equilibrium between opposing forces - between control and letting go, intuition and intellect, realism and abstraction, oil and water. What I am seeking to convey when working is not a picture of something, but the thing itself - an experience of it, a sort of distillation.

My technique is expressive and dynamic with an emphasis on the texture and complexity of paint. I experiment with different surfaces such as sandpaper, metal, and ceramic tile, looking for ways to surprise myself.

Art is compelling to me because it is by its very nature indefinable - paradoxical. There is always more to look for, to discover, to question. For me it is an exciting adventure, which connects me to something universal and unpredictable."

Colin Cochran
2009

Christine Heller, Into the Crosscurrents

2009-10-23T11:56:00.007-05:00

Main Galleries:
Christine Heller
Into The Crosscurrents

“Into the Crosscurrents is a series of new works from a year of non-stop painting; a year in which tumultuous shocks have thrown me into a new stage of life. The act of painting has been a haven and in each stroke, I have been excavating what has gone before.

Painting for me is an extremely physical act, improvisational choreography that generates the strokes of paint, leads me into the core of a painting and prods me to go where I have never been before. New patterns of color, movement and form result from making marks that are authentic, clear, and accessible - without interference of preconceptions.

While I am painting, one response incites another until I see clarity developing, which tells me I have gotten all that I can from the painting. But sometimes the painting does not let me go. I persevere, going deeper, as if digging for relics, not knowing what I will find. The process leads me until I reach the crux of the work.

My paintings are the tracks left after a choreographed excavation. They are sometimes a distillation of memories and often a visceral search for essence."

Christine Heller
2009

Sculpture Garden:
John Ruppert

"The chain-link fabric sculptures have evolved over the past several years, influenced by the urban context of my studio. These sculptures are translucent and are an antithesis to the mass of the castings. The shapes of the fabric sculptures are determined by the structural characteristics of the chain-link fabric, stainless steel retention rings, zip ties, aircraft cable, and gravity.

Context is critical to these sculptures. The indoor and out surroundings, as well as the relationship to other objects and each other, are in constant flux. In an outdoor setting the sculptures act as a monitor to the surroundings; interacting with the context of the site (with each other ... if there are more than one form) and the various weather and light conditions."

John Ruppert
2009

Carriage House:
Installation Linda Mussmann
light bulbs, zip cord, handmade dimmers, handmade light instrument

"Linda Mussmann started making lights out of #10 tomato sauce cans discarded from the pizza parlors in New York City in the early 1970's for her theater Time & Space Limited.

Why did she do this? Because she did not like traditional theater lights. They were too big and too bright and did not fit the thinking she had about the theater she was making...and this theater (TSL) was about space and time and light and language and words and sound (all parts needed to be recognized independently).

Linda wanted lots of lights and lots of dimmers and lots of things going on and off and lots of little cans hanging from the ceiling so people could see the light and not be afraid of real stuff. Linda did not like illusion. She believes in truth. Then Linda kept on making lights and installed ideas for more spaces...sometimes real spaces and sometimes invented spaces. She has worked in theaters, and museums (Whitney, MOMA, major theaters such as Merce Cunningham's space, Riverside Dance theater, Marymount Theater, LaMama Annex theater etc).... and now she works every day in Hudson, New York at TSL in the theater space that she co-directs with Claudia Bruce.

Linda will make the elevator shaft (located in the barn at the John Davis Gallery) a place that will have handmade lights, a site specific installation lighting the “elevator shaft".

Linda Mussmann
2009

Second Floor:
Sara Garden Armstrong
Shadow Memories
Photocollage, pastel, graphite, gel medium mounted on Lucite

“I have always been intrigued with natures fleeting moments, forever changing, constantly being renewed. I try to interpret the processes that are organic and dynamic capture a moment and trace time to paper surface.

One body of works examines winter shadows as they arrive, transition and depart. Shadows embody the ephemeral moments in the composition of our lives. The forms they create can suggest poignant memories, or the lapse between what is real and what is not.

I photograph shadows and details of nature including previous artwork, select portions to print and collage, and apply pastel and graphite to the composite image. I then coat the image with multiple layers (upwards of 25) of gel medium, adding depth and dimension. This slow process of layer coating allows me to explore the changes that occur as light moves through the medium to the image, the end result being an alteration of focus."

Sara Garden Armstrong
2009

Second Floor:
Evan Venegas

“My work looks deep into the evolution of city life. The inspiration comes from the energy created by the masses of people and how weaved together we form a changing backdrop for city living. Another form of stimulation is the urban shapes which are sharp, curved, bold, delicate and combine into an infinite number of both simple and complex configurations. This has evolved into a symbolism that reflects the distinction between anthropomorphic shapes and those that have a manufactured quality. I fuse these two classes of shapes in my painting to represent what happens daily in the urban environment."

Evan Venegas
2009

Third Floor:
Christopher McEvoy

“My latest paintings began with the desire to explore interconnectivity. I am influenced by the fluid nature of memory, experience and perception. To explore these ideas, I captured a series of images, generally landscapes that chronicle my surroundings, then used drawing and digital technology to manipulate each image, thus creating a record of perception and emotional response without giving the viewer direct access to the stimulus. In the paintings I develop from these images, structures vie for dominance within the canvas, much as sensory images or impressions might come to the forefront or recede in the mind or memory. Color and scale serve as a means to magnify and distort the experience of the viewer, ultimately amplifying a common location or a commonplace experience. To this end, technology is used to create the image, but it is the act of painting that makes the image more real, or larger than the reality it was derived from. Ultimately, the paintings lead the observer to question whether what he sees is directed by the artist, or directed by the viewer’s own personal set of experiences."

Christopher McEvoy
2009

Fourth Floor:
John Van Alstine
Sisyphean Holiday Series

"SISYPHEAN HOLIDAY SERIES is a “tongue in cheek” spin-off from my recent Sisyphean Circle Series (2005-9), which examines parallels between the Greek mythological character Sisyphus and the plight of the artist.

Because of a lifetime of transgressions when Sisyphus reached the underworld he was forced as punishment to roll a large stone up a steep hill, only to have it tumble back after reaching the top. This toil lasts all eternity and, I believe, is a perfect metaphor for the creative process and especially applicable to those, like myself, who uses stone as a primary material.

However, to view the creative process simply as toil or a punishment is obviously too narrow and negative, I prefer to see it in the context presented by Albert Camus, the French existentialist in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus. Here Camus uses the myth to illustrate the idea that reaching ones final destination is not always the most important and if one “reconsiders Sisyphus” as he suggests, the struggle or journey reveals itself as ultimately the most meaningful - an idea that I, and many others, believe is central to the creative process and life in general.

After completing over 30 sculptures in the Sisyphean Circle Series, I created the new Sisyphean Holiday Series and present these works in a light hearted, “tongue in cheek” way. They suggest giving Sisyphus (and me) a break or “holiday”. Here Sisyphus's “stone” is placed in a form similar to an Adirondack guide boat or canoe which, I believe, gives the sculpture a playful and local summer twist."

John Van Alstine
2009

Fran Shalom with Douglas Culhane, Erin Walrath, Grace Bakst Wapner, Jeremy Hoffeld and Barry Bartlett

2009-10-03T09:39:00.014-05:00

On Thursday, September 17th the work of the featured artist Fran Shalom was displayed in the main galleries with sculpture in the garden by Douglas Culhane, an installation by Erin Walrath in the Carriage House atrium, mixed media work by Grace Bakst Wapner, Erin Walrath, paintings by Jeremy Hoffeld and porcelain sculpture by Barry Bartlett.

Main Galleries:

Fran Shalom

Paintings

"I am a modernist abstract painter with a pop sensibility. My works balance the formal with the playful, paring down shapes and ideas into their most basic forms. It is a search for clarity and humor, as is evidenced by the shapes and colors in my paintings: cartoony, bright, blobby and fun. But, like life itself, there is an undercurrent of conflict beneath the whimsy, as reflected in the tension and interaction between the shapes. Ultimately, it is important that the viewer becomes involved with the paintings, tempting them to stay long enough with the images to connect to a narrative that is at once ambiguous yet taps into the specifics and subtleties of their own lives."

Fran Shalom
2009

Sculpture Garden:

Douglas Culhane

At The Blind Window

"Things - solid inanimate objects - seem to be the most knowable, reliable and defined entities of our daily experience. I have always suspected that this is not the entire truth. As a sculptor I explore the inner potential of things and create works that make the mystery, uneasiness and animate presence of solid objects more apparent. The possibility of articulating ideas, feeling and questions without language is the aspect of sculpture I find most compelling.

These pieces were made with the knowledge of many other related objects in mind. Although they have no other utility than their accessibility to contemplation, their vocabulary is derived from the features of utilitarian objects. Form and function are confounded, mutated and hybridized to illuminate the richness and complexity of their being and of our experience of this world dense with things."

Douglas Culhane
2009

Carriage House:

Installation:
Erin Walrath

Installation

Force of Habit,

2009 (ongoing)Retired Socks, Reclaimed Wooden Objects, Nails, Glue

Currently 8 x 11 feet but size indeterminate

"We are creatures of habit. And as we go about running our particular programs and patterns, we leave in our wake, a trail of debris. That debris is sometimes saturated with meaning and is sometimes perfectly boring. Recently, I have begun to build visual tapestries from the things I collect, giving voice, or at least new context to the otherwise less interesting object. I find that this process has created an impetus to look at the world more optimistically. It also allows me a sort of indulgence and a freedom that I had not previously permitted myself; to be less cerebral and more playful in making art.

For the past two and a half years, I have been gathering material for the piece that is the focus of this body of work. 'Force of Habit' is an installation comprised of collected socks that have been naturally worn out and, in some cases, outright obliterated. They have been saved, collected and submitted by hundreds of individuals. The intention was to create a project that could continue to grow, at times on its own, taking on whatever form it would. It became apparent to me somewhere in the process that I was creating a piece that would somehow reference the fine line between absurdity and gravity that seems to be the uniquely human experience."

Erin Walrath
2009

Second Floor:

Grace Bakst Wapner

Collage

"The focus of this series is first and foremost about color and texture. The format of a smaller rectangle inside a larger rectangle suggests a smaller world within a larger one and often there is a dialogue between the two. This dialogue is primarily about the play between fabric and paint or stitching and the painted line. The concern is with the abstract: with formal aspects of color and placement, with the difference between a line stitched and a line drawn, with the texture and character of stitched threads, and with the play of reflective light on fabric contrasted with the surface of paint absorbed into paper.

Sometimes the outlines of houses can seem to be nestled in towns or colorful villages can be seen within gray cities but these images evolve from attention to abstract form, color and placement and are of secondary interest as the piece is worked."

Grace Bakst Wapner

2009

Third Floor:
Jeremy Hoffeld

Drawings and Paintings

"My recent drawings and paintings are closely tied to language. My mark-making units are words and sentences. Each picture is a type of entry, composed with distinct written content, ranging from commentary, to stream of consciousness, to confessional.

Through the layered application of sentences a charged surface emerges, which is infused with the underlying feeling of the words, but in which the legible content is mostly abstracted."

Jeremy Hoffeld
2009

Fourth Floor:

Barry Bartlett
Beer Steins and Buddhas

Amalgams of Desire

Barry Bartlett's narrative sculptures, in ceramics and mixed media, have long explored the realm of socio-psychological issues, from evolution to warfare to suburban sprawl. In Bartlett's latest work, iconic motifs are reconfigured using porcelain castings of mass-produced souvenir molds. These eccentric, over-sized steins and Buddha icons are superimposed with casts of cultural, religious and political figures, fantastical animals, holiday chotchkes, etc.

Essentially, a stein is a lidded tankard or mug. The lid was originally conceived in the late 1400's (following the lessons of the bubonic plague that killed over 25 million) as a sanitary measure to protect against hoards of little flies that frequently invaded Central Europe. With the decrease in population, landless day laborers that had survived the plague could now command higher wages and afford small luxuries. And so it was that the stein, vessel for the newly improved beer - a.k.a the flowing bread - was born. Beer was now made with quality ingredients, not the slop of rotting cabbages and bread, and promised many health benefits. Through the centuries, the stein, with its luxury value manifested via allegorical, biblical and historical vignettes, became a status symbol, reflecting current cultural interests and trends.

Bartlett's act of recontextualizing these icons reminds us both of their permanence in our imaginations and their vulnerability as icons. Commemorative vessels, once a mainstay of events such as world's fairs, are now usually relegated to the realm of kitsch; reinterpreted as political commentary, however, they seem to regain a kind of expressive power. What was exotic has become trivial, historical events turn into shallow representations, kitschy fantasy figures become almost anonymous in their new, strange surroundings, as Bartlett says, and commemoration becomes commentary. The bourgeoisie have reached astronomical proportions.

Joseph Haske

2009-08-30T12:54:00.011-05:00

Main Galleries:

Joseph Haske

Paintings

"Painting is a language. When painting, one is in a dialogue with other artists past and present and then with all things seen and remembered.

At some point I came to believe in a Jungian idea that there are universal archetypes. This led me to look for images with symbolic content, sometimes conscious geometric devices such as squares and the golden rectangle but just as often intuitively non literal, non verbal ideas. Lately I have been re-examining my own history of surfaces and paint handling to see if some discarded device might have a new usefulness.

Gesture, the mark of the brush, and the surface of the painting have always been very important to me. Sometimes these swirling lines make me think of the snakes of Medusa's head and at other times just the simple curving of a sound in the air. The underlying surfaces of these paintings appear very solid and mural-like. These layers of marble dust give off luminosity and the actual painting is usually just thin glazes, almost stains, on that surface."

Joseph Haske

2009

________________________________________

Sculpture Garden:

Jon Isherwood

Due to a delay in customs, the sculpture of Jon Isherwood did not arrive in time for the previous opening exhibition. This exhibition will introduce this new work for the first time.

"China is a fascinating blend of the ancient and the modern. It was therefore a particularly appropriate place to find inspiration for these sculptures, in which cutting edge digital technology was used to make sculptures made of stone, the oldest, most resilient and unforgiving of materials.

One of the greatest challenges for me, however, was that my approach to creating sculpture in this project was the reverse of how I normally work. I usually begin by modeling my sculptures in clay, and then use digital technology to model and cut the stone. In this case, however, the work began using 3D Studio Max to conceive the sculptures, which were then made into prototypes and eventually sent to China to be carved by hand. In other words, my normal working method is from the hand to technology, and in this project the artistic process began with technology and finished with the hand.

What was both daunting and intriguing about this way of working was the speed that the computer afforded in the design process. The 3D modeling technology enabled me to design a number of forms very quickly in the computer, and from those I could choose a few to print using a rapid-prototype machine. From working with the prototypes, I was able to see them as real objects and thus to see what needed to be changed or to understand the form. In the computer one finds a virtual scale that is relative to the screen, but in actual scale, it scales to the real world: the body, the hand. Rapid-prototyping facilitated a tactile intervention in the virtual design process.

One very exciting thing that occurred while using the 3-D Studio Max software was that it provided me with the ability to overlay patterns onto each other and onto form. For example, in one of the pieces that I created for this exhibition, I used the computer to take a traditional Chinese calligraphic pattern and overlay it with an abstract geometric pattern of my own design-another collision of the ancient and the modern. I then superimposed these merged patterns onto a form, which became the sculpture "In Deep" and "Burning through History". The technology allowed this overlay, which would not have been possible otherwise.

My travels through China in 2007 /08 were a main source of inspiration for the pieces I created, which are not a series, but rather four distinct responses to what I saw and absorbed. At the Dazu rock carvings, for example, I discovered an overwhelming experience of pattern and imagery bursting forward from the rock surface in high relief, surging forward in terms of dimension and yet still very attached to the earth. The issue of repetition and pattern and the aesthetic proportioning of the objects that led to a face-on frontal address from a sculpture were striking, and led to some of my sculptural explorations in pattern and form for this exhibition.

China is a fascinating blend of contrasts and contradictions, and it has been an inspiration for the work I have made using the 3D modeling technology. Whilst I feel really excited and confident in these pieces, I also feel that they represent four distinct new beginnings in the further evolution of my work."

Jon Isherwood

2009

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Carriage House:

There are five artists within the carriage house: an installation by Sara Jane Roszak, paintings by Larry Brown and Peter McCaffrey and sculpture by William Ransom and Anthony Garner, in addition to a continuously changing group show of gallery sculptors on the first floor.

Carriage House Atrium:

Sara Jane Roszak

Installation: Jacob's Ladder

"An Installation made from rope and wood found in the area of Gloucester, Massachusetts, evoking the reflection of the winter sunset on the tree branches and sailboat ropes in the Harbor."

Sara Jane Roszak

2009

Second Floor:

Larry Brown

Paintings

"As a consequence of political inaction and ideological misdirection, the calamitous results of dramatic climate change seem quite evident. These new paintings are framed in that context. Although quite abstract, this new work tends to imply a collaborative relationship between the rather forceful character of nature's imperious beauty and its powerful destructive potential.

My work has evolved over the years from a general notion of the interaction of science and nature to, now, the suggestion of dynamic situations or events which are emphatically urgent, dangerous and potentially irreversible. The implication that everything in these paintings is in motion and dependent on a relative system of established structures reinforces the prescience of nature's command as well as its seemingly eternal presence.

The architectural elements reference a kind of gestalt of containment; a series of corridors or passageways which have been breached or opened incidentally.

Finally, the attempted dialectical tension between the foreboding content of this work and the magical process of painting itself is significant. Although this sense of conceptual opposition has been a long term focus of my interest, in the end, the seductive character of the paint and its unique processes still remain the primary and dominant subject."

Larry Brown

2009

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Second Floor:

Peter McCaffrey

Among Fields

A Selection of Paintings and Works on Paper

"Images of animals dominate these works on paper and panel. Some are endowed with divine attributes. Others rise above their lowly status as icons of a simpler life. In the creation of an icon, gold represents solar light and heavenly intelligence. These are icons invented without rules. Yet their creation is an act of reverence, a way of working back through layers of obscurity to a source of imagination; to a primeval, rustic spirit-filled world. The element of gold acts as a beacon to the emerging image. These icons are a devotion to creatures in transition. In the drawings, a

meandering line defines a space and delineates the boundaries. The traces from erasure expose a thought, and I hesitate before making the final mark. I am drawn to the beautiful cursive handwriting of old letters and ledger books. The marks of the original hand remain firm and intact, and add a layer of history to the renderings I make on them. I feel an innate curiosity about the domestication and "interior life" of the animals I have chosen as subjects. My intention is to draw the viewer in: to tell the story of a distant memory, or a lost connection, and everything I hold dear."

Peter McCaffrey

2009

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Third Floor:

William Ransom

hold back, hold forth

"Growing up in the rough-sawn world of a dairy farm in the hills of Vermont, I used my hands every day and built a foundation for knowledge of tools and materials; cutting firewood, fixing machinery, constructing and repairing buildings and picking rocks. I learned early about life and death, connection to place, the importance of family, food, storytelling and the cycles of the natural world. These lessons continue to inform how I live and demand that I strive to maintain connections despite my perception of a cultural disintegration of familiarity with the intricacies of the world. I constantly seek balance in my life and work: as a diabetic, balance between my sweet tooth and insulin injections; as the son of a bi-racial union, balance between black and white; as a farm kid living in LA, balance between rural and urban, city and soil. I navigate the world trying to keep my mind and eyes open to the realities of the biological and social systems I engage and the extent of my impact on them. My work reminds others to recognize the roots of their own connectedness. This is not a didactic morality tale. It is more an idiosyncratic vision of my own role in the world, rooted in my observations, my personal history, and the way I connect with my physical

surroundings.

Direct, hands-on interaction with material has always been important to me. For a long time wood has been my primary material and I choose wood deemed to be without value, found in dumpsters or scrounged from debris piles at construction sites. I enjoy how readily we associate the corporeality of wood with our own bodies, and how easily it can remind us of the entropic biological processes of growth and decay, loss and regeneration, consumption and excretion. Transformative processes that reflect the passage of time and that we are as inevitably susceptible to as everything else alive in this world."

William Ransom

2008

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Fourth Floor:

Anthony Garner

Sculpture

"Art is an effort to study and to communicate the tactile and visual experience I have of the world around us. Sculpture affords me the best opportunities to combine those tactile and visual experiences. I enjoy the complex possibilities for revelation and contemplation that sculpture offers: sculpture may be both sensual and cerebral, both process and product, both space and form. My recent work combines the sensual aspects of carved wood with the conceptual ideas of articulated and compressed space."

Anthony Garner

2009