| Schoolhouse Press |
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| JEN BRADLEY |
| The Schoolhouse Galleries 494 Commercial Street Provincetown, MA 02657 508.487.4800
PRESENT
NEW WORK
Friday, August 20 - Wednesday, September 1, 2004
RECEPTION: Friday, August 20 7-10 PM
Jen Bradley, Robin Bruch, Liz Carney, Susan Lyman, Pasquale Natale, Tom Nozkowski, Joyce Robins, Gina Kamentsky, Lynn Stanley
JEN BRADLEY grew up in a city suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. As a teenager, she attended classes at the Museum School of Fine Arts in Boston and later graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art, where she studied painting and printmaking. Following graduation in 1995, Jen bought a 600 pound printing press; an act of determination to continue to pursue and explore her artwork.
Jen moved to Provincetown and immersed herself in the arts community. While here, beyond staying committed to her work, Jen studied under many well known local artists and exhibited regularly. Her fascination with nature and creation of art began at an early age. Thinking back on childhood trips with her father, a professor of biology, to ponds surrounding her home, Jen recalls her interest in the natural world.
"We would collect specimens from the water and look at the organisms under the microscope. I then drew the shapes that I saw, an event that taught me to observe and record my experiences through drawing."
Jen divides her time between Provincetown. For this exhibition she will present a series of prints of apes that are inspired by her visits to the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston. Bradley began drawing the gorillas at the zoo in 1994. Since then she has begun to translate the drawings into paintings, and now prints
ROBIN BRUCH paints relaxed but quietly ecstatic versions of geometric abstraction. The images often recall bold textile patterns or the symbolic meditative diagrams of India called yantras. An association with Western manuscript painting is also present, but overall her work is rooted in the picture of contemporary abstraction. For this exhibition she will show new paintings that are smart, quirky, colorful, joyful and precise. Looking at the work it is evident that she seems aware of every possibility for the success and failure of an image. Clouds of determination and hesitation may surround her intentions. Yet denying nothing she makes mark after perfect mark. Then again: perfect. And on: perfect, human marks which deny nothing.
LIZ CARNEY, an artist known for her strong compositions and vivid palette, will show new paintings in which she continues to delve further into exploring the Provincetown waterfront. While sharing an eye for the shore with her predecessors - Provincetown painters such as Hawthorne, Moffett and Whorf - she also brings contemporary social and aesthetic concerns to the fore. For several years Carney has been working almost exclusively at Provincetown's piers and boatyards, recording images of a slowly diminishing fishing fleet. Her new paintings continue to capture the brilliance and strength of her waterfront subjects while also moving more steadily toward abstraction as she crops and distills her images.
For the past two decades GINA KAMENTSKY has been creating one of a kind mechanical toys and sculpture incorporating found metal objects. Her playful work has been featured in The Sunday New York Times, Metropolis Magazine, LA. Style, and the Boston Globe. During her career, she has produced interactive exhibits for children's science museums, designed custom sculptural lighting for residential and commercial use, and invented dolls, games and toys for companies including Hasbro, Fisher Price and Lego, collaborated on design of a miniature golf course and produced several award winning animated films.
This is her first exhibition at the Schoolhouse Galleries. She will present new work consisting of kinetic change banks and interactive mechanical sculpture.
SUSAN LYMAN's inspiration for the wood sculptures she will exhibit is almost inseparable from her subject, the plant materials she finds and gathers on the beach, in the woods or at Ducky Noon's "pit" in North Truro. A twisted root, vine, or sapling seems here to embrace or mimic a body or gesture.
PASQUALE NATALE will present a series bronze pieces, casts of child's blocks that spell the phrases, 'Try a little tenderness' and 'Everyone needs someone'.
As a child, Pasquale constructed shrines with fabric and real roses. Later, as an adult in Provincetown his works became like shrines or switching stations, sites of metamorphoses where poetry, design, and architecture would intersect to transform "irreversible absence. . .into tangible presence". The work became about AIDS, loss, and memory. His ingredients then-- fear, grief, the utter incomprehensibility of time and loss, and above all, love, were folded into each work of art - cross, door, photograph, as strata, the living material animating it from within. The sheer number of dots in the dominoes he used to construct sculpture spoke of the endless replication--of the virus, death, and now, the survivors. But there's the Freudian notion that repetition always contains the possibility of a different outcome, a persistently rekindled optimism. Like people, Natale's pieces were and remain in transition, as if beneath the narrative of loss lies some other creature struggling to be born. Now he had again surprised his audiences by returning to a joyful humor, a hopeful position full of new objects and ideas..and above all, love.
TOM NOZKOWSKI, one of America's foremost abstract painters, has had more than 50 one-person exhibitions worldwide and been in more than 100 group shows since 1973. Nozkowski has received the American Academy of Fine Arts and letters Award in Painting (1999) and Purchase Prize (1998 & 1999); a New York State Foundation of the Arts Fellowship (1989); and a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Grant (1984). He was a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow (1993). His works are in permanent collections including Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Centre National des Artes Plastiques, Paris; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Ga., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City. Nozkowski lives and works in New York and teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.
JOYCE ROBINS was born in Greenville, South Carolina. She was educated at the Yale Summer School of Art, The Cooper Union (B.F.A.,1966) and at The City University of New York (B.S.L.A.,1995). She has had seventeen one-person shows of her artwork, most recently at the Jane Hartsook Gallery in New York City (2002). In addition her work has been seen recently in many group shows at galleries and museums, including The Brooklyn Museum, The Gasworks (London), The Delaware Art Museum, Vassar College, Pierogi Gallery, Pewabic Pottery, Lennon Weinberg Gallery. In addition to making sculpture, Joyce Robins is a landscape designer. Her current projects include a public sculpture garden in Beacon NY, scheduled to open in the summer of 2003. Robins has taught sculpture at Vassar College. Her awards and honors include being a finalist for the Chrysler Foundation Design Awards in 2000 and a recipient of a New York State Creative Artists Public Service Grant for Sculpture (1982). Robins was a visiting artist at the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts (2000). Robins work has been written about in The New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, The Village Voice, The Nation, The New York Observer, The Philadelphia Inquirer and American Ceramics. She lives and works in New York City and in the Hudson Valley of New York State.
LYNN STANLEY attended the School of Visual Arts and Queens College where her focus was in painting. In 1997 she received her BA in studio Art at Smith College, where she produced letter press books, broadsides, and non-conventional book forms. A writer, as well as a visual artist, Stanley was a Colby Fellow at the University of Michigan, where she received her MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry in 2000. Stanley has taught creative writing at the University of Michigan and with the Provincetown International Art Institute in affiliation with Cape Cod Community College, and is currently the Educational Coordinator at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. She is the recipient of 2002 grants for poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Provincetown Cultural Council. A chapbook of her poetry, "Gravity Claims Us," is available from Folly Cover Press. She continues to make artists books and is represented by the School House Center for the Arts in Provincetown.
For this exhibition she will present a show of books selected from her own work, and the works of Peter Madden, Mark Adams, Bob Bailey, and others.
The Schoolhouse Galleries are located at 494 Commercial Street in Provincetown's East End gallery District. For information or to interview the artists please contact Mike Carroll at 508.487.4800 X 105 or email mcarroll@schoolhousecenter.com .
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