| Schoolhouse Press |
| The Schoolhouse Galleries Friday, September 3 - 29, 2004
Silas-Kenyon: Melanie Braverman, Marty Epp, Jason Byron Gavann, M.P. Landis, Robena Malicoat, Dermot Meagher, Paul Stopforth Project Wall & Hall Cases: Patti Hudson, Brent Jones
Driskel Library: Paul Wirhun Driskel Cases: Amy Kandall And: A SHORT FILM by MIKE WARE
MELANIE BRAVERMAN is an artist who almost cannot help creating art because she does not seem to see the difference between that which is art and that which, supposedly, is not. She possesses, in abundance, a quality Flannery O’Connor called “the habit of being”, which, according to O’Connor, involved living one’s life in a particularly deeply immersed condition or, in O’Connor’s own works, being someone “on whom nothing is lost.” This quality of heightened attention is common, according to O’Connor, only among saints and certain artists. “As an artist, Melanie doesn’t pay much attention to boundaries of any sort. She doesn’t acknowledge the traditional divide between the prosaic and the profound, or between art and craft, or even between one discipline and another... I’m not sure how I’d answer, in one or two or even more words, any question about what, exactly, it is that she does. I’d have to start by saying that she is creating a body of work about loss, beauty and transcendence, and that while everything she does has tremendous integrity of its own it is also adamantly part of something larger, something aesthetically and emotionally coherent. Melanie is a novelist and poet, a sculptor, a ceramicist, a quilt maker, and an installation artist, among other things, but a list like that doesn’t in any useful way account for the breadth and variety, or the innovation, of her work.“ ...Work like this is an inspiration, and better than that. It is a reason, an explanation. I find I can sometimes look at Melanie’s work and think, “Right, that’s why we struggle to make art.” Because the world speaks to us constantly, insistently, in a language we can’t understand, and we need work like Melanie’s to help with the unending effort of translation.”
~from an introduction by novelist Michael Cunningham
Artist and writer Melanie Braverman has been exhibiting her work at the Schoolhouse Center since1998. She is the author of the novel East Justice (1996) and a book of poems Lamentations, Benedictions, and Indiscretions (2000). Her newest book of poetry is called Red. For this exhibition she will present an new embroidered work.
JASON BYRON GAVANN has been using a twin lens Rolleiflex camera with a diamond cut zeis lens for over 20 years, inspired by its square format and incredible sharpness. The unique color in Gavann’s images is achieved from developing slide film as negative film, a technique is called Cross Process which makes a color image that is very saturated in color with soft grain and lots of contrast. For this exhibition he will present a new series of portraits.
PATTI HUDSON will present ‘The Night of 100 Faces’, 100 masks made of found and assembled metal. Hudson’s masks are immensely popular for their humor and style. She will take the center area of the galleries and make a ‘metal-fest’ with fellow metal lamp-maker Brent Jones.
BRENT JONES will present new lamps and sculpture made from found metal around Athens, GA, where he lives and works.
MP LANDIS will be exhibiting new paintings and works on paper exploring the structure and function of the grid. MP Landis lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He has had recent exhibitions in New York City, Philadelphia, and Madrid and began his teaching career this summer at the Fine Arts Work Center.
JENNIFER LIESE is an artist and writer who lives and works in New York City. She is a critic, editor and frequent contributor to arts groups and publications in Provincetown, New York and Chicago. Ten years ago, she found herself, almost by accident, in a pottery workshop outside of Nairobi, Kenya, where she worked for six months making plates and mugs for the safari hotels. When she returned home, the first thing she did was sign up for a ceramics class. After moving to New York she signed up for another, and another. Later she moved to Provincetown, bought a kiln, and started showing the work. Now she has a studio in Brooklyn. She will present a new series of ceramic pieces; chickens with hand grenade torsos. For a preview go to : http://homepage.mac.com/rstoland/jen.html
ROBENA MALICOAT lives and paints in her Provincetown studio. She makes straightforward, honest paintings of objects and situations that include the things and people she sees each day. Malicoat’s work has a generosity that allows the viewer to relax into the act of looking. Yet the work also insists on being acknowledged for its complexities. Color, composition, metaphor, the residue of memory, and the making of place are her tools; all used in a determined but unselfconscious way. The results are a series of paintings where beauty seems to have been restored to the chosen subjects, not for aesthetic purposed but because it makes more sense that way.
Malicoat is intrigued by the objects we take for granted both visually and in the daily scheme of life. The seemingly obvious often catches her eye: a chair pushed back from the table, a teacup on a shelf, the chaos on her kitchen counter. When her eye is caught, the paintbrush is likely to follow. Preferring to let the composition, the palette, and the idea evolve together, Robena starts painting when something intrigues her. At some point, she and her painting clash and experience a head-on collision -- almost as if the painting has a better idea of itself than she does. This is, to her, when painting becomes really interesting -- becomes more than painting what is in front of her. She asks “what you are seeing? What does seeing it feel like? What is happening on the flat, two-dimensional canvas itself? It is sometimes about being willing to let go of an idea, sometimes about persisting even when the painting defies reason, and sometimes a balance of both.
DERMOT MEAGHER studied Art at the Castle Hill Center for the Arts in Truro, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Provincetown Art Association, the Cambridge Center for Adult Education and, as a child, at the Worcester Art Museum. He also studied Art History at Harvard College. Among others, his teachers have been Elizabeth McDermott Meagher, Paul Bowen, Jim Peters, Rob Moore, Brian Campbell, Eliot Hubbard, Ricardo Carlos Martinez, Raphael Noz and David Sipress.
He has shown frequently at juried and non-juried shows at the Provincetown Art Association, including the Black and White show in 2000 and the Emerging Artists Show of 2001 curated by Midge Battelle. His work was also in the One Hundred Years of Art in Provincetown show at the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown in 1999. In 2002 he showed at the Wing Pinske Gallery in New Bedford. His numerous collectors include many other artists.
For this exhibition he will present new drawings made with ink, colored pencil and various materials found at the locations on which the works were conceived.
DOUG PADGETT’s new paintings play upon the tradition of the sublime landscape, those realms of natural isolation and grandeur which provoke awe: ocean, sky, a magnificent waterfall. But whereas human consciousness often appears as insignificant in the landscapes of the Hudson River School and German Romantic painters that serve as his models, Padgett's work asserts the primacy of the imagined landscape.
There is, first, the drama-infused perspective of the dwarfed viewer of these paintings, daring a look over Niagara falls; within reach of the flexed dorsal arc of a passing shark; gazing up at a skyscraper, the dizzying urban equivalent of the mountain; or engaged in an equally vertiginous ocean descent amid drifting jellyfish. In these paintings, the viewer is implicated in an ambiguous narrative of danger either averted or anticipated.
These new paintings also play with traditional landscape painting by foregrounding the way technology and the built environment mediate our perception of the "natural." Reflected clouds float in a glass sky at once tranquil and pitiless. Jellyfish hover in an aqueous ether strangely familiar yet which no human enters without aid. The displaced viewer is perhaps in the water or behind a sheet of glass as a shark passes, in a disorienting play of surfaces balanced compositionally by the shark's elegant bulk.
Never fully representational in intent, Padgett’s paintings often take on the feeling of images pulled from dreams. Their simplified representational style creates a tension between letting the paint dissolve into abstraction and making it represent something recognizable. This tension allows for a more open interpretation of even the most familiar objects.
Unique to Padgett's latest landscape paintings is the sense of discovery made possible by their scaled-down focus, alerting us to the astonishing translucent minutiae of the ocean, or the reflection in a glass building that provides a meditation on time.
Previous Quotes
“His work possesses a surprise-in the-everyday, like finding a never-seen photo of yourself and being startled by the pose. Padgett’s objects, so woven into the daily fabric of our lives as to be almost unseeable, appear fully intact, yet completely changed. The impact of his work lies within the gently unfolding discovery that this change evokes. His household becomes a filter through which we view the world, and then, of course, ourselves.” Caroline Crumbpacker Provincetown Arts
“Padgett’s paintings are—like all visions of the sublime—unheimlich, uncanny.” Frances Richard Catalog Essay
“Doug Padgett's grand Untitled is a cartoony 19th-century vista of drippy, cellular stalactites hanging deep within a morphing natural interior that is oddly reminiscent of small paintings of the vaults of Dutch churches. Two or three human witnesses stand in the lower right and one crosses the bottom of the painting on a tourists' ramp; their hair flickers in the same yellow, blue, and red daubs that animate the painting's pulsating, ancient stone.” Eileen Myles Village Voice
PAUL STOPFORTH is originally from South Africa where he was one of the ?rst visual artists to confront the injustices of the apartheid system through his work. An important series of his drawings based on the death of the Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko evidence a particular kind of witnessing and testimony in relation to apartheid-era interrogation and torture, and to the deaths in detention to which these practices led. He established and co directed the alternative Market Gallery in the Market Theater complex in Johannesburg. He studied at the Johannesburg College of Art and was awarded British Council Scholarship to attend the Royal College of Art in London. He has held numerous one-person exhibitions both in South Africa and in the US. He has been represented in group shows at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; the Birmingham Museums; Malmo Kunsthall, Sweden; the Africus Johannesburg Biennale; Museum for African Art, New York; the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts at Stanford University; and University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson. Stopforth is a recipient of the Rodney Burn Award for Figurative Drawing from the Royal College of Art; residencies at the Robben Island Museum, South Africa, and at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation; an Engelhard Foundation Fellowship, and the Ian HaggieBest Artist Award. Public collections holding his works include the Harvard Film Archive;the Constitutional Court of South Africa; Tufts University Gallery; the National Gallery,Cape Town; Johannesburg Art Gallery; Durban Art Museum; the Pretoria Art Gallery; and University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries.
For this exhibition he will present two ‘drawings’ based on power, greed, arrogance and imperial ambition. One image refers to the refusal of occupying powers to take the lives and cultures of the colonized peoples into account. Imperialist ideological systems become the framework within which controls are articulated, and these systems are doomed to fail as they depend on force for their implementation. The building in ‘Empire Building’ (the first drawing) is a closed system, somewhat reminiscent of a drawing by Escher, or a fragment of text by Kafka. There is no visible or accessible exit. The building appears to hover inside a minimally colored ground that flows into and through the drawing. The drawing itself is very fine and detailed, which gives a sense of veracity to the impossibility of its actual construction.
The reference for ‘Grindstone’, the second drawing -of a grindstone- comes from a photograph of British soldiers sharpening officer’s swords during a campaign against the Zulu nation (circa 1879). Besides the fascination that the grindstone itself holds for Stopforth, the symbolic factor of grinding something (somebody) down, to improve it’s function (awareness), is the reason for this choice of object. The flood of red-brown, flecked with pale white provides an ambiguous ground within which the form floats, surrounded by darkly outlined hands. It is graphically a very striking and mysterious image.
PIA SCHACHTER is a photographer who lives and works in Boston. In the early 80’s Pia worked with artists like Pat Hearn, Steve Stain and Penelope Place at the now legendary 38 Thayer Street Loft. She also sang and performed for the punk band Daily Bodies. In the 90’s she wrote the ‘Beauty and Truth’ column that appeared for years in Stuff magazine and in The Improper Bostonian. Since 1999 she has devoted her time to photography and conceptual art.
For this exhibition she will show a sample of images from her years of collecting shots of the people- mostly young men- of the Death Metal movement. During this time Schachter heard many stories of the inner calm that comes from such extreme music. The resulting photographs focus on the eyes, and the determination each person has to gain power over their own sadness. She chooses portraiture, as it shows their beauty and pain with honor.
VICKY TOMAYKO was born in Detroit Michigan in 1955. She received a BFA from Wayne State University in 1977. In 1978 she was awarded a Ford Foundation Grant for the Arts. She received an MFA in printmaking from Western Michigan University in 1979. Tomayko was an assistant professor of art, teaching printmaking, at Connecticut College in New London, CT from 1979 to 1981. She moved to Provincetown in 1982 with husband, artist Jim Peters. Tomayko was awarded a fellowship at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in 1985-86. In 1994, Tomayko and her husband built their house and studios on the dunes in Truro where they live with their children, Arvid and Sylvia. Tomayko teaches printmaking at the Museum School at Provincetown Art Association and Museum, a college credit program connected with Cape Cod Community College. She is also an Artist-in-Residence at The Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School in Orleans, a community based middle school, and teaches classes for adults and children at The Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill.
For this show she will present 3 new prints, and works in our flat files.
MIKE WARE will show the short film “Vacancy” in the public room upstairs at WOMR. Originally screened at the 2004 Provincetown International Film Festival, it documents his installation at the condemned Meadows Motel curated last fall. Mike Ware, originally from Boston, met Father Paul Shanley at age 13. Out on bail, Shanley currently lives in Provincetown while awaiting trial this October. His charges include ten counts of child rape and indecent assaults on minors. Ware’s ‘room” for the priest at the Meadows Motel attracted national media attention. Footage he had created as part of the original piece inspired Ware to make the documentary “Vacancy”.
In just over ten minutes, the film gives a voice to individuals that have survived the child abuse scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church. “I think this film brings what happened to these kids to life.” says Ware. “We need to be reminded.”
“Vacancy” will screen upstairs from the Schoolhouse Gallery at the WOMR studios every half-hour from 7:30 to 9:30 pm. Friday, September 3rd.
The Schoolhouse Galleries are located at 494 Commercial Street in Provincetown’s historic East End gallery District. For information or an interview with the artists please contact Mike Carroll at 508.487.4800, mcarroll@schoolhousecenter.com
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