| Schoolhouse Press | |||
| The SILAS-KENYON GALLERY | |||
| DAVID CARRINO | |||
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DAVID CARRINO/ KEN CORBETT/ JEN BRADLEY/ MARYALICE JOHNSTON/ MARIAN ROTH/ M.P. LANDIS/ DOUG PADGETT/ JAMES SHANNON In the Silas-Kenyon Gallery August 15 - 27, 2003 Artists Reception: Friday August 15 7-10 PM Artist Talk: Saturday, August 16 Noon Hours: Daily 11-9 The Silas-Kenyon Gallery is pleased to present new work in the galleries from August 15-27. Please join us as we present seven artists with a strong contemporary vision.
DAVID CARRINO continues his exploration of the male nude with a series of new black and white silver prints. These compelling and beautiful pictures allow us to swim in the sultry tension created between Carrino’s masterful control of the image and his ability to subvert the genre. "David Carrino is an artist whose work deals with identity, with language, with attention to both the world and to the gestures that mark and define it. In this use of the word, "gesture" refers not to the grand actions of a Jackson Pollock, but to more quotidian ones- the way a woman habitually holds her body, or the way handwriting becomes as recognizable, or invisible, as a face we see every day. Handwriting is a revealing example, for it lies at the center of this work, representing one gesture that gives the world its voice, its "body." " -Nick Flynn
Corbett has been working over the past several years on a number of projects, both intellectual and artistic, that engage pattern and variance: taking pictures of the blue sky, writing about masculinities, making small beeswax bowls, writing about marginalities, and taking pictures of the Provincetown bay. For this installation, he has chosen two painting that were painted at the same time, side-by-side, using the same drip technique. They are similar, indeed from a distance they appear the same, and yet upon closer inspection they are vastly different. Pattern accumulates to create both sameness and difference. He has also chosen to expand this installation by adding a close-up photograph of one of the paintings; this photograph while the same size as the paintings is yet another variation, yet another pattern, and yet again the work of difference created through repetition. Corbett uses the process of repetition to structure the viewer’s experience of looking, to draw on repetition as it opens a mind onto and into the possibilities of reflection and reverie. Bradley_kitombe JEN BRADLEY continues to create paintings of apes that are inspired by her visits to the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston, MA. Bradley began drawing the gorillas at the zoo in 1994, since then she has begun to translate the drawings into paintings. Many images are portrait like, focusing on the facial expressions. Bradley continues to ask questions like, are gorillas human-like, or are we ape-like. The paint is layered using washes of oil and paint. Areas of canvas are left raw. Drawing remains a fundamental part in her process of observing the gorillas and creating the work.
MARYALICE JOHNSTON received a M.F.A. from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, in 1982. She was a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center from 1986-1988. In 1997 she returned to live and work in Provincetown where she currently serves as the Visual Arts Program Coordinator at the Fine Arts Work Center. Her recent shows include Restrooms and Privacy, The Boston Center For The Arts, Boston, MA; Light, The Schoolhouse Center, Provincetown, MA; For Your Collection, The Attleboro Museum, Attleboro, MA; Maryalice Johnston - New Work, The Koussevitzky Art Gallery, Berkshire Community College; and 1985-86 FAWC Former Fellows, The Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Provincetown, MA. Grants include the Provincetown Cultural Council, Provincetown Community Compact, Central New York Community Arts Council, and an S.O.S, New York Foundation for the Arts. Johnston’s work consists of multiples, often a repetition of a three-dimensional object with subtle variations, which are scattered across a large grid mapped on the gallery or studio wall. The mathematical order of the grid presents a field of possibilities and variations for the placement of the objects. Complicated beginnings often become simplified – narrowed down to one or two formal issues with several emotional and/or psychological layers for the viewer to explore. The objects created for the grid are mostly fragile, and could be labeled with any number of adjectives – transparent, tactile, alluring, beautiful. She plays with the thought of total commitment to a finished piece, and likes to consider new and riskier arrangements for the objects – drawn to the life a work might have beyond what it appears to be. A reincarnation or recycling of the work into a new consciousness.
MARIAN ROTH has been making pictures with pinhole cameras for about 15 years, drawn by their apparent simplicity and intensely personal quality. With pinhole photography she must be willing to let inspiration and synchronicity, more than any cerebral process, make the picture. Everything is trial and error, and every time she changes the camera the process begins again. The simplicity of the pinhole camera is a little misleading, as it often takes days or weeks to get a new camera going and often a whole day to get one or two useable images. Roth doesn’t mind the struggle, knowing she is actually 'making' a picture, instead of simply 'taking' it. The long exposures (20 seconds to 20 minutes) permit accidents and the unknown to manifest, so the final pictures is, most often, a surprise. She loves the mystery of not really knowing what she will get and the joy of making a picture with something as ordinary as a tin can. For this exhibition she will present a series of new 15 x 20" pinhole photos made in a 5 gallon can. They are images of the soft movements of water and some quieter moments in the local landscapes. As usual Roth manages to make art that is satisfying and personal with a powerful sense of place and the endlessness of time.
M.P. LANDIS moved to Brooklyn, N.Y. in 1996 after living in Provincetown year-round for eight years. Since then, his work has become less dependent on the figure and more poetic and open. His current work is a palimpsest of direct inspiration such as music (often avant-garde jazz), poetry or nature, and the process and emotions of everyday experience. Collaboration is a significant component of Landis’s art. In addition to his studio work, he has painted live on stage with musicians, dancers and poets from the New York jazz scene, and his paintings and photographs have been used as cover art for various CD releases. He’s also involved in ongoing collaborations via the U.S. Postal Service with visual artists Paul Bowen and Bert Yarborough and with poet Nick Flynn, among others. Currently, he is co-curating an exhibition of 20 artists with upcoming shows in Phoenix, Arizona and in New York City. He has a solo exhibition at 55 Mercer Gallery in NYC this October. "Blue holds the accumulation of experience, the often elusive and always present now, as surface, as water reflecting sky above and depth below. Surface rippling movement and music. The beautiful nature of longing – across, below, above and within." – MPL Landis’s new work is abstract with an underlying, often subtle grid, and all are blue. The similarities trail off there, with variations in size, materiality, and mood rivaling the nearly infinite associations roused by the hue. "Every time I mention blue to people, they have a story to tell," says the artist, who was only somewhat surprised by the resonance. Landis’s own influences for the series include poems by Jelaluddin Rumi, Eileen Myles, and Gerald Stern, all of which reflect on blue, as well as nature and music. In one painting, a night-sky ground is dappled with white. This is Kasugano, the flowering apricot tree. In another, Robert Pete Williams (named for the long-imprisoned blues singer), an etched grid bridles an expanse of blue, evoking the natural instinct to both grasp and free the ephemeral. -MPL
DOUG PADGETT paints in New York, where he lives. His paintings – landscapes of Mars, big panels of paneling, and the surface of water - invite us to walk into a space that is conjectural, to muse toward perspective that does not have atmosphere. Padgett’s work is as much about exploring painting (as opposed to photography, digital rendering, or daydream) as they are about the rendered images. He insists on the primacy of basic painterly concerns: how three dimensions are expressed in two; the relative values of fore-, mid-, and background; the world-ending edge of the canvas. At the same time, he lures us into recognizing our own fantasies about what is actual and what is imagined. Toying with the tradition of sublime landscape—those realms of natural isolation and grandeur where human consciousness appears as insignificant and awed—his paintings also incorporate an exuberant, plastic understanding of space born of animation and science fiction, not to mention information as disseminated by popular media. When I was in High School I worked for a while at a McDonalds in Cloverdale Indiana. I worked on the grill with a guy we called Devil Dave. We were goofing around one day with the plastic hand puppets that came with the happy meals when one of them fell on the grill and instantly melted into a contorted version of Ronald McDonald. When it was scraped it off it left a faint colorful wavy image of Ronald on the grill. Grilling hamburgers quickly gave way to visual mayhem. We covered the grill with all the different characters and then scraped them off. Hamburgler, the little French fry guys, the big purple guy covered the grill in a twisted psychedelic patterns. Our manager Jeff was a few years older than us and spent most of his shift in his office listening to Mott the Hoople. When he came out and noticed our work he said it was "amazing". For this show he will present a series of new water paintings.
Also presented will be new giclee prints by JAMES SHANNON. James Shannon lives in Provincetown. A tree surgeon by profession, he supplements his income by commercial fishing for striped bass. Underneath all this is a love of the arts, music, poetry and the visual mediums. Photography fascinates me, what we choose to gaze at, then, by capturing it in time forever...it gazes back at us. What we choose to look at and why is interesting to me, a deep believer in the unconscious, I believe our subject matter chooses us. Reasons for this are often speculative at best, and the great mystery is unveiled. In these photos, night, water and homes have my attention. For me the sea is my home, at night the sea becomes even more mysterious and foreboding, This is irresistible to me and lately has my full attention. I suppose the first reaction I have to something is emotional, then by photographing it - sometimes over and over - I begin to uncover more of what may have drawn me to it. After this process if I can come up with one image that represents what I saw...I’m pretty happy. - JS
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