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| The SILAS-KENYON GALLERY | |||
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| ROBENA MALICOAT | |||
| The SILAS – KENYON GALLERY Presents RAMON ALCOLEA – ROB DUTOIT – JENNIFER LIESE – WILLIAM O. JOHNSON – ANNE LORD - ROBENA MALICOAT – RON RUMFORD – PAUL STOPFORTH – STEPHEN VASSILAKOS – PAUL WIRHUN Aug. 29 – Sept 17, 2003 Artists Reception: Friday August 29 7-10 PM Artist Talk: Saturday, August 30 Noon
The Silas-Kenyon Gallery presents new work in the galleries. Please join us for this exciting show featuring Provincetown’s finest traditional and contemporary talents.
RAMON S. ALCOLEA is a Spanish born sculptor has lived in Provincetown since 1989 after graduating from Parsons School of Design in NYC. He has received many grants and awards, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and a Massachusetts Local Cultural Grant. The work in this exhibition: "Arcadia" uses a combination of found wood and new wood together in an attempt to create a unit that doesn’t lose the integrity of its parts. If Form follows Function then this work follows the function of it’s own working process. This working process is as much part of the finished piece as the visual decision making that went into its making. Recently a friend who is a photographer and teacher was talking about how she wanted her students to stop just clicking the camera at the hope to obtain something good or even good enough but to try to live in the joy of living in the art process. In my new work I set myself a relatively strict perimeter of size and materials and this forces me to stop clicking the camera and for a while to move along with the work without my already determined end of it.I try to pass the "Object" that it will be and to remain in the process of "Making". - RA
ROB DUTOIT received his graduate degree from Parsons, where he studied with Paul Resika and Leland Bell. He has exhibited extensively in Provincetown, Boston and New York, and has taught painting at Castle Hill Center for the Arts and The Provincetown Art Association and Museum. He will present new drawings and paintings.
WILLIAM O. JOHNSON makes oil paintings that depict both the ordinariness and the heroism of the surfmen of the US Lifesaving Service who patrolled the coast of Cape Cod from 1878 to 1915 in search of shipwreck victims. A journalist by profession, Johnson spent summers in the 1970’s in a shack in the Provincetown dunes and wrote severalmagazine articles about the place. In his research he found an invaluable book: ‘The Life Savers of Cape Cod’ published in 1902. He began duplicating pages of this book in his paintings, using a mix of paint and the printed word to recapture the lives of these brave, simple men. That was 1979, and the painted pages go on. For several years Johnson has envisioned a children’s book called ‘The Orphan and the Life – Saver." Now he has painted some front cover and page illustrations from that still unfinished book, hoping to snap his muse to life.
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. There are often long intervals when I don't have a place to work and so I don't make work, but somehow when the need comes, a place appears, and things get made. In the intervals, I look, and think about how I'll make what I've looked at: flowers and drawings of flowers, animal claws, Pokemon cards, and sometimes clouds. I'm a handbuilder, not a thrower. I use molds, many of them wooden bowls scavenged from the Truro swap shack. From the molds come the bodies, andthen I add legs, and feet, and patterns, and color. Sometimes I think I should invest my little guys with deep conceptual/political meaning, but they smartly refuse. They seem to make people smile, and that's plenty - JL
ANNE LORD has been drawing since she could hold a pencil. When she was still a young student her 7th grade class made brush drawings of each other doing simple poses. She was thrilled with the immediacy and risk of putting the loaded brush to paper. Anne has been living and working in Provincetown since the sixties. Best known for claywork, she handbuilds both functional and sculptural pieces. Recently she has been exploring monotypes, finding that the medium has a process orientation mindful to ceramic glazing and firing. Both are unpredictable and exciting and request the artist to respond with the thrill of uncertainty and discovery. ‘While helping to care for three growing children I found myself returning to my old friend clay as an ally. Working in clay is another way to draw. Hand building clay pieces and firing kilns became as much part of the day as hanging out in the kitchen, cooking family meals and having fun with the kids. I ran a gallery for four years where I could do clay work and show artwork of my own and others.’ - AL Lord is also a persistent participant in community affairs and services. Integrating and balancing the several strong interests in Lord’s life is challenging. She has found that drawing, and its extensions is the thread that holds things together for her, like a benchmark she returns to again and again. For her this is a thrilling and rejuvenating process. We are luckier – thrilled and rejuvenated by the results.
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 peaceful restorative quality that generously 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. Simply put, Robena loves to paint. To be a bit more complicated, process is what keeps her captive as an artist. She 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.
RON RUMFORD is a printmaker and painter who lives and works in Philadelphia. His most recent works are made by consecutive printings of a series of etched and collagraph plates. Rather than trying to resolve a particular image for an edition of prints, exploiting chance and discoveries within the idiosyncrasies of the process was the goal. Shapes were masked out, then printed over with another layer of etched lines or field of color. Rumford was urged on by the surprises that emerged from the etching press.
PAUL STOPFORTH: The consistent evolution of Stopforth's work has led him to develop a convincing form of abstract figuration that displays considerable drawing, graphic and pictorial skills. His new large scale works on paper in which he employs a combination of poured, spilled and vigorously applied color, overlapped by a range of drawn surfaces, constitute a sophisticated and powerful shift in direction. He has not entirely abandoned the narrative structures that consistently linked his work to the social and political concerns of his past life in South Africa under apartheid, but what he has been able to do is to enlarge the scope of that awareness, and in doing so has liberated his work entirely from those constraints. There is a dramatic and complex sense of movement; meaning and time in these new works that appear haunted by a serene ambiguity.
For this show he will present self-portraits completed over the past 4 years.
PAUL WIRHUN believes that eggs are events - not simply objects. They are the confluence of primal life forces, sexual energies, that create new life - new beginnings. The shells are memories of these events. He has worked on eggshells since he was a child, learning the traditional Ukrainian art of pysanky from his mother. Pysanky are talisman created through batiking designs with specific intentions to use the egg's life-power for a desired result. This cultic use of eggs informs his work to this day – he considers eggmaking a sacred magical art. For this show he will present 22 skull eggs in a pile – the politics of our times.
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