The SCHOOLHOUSE CENTER
Silas-Kenyon Gallery

Presents

JEN BRADLEY
TOM BORGESE
PASQUALE NATALE
DOUG PADGETT
LYNN STANLEY

The Silas-Kenyon Gallery at the Schoolhouse Center is pleased to present new work in the galleries August 24 through September 6, 2001. There will be an artist’s reception on Friday, August 24 from 7 - 10:00 p.m.

 

JEN BRADLEY continues her exploration of process in the studio with a new body of work for the “Studio Wall” at Silas-Kenyon. Mostly black and white, and comprised of images originating from transfers and monoprints, Bradley makes powerful, elegant drawings and paintings. Far from ordinary, her images seem to depict an anti-language or to represent all that a space/ place is without using traditional methods. She defines form by moving within it, her imagery offering clues to her relationship with the paint, pen, and charcoal; a relationship which is so personal to her it becomes universal when viewed.

 

TOM BORGESE’s work is comprised of an increasingly diverse array of media. While each body of work has distinct formal preoccupation, the individual concentrations are linked by a conception of art’s potential to examine and reconfigure value.
In Borgese’s oil paintings he is attracted to the subject matter of
gemstones because they reflect and absorb light within their facets, but also because their depiction affords a comparison between the established value of a stone to the relatively abstract idea of the “value” of a work of art. He also enjoys painting the architecture of Frank Gehry’s museums, seeing these as painting the of a fusion of landscape and still-life
(albeit incredibly complex examples of the two). At the same time, there is a satisfaction derived from reproducing an architecture that houses artwork and secures its place in a
hierarchical value system.

Borgese’s sculptures are made from commodities that have a specific value, ie: collectible toys or expensive gift items. By using these items as sculptural components, he negates their ascribed value while manipulating their forms. Conversely,
equal attention is paid to material that has no inherent value, usually detritus from other artwork or other unrecyclable waste, which is transformed it into something visually engaging in its own right.

People disappear. Objects live on. Pasquale Natale’s sculptures
transform this simple cruelty from a source of immobilizing despair to one of perseverance and consolation. To walk into an installation of his work is to enter a contemplative refuge, the air dusky with arrested time. On the walls are cruciforms ranging
in size from five inches to five feet, composed of antique dominoes; the crosses suggest both memorium and the positive sign associated with HIV.

As a person living long-term with AIDS, Natale makes icons inextricably informed by the epidemic. AIDS is the point of departure, but because his work is about motion and transformation, not stasis, his pieces open out from the specificity of this disease to encompass universal complexities of absence and time. As a child, Natale constructed shrines with fabric and real roses. “I felt most connected with myself when I was touching, working with, and feeling objects.”

His shrines now are switching stations, sites of metamorphoses where poetry, design, and architecture intersect to transform “irreversible absence. . .into tangible presence.” The dots reference the chill march of math and bloodtests, then deny them domination. A back-and-forth contagion transpires between bar graphs, pills, voices, bodies, stars. Metaphors proliferate, infect one another: time spools by, minutes accrue, the viral dots multiply and spread, each representing a lost body, a puncture through which the sonorous light of absence flows. People are retrieved from the oblivion of statistics.

Loss and redemption bleed invisibly from the art of Pasquale Natale. For in his blending of the everyday and the spiritual, of craft and art, his objects breathe an atmosphere equal parts bemusement, gentle defiance, consolation, and reverence for the
processes of life. There will be a catalogue for this exhibition with an essay by Laurie Weeks.

 

Doug Padgett’s Mars paintings invite us to walk for days into a space that is conjectural, to muse toward a horizon that smudges delicately in atmospheric perspective but does not have atmosphere. These swirling dunes and gullies lure the eye ever deeper into the distance, even as their psychedelic palette and patterned surfaces remind us that no such depth is possible. In other words, these glowing wastelands are as much about exploring painting (as opposed to photography, digital rendering, or daydream) as they are about the planet Mars.

Padgett 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-the Mars paintings also incorporate an exuberant, plastic understanding of space born of animation and science fiction, not to mention NASA information as disseminated by popular
media.

Like Bierstadt’s images of Alaska, which described the newly acquired territory to an eager nineteenth century public, Padgett’s views of the Red Planet are being made in an interval between wilderness and colonization, a pause where astrological fiction
shades toward astronomic fact. This particular blend of innocence and experience with regard to Mars will not exist again. This land is, palpably, not ours. But those radiant hills, that soft light, seem so familiar, beckoning toward revelations just over the next rise. Finally, in spite of our impulse to lose ourselves in its “unhomelike” perspective, each atom of this mysterious world reasserts its origin in the primal goop/paint. Its creator is one of us.

 

In her current show LYNN STANLEY continues her eclectic exploration of the artist’s book: books with wheels, books shaped like birds, and ornately illustrated “houses”, as well as the more familiar accordion book, will be shown. Stanley will also exhibit paintings inspired by 15th century illuminated manuscripts; here
she explores Eve as archetype, and the ever resonant symbolism of the fall from grace. The paintings are done on goache paper, wood, and plaster; each displays a rich sense of color, detail and pattern.

 

The Schoolhouse Center is located at 494 Commercial St. in Provincetown’s historic East End Gallery District. Summer hours are daily from 11-10 and always by appointment. For information contact Michael Carroll at 508.487.4800 X 105