The Silas-Kenyon Gallery
At
THE SCHOOLHOUSE CENTER
Presents

Marty Epp
Elana Gutmann
Patti Hudson
David Jones
M.P. Landis
Ron Rumford
Gay Smith

New Work In The Galleries

JULY 12-24, 2002
RECEPTION: Friday, July 12 7-10 PM
ARTIST TALKS/ Saturday, July 13 Noon

 

MARTY EPP presents works from a recent body of prints made using intaglio and woodcut with chine colle. Some have additional handcoloring done in watercolor or ink wash. The images refer to physical atmospheres and weather, especially in Provincetown, and formal issues such as composition and color decisions. However, they also acknowledge the point where all of that takes a back seat to Epp’s intuition, which magically guides her through her process and us into our looking. The wood cuts are derived from a very personal and time consuming method of photocopying cryptic personal notes, enlarging the photocopies, transferring them to a wood block, cutting the block and finally printing it. The block is sometimes printed on Japanese wood cut paper and sometimes on old book pages.

Epp uses the idea of place or landscape as a non-specific space to explore images that upon examination seem personal, intimate or specific. She creates objects with history revealed slowly -- usually after considerable scrutiny from near and far. The images have
conscious and unconscious roots in architectural elements, both observed and imagined, reflecting her interest in structural remnants, evidence of growth and decay, the tension between weight and lightness, and the pull of gravity on silence and sound. Epp’s manipulated images are abstracted so they nudge at and even take on other identities which feel new but which have elements familiar enough to the viewer to spark a nagging recognition.

 

ELANA GUTMANN brings her exploration of liminal form to the Center galleries for the first time, using veils and scrims of scrubbed yet vivid color to evoke "places" both insubstantial and immediate. Manipulating each layer of pigment through alterations of viscosity and tone, she creates topographies of shape and value that insinuate, but
simultaneously destabilize, a sense of landscape.

These experiential locations emerge from a depth of field intuited physically by the viewer, yet contradicted by the frequent use of diptych format-which splits and compartmentalizes the images-and by the hard, cool surface of the panels themselves. Gutmann invites the eye to wander into unlimited and luscious space, only to lure the viewer's attention back to the smooth flatness of the paint. Her exactingly prepared surfaces-in this case, wood panels sealed with the traditional gesso mixture of marble dust, titanium white pigment, gypsum, and rabbit-skin glue-allow the pigment to hover against rather than to saturate the support, establishing a dynamic between dissolve and
restraint. Whisked from a reverie of total access, we find ourselves once more at a remove from the realm of Gutmann's gestures, as if the calligraphic squiggles that often float in the foreground of these works had nimbly reasserted their autonomy. Swooping, stuttering, massing, fading, these marks never quite play figure to some distant ground. But their subtle theatricality orders each composition, activating the apparent tranquility of the "scene" and interrupting the unity of billowing color. As if Chinese landscape had tarted itself up to handle a brighter, hotter palette, like Turner but with the romantic operatics pared away, Gutmann's images are both lavishly evocative and quietly, almost preternaturally private.

"Elana Gutmann’s paintings radiate a kind of wisdom; the intimate relationship of touch over time. Texture dominates, yet the surfaces are rubbed smooth allowing the eye to go deeper in as the surfaces seem to cherish our desire to know them. Whether pushing up from within as a persistent stain, or making bold swipes and splashes across the center of the canvass, as in earlier works, the life force is visceral. There are bite and claw marks, but no violence. More recently Gutmann has made a conscious decision to construct surfaces that will 'take her mark'. The interior language is the same, sweeping curves and fluent lines, but in these multi-paneled pieces the vocabulary is laid bare, let be. There is expansiveness in this quiet terrain, a confidence in these narratives. Gutmann’s mark is indelible and authentic. We know where she has been."

- from an essay by Karin Cook

Elana Gutmann has worked extensively with master printmakers EditionsCillart in Paris, and-in addition to numerous exhibitions in this country-has shown in Paris, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Stockholm, Valencia (Spain), Pescara (Italy), and Saigon (Viet Nam). Her work is represented in the collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, and the University of Chicago, as well as private and corporate collections worldwide.

 

PATTI HUDSON presents a group of masks made from various found and collected materials. The faces she makes are expressive and colorful, but also canny in their ability to capture the sidelong, quirky moments usually reserved for the corner of our eyes, a turn of the head, or an overheard conversation. It would be unnerving if the masks were not so fun and likable.

 

DAVID JONES continues his exploration in paint of location, time and temperature, using components of the architecture of the Lower Cape as visual references and compositional anchors. The images are colorful and sexy, his palette seeming to imbue a cinematic theatricality to his renderings of the physical residue of a journey. He sees these clock
towers and rooftops as things that time passes through or around. With this simple point of view the work becomes as complex and human as a life lived looking, wandering, loving the passing summer.

 

M.P. LANDIS The "Silence" series, in which lone abstracted figures punctuate hazy expanses, is among M.P. Landis' best-known bodies of work. This recent series is anything but silent -- in both origin and ultimate mien. Painted during a springtime East Coast tour with the revolutionary Jump Arts collective, the works in Landis' first solo
show at the Schoolhouse are vibrant records of the responses of one artist (in the company of a poet and three dancers) to nine avant-garde jazz musicians including the likes of Daniel Carter and Sabir Mateen.

Landis has been a devoted follower of jazz – particularly improvisational jazz - for well over a decade. His WOMR program "Bird Calls" ran from 1991-1996, the year he moved from Provincetown to New York in search of a more varied aural palette. Landis had long been painting to a soundtrack; on meeting Tom Abbs, bassist, tuba-player, and founder of the nonprofit Jump Arts, he started collaborating with musicians, painting while they played.

The "live painting" enacted on the seven-stop Jump Arts American Road Project is Landis' most extensive collaboration to date. On any given night, while the musicians did their thing with the horns, drums, strings, and keyboards, Landis did his with paint, china markers, oil pastels, and charcoal, all applied to two large boards, each stapled with a dozen or so variously sized sheets of paper. (Landis likens the multiple surfaces to the many parts of a song.) Add to music and paint a third element -- the audience
-- and here's where it got interesting. "Standing on a stage is not especially comfortable for me, but it's that tension I'm intrigued by," says Landis. "I couldn't do it without letting the music take over."

On-stage, Landis' focus on his "canvases" is constant and absolute. (This for several hours at a stretch.) "In a sense I'm trying to capture the music," Landis says, "and every time it changes -- which is all the time -- I have to react. Often I have to decide whether to take the time to describe a moment that's just passed or instead let go." This "forced spontaneity" is just one distinguishing demand of live painting. With it comes the primacy of instinct over intellect. And then there's the reduction of materials to what's on hand and nothing more. From this deep relationship with music, the impulse of the moment, and
limited means to an end, has sprung a series of paintings that, while rife with the vitality of the dynamic process that spawned them, feel extraordinarily resolved. The marks (brushy strokes; agitated lines; obliterating washes) reveal the gestures (arm sweeps, pressing fingers; circling palms) that we imagine reflect the music (sonic swells?; staccato horn blasts?; rolling bass?). But this is not a direct translation, not a synesthetic exercise. It's improvisation, that delicate balance of constraint and freedom that leads to beauty.

 

RON RUMFORD ~ In his latest body of work, Ron Rumford continues to use the broad range of printmaking techniques at his disposal to create unique works (monoprints) more often than uniform editions of identical impressions, the more general practice of the printmaker. The style of Rumford’s work is equally idiosyncratic, combining the calculated
austerity of the color field minimalist with the engaging playfulness of the Japanese potter. Rumford makes his prints in a most unusual way, substituting for the usual metal plates clay matrices that are made by rolling out the clay into narrow widths with a hand cranked pasta machine. After arranging the sheets he uses a sharp point to incise a
tracery of curvy lines into the soft material, then bakes them in the oven.

Rumford’s affinity to eastern and western models is deeply rooted, integrating the mathematical with the gestural, and delighting with various patterns. After the printing is complete he arranges the paper blocks to reveal the unexpected color, shape, and spatial relationships that combine with surprising linear connections to make this new body of
work so engaging. This exhibition comes to the Silas-Kenyon Gallery from a previous
exhibit at The Print Center in Philadelphia, PA.

 

GAY SMITH was educated at Harvard University, the Findhorn Foundation, and Penland School. She has been artist-in residence at Penland School and Archie Bray Foundation. Among her teaching stints are Penland School, Harvard Ceramics Studio, and Castle Hill in Truro. Her work is exhibited nationally. For this exhibition she will present work inspired by metaphors for growth and decay, tidal patterns, marks that result from erosion, and
skin that appear while in the studio.

 

 

The Schoolhouse Center is located at 494 Commercial Street in Provincetown’s historic East End Gallery District. For more information or an interview with the artists please contact Michael Carroll at 508.487.4800 X 105.