| Schoolhouse Press | |||
| The SILAS-KENYON GALLERY | |||
| LARRY COLLINS In the Silas-Kenyon Gallery July 25 through August 13, 2003 Artists Reception: Friday July 25 7-10 PM Artist Talk: Saturday, July 26 Noon Hours: Daily 11-9 Larry Collins has been a professor of anatomy at Massachusetts College of Art and at The University of New Hampshire. He has collaborated on a book with Allen Ginsberg and has illustrated Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s The Hopper House at Truro. His work is in the permanent collections of the New York Public Library, the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, the Boston Public Library, Harvard University and the British Museum.
- LC MARTY EPP is an artist who makes work in painting, printmaking and drawing. Born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1961, she has lived in Massachusetts since 1981 and now lives and works in Boston and Provincetown. Epp is a graduate of Boston University, Lesley College and The Massachusetts College of Art where she received her BFA in painting in 1994. Since graduating from Mass Art, Epp has pursued her art full time and has shown locally, nationally and internationally. In 1998 she won a New England Foundation for the Arts grant in the works on paper category. Her work is in collections abroad and in the US including the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and the Boston Public Library. In the Boston Globe, reviewer Cate McQuaid says: "[Epp’s work has] outlined geometries indicating three-dimensional structures […] making an unlikely combination of crisp and sensuous, plotted out and organic. [The work] marries extremes: precision with chaos and helplessness […]. The drawings in this body of work are made with a variety of inks, watercolors, gouache and washes on pages from old books. The smaller one is a discarded book I found in the hallway outside my studio. The larger, a book I purchased to research codfish. (For the curious viewer, see Note 1. and * below.). All of these pages become small meditations where I am engaged in the world of each distinct page. They are hybrid doodles done in collaboration with what is already on the page, with the intent to create yet another distinct and curious world. The two portraits in oval frames deserve a special mention. Here’s what I know about the two fellows in the portraits. On March 17, 1784, Mr. John Rowe suggested to the House of Representatives in Boston’s old state house, that the representation of a codfish be hung in the House Chambers as a memorial to the importance of "Cod-Fishery" to the welfare of the Commonwealth. The House members approved the suggestion, and Mr. Rowe, being an eccentric supporter of the arts and a statesman as well, paid for the creation and installation of the carved, wooden codfish that was to hang above the chair of the speaker of the house. Over a hundred years later, George v. L. Meyer, then Speaker of the House, commissioned the writing of a document* that would outline the history of said wooden codfish and support it’s being moved to the new state house then under construction. That document was published in 1895 and based on its findings, the carved wooden codfish was deemed important enough to be moved from the old state house to the new, and there it hangs to this day. For these two drawings, I took the portraits out of context by removing them from the accompanying text and then altering their identity by blending the historic aesthetic of the formal portrait with the "doodle-from-the-artist’s-mind" aesthetic of collage, graffiti and irreverence. My framing choice is a conscious nod back in the direction of the formal portrait and is meant as part of the overall intent of the piece. The other drawings have more to do with a given structure in the layout of the page itself and my response to that formal element. I am embellishing upon an already given mark; staking a claim on the page for myself. I think I’m saying to the viewer "this was that but now it’s something else." Note: 1. The Complete Works of Rabelais. The Five Books of Gargantua and Pantagreul, in the Modern Translation of Jacques Le Clercq. First Edition published 1944. * A History of the Emblem of the Codfish in the Hall of the House of Representatives. Wright & Potter Printing Co. (Boston), 1895.
For over 20 years now JASON GAVANN has been using a twin lens Rolleiflex camera with a diamond cut zeis lens, finding inspiration in its square format and incredible sharpness. The stunning color in Gavann’s images is achieved from developing slide film as negative film. This technique is called Cross Processing, which makes a color image that is very saturated in color with soft grain and lots of contrast. Gavann creates themes for his images about role playing, sexual fantasies, as well as simple things like flowers, butterflies and his dog. He has always photographed friends, lovers and the many places he has lived but still does not consider his work totally diaristic. Rather he uses these devices to establish his position and point of view, one that is both generous and voyeuristic. Elana Gutmann is an artist whose experience of place is intimately and ambiently connected to her sense of the abstract. Gutmann has spent extensive periods living and working in Europe, Mexico and Central America, while making her primary residence in Manhattan. These travels resonate within the work, but it is the visceral rather than the literal that inform. One senses the quiet expanse of an ancient mountain vista, the tattered light at the edge of a forgotten shore. Immediately palpable and sensual, yet resistant to explanation or narrative, her lush colors and liminal forms seem to bypass rational explanation in order to affect the body directly, producing in her viewers a sort of visceral knowledge-a certainty gained not through the mind, but through the muscles- known as kinesthesia.
- Frances Richards, Kinesthesia In the paintings on panel, Gutmann's exactingly prepared surfaces-wood panels layered with the traditional gesso mixture of marble dust, titanium white pigment, gypsum, and rabbit-skin glue-allow wax and oil pigment to hover against rather than to saturate the support, establishing a dynamic between ecstatic dissolve and knowing restraint. In both her paintings and her unique works on paper, In addition to numerous exhibitions in this country, Gutmann has shown in Paris, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Stockholm, Valencia (Spain), Pescara (Italy), and in Saigon. Her work is represented in the collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Wingspread Foundation, and the University of Chicago, as well as in numerous private and corporate collections worldwide. Most recently, Gutmann mounted a solo exhibition at the Perimeter Gallery in Chicago, and was represented at the 2003 International Art Fair. This fall Gutmann will present new works on paper at Galerie La Houssaine in Paris and
The heart of the artistic challenge, for me, in making these metal face sculptures, has been to allow the materials to speak for themselves--guiding my hands/eyes to bend, twist, cut, screw or drill--in such a way where the face shapes itself. I pick up pieces of used or discarded metal along my way in my travels if it calls my attention from the ground or the debris heap. Returning home I toss the booty into a crate in the studio. When it's time to work I dump the box of used metal onto the middle of the floor and set about sorting it and looking it over. It's work and it is play. Individual spirits of the shapes and different types of metal are at work and at play--connecting up through the recognizable form of "face", be it animal, human or alien. At times even connecting by giving face to the spiritual, invisible entities, forces that guide us and keep us company here on our journey. On a good day, when I'm working slowly and carefully with a good attitude and paying attention the materials do speak for themselves and the faces come out great. Like Noah's animals lining up two by two to board the ark, rusty bottle caps pair up for eyes, nostrils or ears. Tin can lids ask to be eye lids, jar tops lips. Those are the sculptures that make it into a show. On a bad day, if I go into my studio with bravado and ego or lack of empathy or equanimity to the materials (or to all the human or animal faces I have seen in my lifetime, for that matter) nothing cool happens, no transformations of wastes or guidance by voices occurs, and the day's work is lifeless, ending up in a bin to be taken apart and started over some other day. - PH
Paul Lee is an artist who lives and works in NYC. He studied sculpture at "Lee refers to the camera as Cyclops, the one-eyed monster who eats human
Critics have called Dermot Meagher’s drawings haiku-like, serene, and poetic snapshot postcards. Grateful for the compliments he says, "They’re just drawings, marks on paper. While doing them I invent a language to describe things-- kind of like the way shorthand and hieroglyphics sometimes resemble the object described. Mostly, I draw trying to let one mark follow the other, hoping not to screw it up by thinking too much." Dermot says he often does three drawings of the same thing, one right after the other. "They rarely come out looking alike. It must be my multiple personalities," he adds with a grin. He uses a number of materials: Sumi ink, walnut ink, plain black ink, tea (with and without milk,) coffee (decaf, cream and sugar,) wet and dry charcoal, pencil, watercolor, asphalt, sand and whatever else is within arm’s reach. Most of the time he draws with a pen but sometimes uses a brush, a stick or a finger. He works outside except when drawing still lives. He is fascinated with boats and still does not understand how they stay afloat. He doesn’t want to know. "There aren’t enough mysteries in life these days," he says, "which is why I don’t like to talk about my drawings."
KATHI SMITH is a printmaker and educator of the American genre of printmaking known as the Provincetown Print. She has been teaching and lecturing on the single-block color woodcut print process for the past fifteen years, as well as making and exhibiting her own prints. She was the first recipient of the LamiaInk! Art Bridge project’s Travel Workshop Residency. Her work is in private and museum collections in the United States and internationally. EXERPTS FROM TRIP TO JAPAN by KATHI SMITH It was with honor and delight that I accepted an invitation to teach a white-line printmaking workshop in Kamigori, Japan, a small town off Japan’s Inland Sea. The workshop was held in conjunction with a joint exhibition of artists’ work from the United States under ArtBridge Lamia Ink! and Japanese artists from the Hand Made Culture Group of Kamigori, Japan. Cortland Jessup, founder and director of LamiaInk!, has been building ArtBridges as a cultural and artistic exchange program between the two countries for the past eleven years, and invited me to exhibit with her group. The exhibition was comprised of artists’ works in various media, crossing the cultural and language differences between the two countries and coming together using our common visual language as a means of communication and expression. The printmaking workshop was an offering to this group, whose Japanese artists have been making color woodcuts for centuries. It was my honor to introduce to Japan the American genre of the color woodcut print, a.k.a. the Provincetown Print. In terms of cultural experience, my visit to Japan became so informative to my work that I decided to make that experience the focus of my upcoming exhibition to be held at the Schoolhouse Center in Provincetown in July. The area surrounding Kamigori, a small town larger than Provincetown but with much the same flavor of supportive community and artistic sophistication in a beautiful and natural setting, is mountainous, with a river running through it. We were invited to a traditional Japanese tea ceremony, in this case on the banks of the river, and it coincided with the feast planned to celebrate the arrival of the cherry blossoms. It was a breathtakingly magical experience. I found myself drawn back to nature in a way that we find here when we allow ourselves to appreciate this place without our normal work-a-day agendas. In Japan, as in Europe, and here, if we open our eyes to see them, the sky, free air space, was home to travel-paths for crows and ravens. They seemed to announce every magical moment, every change forewarned. They became constant companions, from Tokyo southwards and return. I watched them, first with interest, then fascination, then with the scientific scrutiny of the disbeliever. They never let me down. The new work, gathered on this trip to a far-away place that felt very much like home, is initiated from the feeling of expansion, of moving forward, yet it also takes what has gone before and returns full circle. The Japanese prints have informed the American prints. My own work, these past three plus decades, has moved through stylistic changes in an effort to communicate a more internalized point of view. The "images from the Inland Sea" series is about expansion; expansion that is acquired personally, through our culture, and advised through nature. It is "real" and "narrative" and uses familiar symbols. It goes beyond the work that informed it, but it comes back to the point from which I started. It is my journey.
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