The SILAS KENYON GALLERY
At The SCHOOLHOUSE CENTER

Presents

Liz Carney
David Gibboney
Andrew Thomas

Tom Boland
John Jurayj
Amy Kandall
Paul Lee
Jim Ranns

June 14 – 26, 2002

 

The Silas-Kenyon Gallery is pleased to present new work in the galleries from June 14-26, 2002. There will be a reception for the artists on Friday, June 14 from 7-10 p.m.

 

Liz Carney is well known for her use of rich color, powerful compositions, and her ability to render light. For several years she has made paintings of Provincetown’s changing shoreline and its indigenous fisherman and fleet. Fresh and honest, Carney’s paintings are natural locations where each component lives in engaged harmony with the entire
piece. They are documents, yes but time is determined here by the artist’s body and location. The images are literal - boats, docks, and cranes - yet the paint hangs on the architecture of each piece’s picture as it would on any Diebenkorn or Kline. Each work is kinetic as a family gathering, a city street, or a breathtaking view in the way that it
generates culture and language.

For this exhibition she has painted views of Dorchester. These images are personal in that they explore views of the Carney’s childhood home and neighborhood, continuing her discussion of painting time worn landscapes without excluding art history, commerce, and social concern. Her ability to balance vivid color and strong sense of interlocking space on the picture plane pushes them to become another kind of “impossible landscape”, and we are more human in response.

 

David Gibboney began sketching and photographing friends in Hell’s Kitchen, his neighborhood in New York. His objective has been to capture the sensual magnetism of the classically beautiful young men there. Allowing a nod to gay iconography, photography, and Carvaggio his work goes on to deal with traditional and non-traditional subject relationships. Primarily however the experience of looking at Gibboney’s gorgeous large charcoal renderings of beautiful young men takes the viewer to that secret sexy place where artist, model, and looker are all wondering if they have fallen in love, and what might then be possible.

 

Andrew Thomas displays painted wall sculptures that reflect the influences growing up in Africa had on his sense of aesthetics. He has always been fascinated by fragments of Roman and Carthaginian relics, and also by African sculpted ancestral effigies whose vested magnetic power makes them daunting pieces of art. Other influences have been Mark Rothko paintings and Oceanic Art. Sometimes lyrical, and often intense, Thomas tries to portray what intrigues and fascinates him about the extremes of the human experience
… in distilled, abstracted totemic forms. In the pieces displayed his affinities are to form, balance, and the pursuit of happiness. These works are made with canvas wrapped on “bones” of various shapes that look like odd, big family crests or really cool surfboards made out of fine art. They are smart in their playful discussion of the “objectness”
of paintings.

In Tafoa 1789 (Ode to Cannibalism) the subject matter is more subtle. The piece is based on a character in the book: Men Against the Sea (from the Mutiny on the Bounty trilogy). In 1789 Captain Bligh is cast adrift, on a skiff with 18 loyal men, from the Bounty by its mutinous crew. They subsequently land on the Island of Tafoa, where the natives, seeing that the larger ship, the Bounty, is not in sight, start banging stones together in excitement and frenzied anticipation of the upcoming feast. The idea of cannibalism in the form of the Chief’s wife is abstracted in this piece. Orange and yellow denote warning colors. The form is assertive, and blue is for the sea… on which an inscription reads: …the
secret, the joy…

 

Tom Boland has lived in Provincetown, with his partner Jim, for nearly ten years after moving here "for the summer" from Boston. He has an extensive background in Historic Preservation, objects restoration, and conservation. Since 1994 he has been "scrounging" around for abandoned pieces of furniture that can be revived and renewed, achieving acclaim for his expert use of milk paint in these restorations. Milk paint is a type of paint used in early American times made from materials readily accessible to everyone. Tom's use of images on furniture items, whetherthey be landscape, historic records or specimen renderings have become so popular that he has begun to make them separate paintings, some of which are on display for this exhibition.

 

John Jurayj makes paintings as windows into a world, of lost presences and ghostings. They occupy a space between abstraction and representation where one bleeds into the other, where a narrative flickers and evaporates. They materialize color, patterns, shapes and light into a remembrance of past whose presence still burns. Jurayj’sworks are unforgettable for their quiet strength and undeniable beauty.Looking at them one feels compelled by their requirements to look and remember.

 

Amy Kandall lives and works in Truro, Ma. She is a prolific painter and sculptor. For this exhibition she will present a large soft sculpture of a dress form.

 

Paul Lee’s color-block sculptural paintings and pencil drawings are small and meticulously put-together, much like the man who created them. The scale of Lee’s work can also be explained by the fact that he works off of a child-sized desk; nothing larger will fit in his tiny Chelsea studio-cum-bedroom. In one drawing, a pencil tip pokes out of the lens of a precise rendering of an Olympus camera, and in another, a drawn pair of scissors slice into an illustration of a camera body.

For Lee, the camera is too simple, quick and easy in comparison to drawings, which he labors over. He refers to the camera as Cyclops, the one-eyed monster who eats human flesh, because of the way the camera consumes people and images in instantaneous gulps. The scissors cutting apart the camera body in Lee’s work is one way to dull the photogenic beast’s appetite. Lee even named the piece “The Diet.” But you won’t hear him stating the obvious. “The meaning is visual,” he explains. “If I could tell you the meaning, I wouldn’t have made the art.”

Lee is equally evasive on the significance of his sculptural paintings. In one piece, part of a yellow cardboard grid is removed to reveal a small oil painting of daffodils on the canvas. By the construction of the piece, one isn’t sure whether the cardboard grid is attacking the flowers or the daffodils breaking apart the grid into jagged fragments. “I love trying to take materials back into nature. The drama exists in the gaps between the cardboard pieces,” Lee says. Another canvas is covered in even rows of orange cardboard with a ramp dug out from the middle of the piece. The color is reminiscent of road construction, yet used in a delicate mosaic within a domestic environment. The piece is one in a series of five in the same color, with holes and ramps punched into the canvases, but never deep or large enough for the viewer to see the wall behind them. Lee throws out possible interpretations: keyholes to the past, or a connection between the art behind the canvas to that on the surface. In the still tension and intricate construction of each piece, you can see him think. “The best thing about making the work is discovering something I didn’t know.The more I take away ideas, the more meaning is revealed through the process,” he says. For such self-pronounced small, quiet works, they leave a large
impression. For this exhibition he will show books and drawings.

 

Jim Rann renders situations with good humor and strong references to previous generations of folk, naïve, and Ashcan school painters. This new body of work amplifies the artist’s viewpoint and includes references to art history. Rann continues to charm us with his steady, unedited pictures of life in Provincetown.

Linda Bond’s current body of work combines representational and symbolic iconography with abstraction. A consistent practice of observational drawing has also informed the work. Sky, ocean, forest landscape, volcanic eruptions become symbols of the four elements – earth, water, air, and fire. The human element, often represented in fragments, adds a fifth component. Here she will exhibit one large piece on the Project
Wall.

 

Amy Sabrina will exhibit new jewelry as a preview to her August exhibition.

 

 

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.