The Silas-Kenyon Gallery
At
The SCHOOLHOUSE CENTER


Presents


Jennifer Amadeo-Holl
Katherine Aoki
Robin Bruch
Tom Borgese
Vivian Bower
Timothy Ojile
Ladd Spiegel
Kate Wolf

 

NEW WORK IN THE GALLERIES

JUNE 28- JULY 10, 2002
RECEPTION: Friday, June 28 7-10 PM

 

ARTIST TALKS/ GALLERY WALK: Saturday, June 29 Noon

JENNIFER AMADEO-HOLL presents The Hypostases Series, a group of paintings that explore one figure shape, generally in a landscape matrix. Each painting differs in execution but is based on the same pen and ink drawing (in some cases rendered upside-down or inverted). With this new work Holl explores the nature of paint and its ability to create continuity and difference by painting one repeated image and examining the differences and similarities that occur in it’s resulting states.
Hypostases comes from the ancient Greek concept of an underlying reality that supports everything else. The three principles of hypostases are considered to be the Logos or Absolute Source of all; the Divine Mind or consciousness; and the World-Soul or creative consciousness existing in time and form. Each principle emanates the next and has a dynamic relationship with the others: the idea being that as one contemplates reality you will cycle through the absolute, spiritual, psychic (soul or mind), and the material.

Thus the title “Hypostases”. In a “series” each painting exists as a complete entity and yet also functions as a dynamic part of the whole, emanating from and referring back to the same source. In the process of painting the artist might begin with the contemplation of the material and end with achieving an expression of the absolute, or vice versa. And lastly, the contemplation of any work of art might ideally lead the viewer to cycle through feelings about the “distinctness” of things and end with feelings about the “oneness” of things. The title is not so much way to name the paintings as an attempt at acknowledging art as an endless search that departs from material and image into similar dynamic relationships, continually returning to each component that supports the process of making.

KATHERINE AOKI is a printmaker form California. Her work questions gender roles using humor to seduce the viewer, as well as familiar visual formats such as advertising and cartoon styles. The gender information is usually imparted through role reversal or characters placed in surprising situations. Aoki will show works from two feminist themes that she has been working with for about a decade: artwork that seems to empower women, and artwork that reveals the hypocrisy of the recent “girl power” trend. She uses the ad format to show strong women using tools with invented brand names such as “Thundertorque” and “Amazon”. Instead of the bikini-clad bimbos of the traditional tool and manufacturing calendars, these women are capable and powerful with “men’s” tools and equipment that equate strength and prowess. Other images show women who have become superheroes because of their learned vocational skills. They differ from popular heroines because they were not imbued with super powers via chemical accident. Instead, they are just really good at their jobs.

 

ROBIN BRUCH paints relaxed but quietly ecstatic versions of geometric abstraction. The images often recall bold textile patterns or the symbolic meditative diagrams of India called yantras. An association with Western manuscript painting is also present, but overall her work is rooted in the picture of contemporary abstraction.
For this exhibition she will show works on paper that are smart, quirky, colorful, and thoughtful. What is remarkable here is way the image transcends itself. Not only is each contributing factor (color, scale, picture, texture, line, etc.) both simple and fascinating, but the resulting works seem to glimmer as if perfectly nourished by each step of it’s construction. Bruch seems aware of every possibility for the success and failure of an image. Clouds of determination and hesitation may surround her intentions. Yet denying nothing she makes mark after perfect mark. Then again: perfect. And on: perfect, human marks which deny nothing. The final pictures are like topographical renderings the architecture of mind. Maps of non-narrative experiences without ends or beginnings. Her work is a generous reminder that the unknown can be a lot of fun.

 

TOM BORGESE makes art and situations that have an uncanny way of seeming to participate in the architecture and fabric of our times, rather than being made from it’s materials or becoming commentary. For this show he will concentrate on traditional subject matter that has been informed by certain aspects of culture and science. These include the figure (as it is clothed in Japanese fashion, which tends to deal with the body in a particularly formal way), architecture (specifically the museums of Frank Gehry, which have the distinction of fracturing solid sculptural compositions into a surrounding landscape), and finally outer-space phenomena.
Borgese focuses specifically on the third area as he feels it parallels a pre-modern function of art, one which acted like science in it’s desire to explore and understand the then current unfolding world. In the same way a Renaissance artist might have grappled with a physical problem like perspective these paintings represent the philosophical ramifications brought on by knowledge.
How do you think about a dying star? What is it like to know about that and see pictures of it? Borgese gives us an opportunity to consider our position in the unfolding universe.

 

VIVIAN BOWER shows a multi-paneled piece on the Project Wall. Bower began her art career making pottery and then sculpture. The satisfying tactile sensations of sculpture suggest a natural evolution to the way she now uses pastels. Her work has developed a kind of mutuality through experimentation and a search to satisfy the inner responses to what she experiences in the studio. But more than anything Bower shows her power with her marks. They are perfectly arrived. Nothing is extra, yet we know that she has explained everything she wants us to know. The right amount of motion, time, cadence, humanity, color, and density all contribute to a startling experience of intimacy upon looking; one which make s it seem as though the moment she made the mark is not yet over.

 

TIMOTHY OJILE began to paint after college where he had earned a degree in Eastern art history. He spent ten years in New York after which he moved to Hawaii where he had gone only to visit with friends. Instead he stayed and took a job at the Honolulu Academy of Arts as graphic designer for the Academy Theater.
Ojile is prolific and his work is colorful and engaging, attempting to render the motivations and provocations underneath the picture of a painting, using the sensational immediacy that wet paint offers. Color, rhythm, and style easily guide us from left to right, or let our eyes rest happily immersed in the physical sensation of looking.

 

LADD SPIEGEL lives and works in New York. He studied with members of “The School of the South” a Latin American Constructivist Art movement in the 1950’s which sought to incorporate indigenous motifs with geometric abstraction. He is additionally influenced by his work in child psychiatry and psychology. For this exhibition he will show sculptures and paintings that depict objects in space. Most of the paintings utilize old maps as their support. The sculptures are made with polymerized and air-dry clay and are hand-carved wood pegs. They are intended to be manipulated and played with, as well as to function as individual art objects.

“Think of zeppelins, planets, ufo’s, clouds. Think –- and how can you not, these days -- of missiles and bombs. Or imagine a white cloud seen from an airplane. Think of seeds and pollen and dust floating in the air.”

KATE WOLF has been dividing her time between Cape Cod and Seattle for the past nine years, alternating her attention from music to visual arts to writing. She has produced a CD of her original music; she plays in people’s bands and has co-produced their music albums; she’s had a poetry reading; she draws in colorful oil pastels and often photographs herself with friends using a camera that looks down her own arm. Before that she photographed babies, taught middle school English and ran a jazz nightclub in Seattle.

For this exhibition, Kate presents Altered Polaroids. For the past three years, she has mined this format and used it to interpret her affection for Cape Cod’s natural environment. She discovered this photographic process by cutting around the edges of the photograph from her One Step Polaroid Camera, peeling it apart and letting the image stand without its top layer. The development interrupts in a way that lends a hazy, dreamy effect to the images. Sometimes the images crack, which most likely has to do with air temperature and level of moisture. The compositions gain a very personal sensitivity, enhancing what Kate loves most about the landscape and its old dwellings and ships, and leaving them to be remembered in three square inches. Viewers are entreated to step close and remember their own times in such a place.

What’s thrilling is that each Altered Polaroid is unique. Indeed, the images can be electronically reproduced, but there are no negatives, and consequently, no other authentic photographic prints. In Kate's opinion, it's a pretty nice life, running around with a Polaroid and a pair of scissors in her bag, ready to stumble onto the next site that makes her day.

 

 

The Schoolhouse Center is located at 494 Commercial Street in Provincetown’s East End Gallery District. For information or to interview the artists please contact Michael Carroll at 508.487.4800 X 105 or check our web site at www.schoolhousecenter.com