The Silas-Kenyon Gallery
At
THE SCHOOLHOUSE CENTER
Presents

MELANIE BRAVERMAN
DAVID MAMO
PAUL LEE
MARY FASSETT

New Work in the Galleries

September 20 - October 2, 2002
RECEPTION: Friday, September 20, 6-9 PM

 

MELANIE BRAVERMAN is an artist who almost cannot help creating art because she does not seem to see the difference between that which is art and that which, supposedly, is not. She possesses, in abundance, a quality Flannery O’Connor called “the habit of being”, which, according to O’Connor, involved living one’s life in a particularly deeply immersed condition or, in O’Connor’s own works, being someone “on whom nothing is lost.” This quality of heightened attention is common, according to O’Connor, only among saints and certain artists. “As an artist, Melanie doesn’t pay much attention to boundaries of any sort. She doesn’t acknowledge the traditional divide between the prosaic and the profound, or between art and craft, or even between one discipline and another... I’m not sure how I’d answer, in one or two or even more words, any question about what, exactly, it is that she does. I’d have to start by saying that she is creating a body of work about loss, beauty and transcendence, and that while everything she does has tremendous integrity of its own it is also adamantly part of something larger, something aesthetically and emotionally coherent. Melanie is a novelist and poet, a sculptor, a ceramicist, a quilt maker, and an installation artist, among other things, but a list like that doesn’t in any useful way account for the breadth and variety, or the innovation, of her work.“ ...Work like this is an inspiration, and better than that. It is a reason, an explanation. I find I can sometimes look at Melanie’s work and think, “Right, that’s why we struggle to make art.” Because the world speaks to us constantly, insistently, in a language we can’t understand, and we need work like Melanie’s to help with the unending effort of translation.”

~from an introduction by novelist Michael Cunningham

Artist and writer Melanie Braverman has been exhibiting her work at the Schoolhouse Center since1998. She is the author of the novel East Justice (1996) and a book of poems Lamentations, Benedictions, and Indiscretions (2000). Her new book of poetry is called Red. For this exhibition she will present an installation of new work entitled Fortunes.

 

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 Lee 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.

 

DAVID MAMO presents new work in the galleries. This show begins with the language of pure sculpture: the discussion of space, volume, and image that appears to dance between Mamo’s shapes and simple forms such as a face, mask, or body part. Each piece has a stern hold on its individuality while also making a generous contribution to it’s position in the installation, home or public space. Mamo uses chunky carved stones and a range of color, some smoothed to transparency. They are placed near large standing tree-like forms stripped pale and carved, or burnt and chiseled. These relationships activate an implied context where each sculpture feels like an enlarged relic in a mysterious landscape where the skill of the artist’s hand has changed time from a time.

Mamo’s sculpture is powerful and alive, asking the viewer to consider the gap between usefulness and beauty, power and function, art and the made thing.

 

MARY CROCKER FASSETT is an artist deep in compassion, wide in experience, and rich in wry wit. Born 1915 in Boston, Mary first learned how to paint from her father, Truman Fassett, a portrait painter in Boston, listed in the Who Was Who in American Art as exhibiting from 1911 until 1935. She has continued to paint in her own style for seventy years.

Apart from her father, Mary Fassett is primarily a self-taught painter and printmaker. She remembers a valuable mentor in Theodore Mueller (son of a famous woodcut artist, Hans Mueller) who taught at the Out of Door School in Sarasota, Florida. This was a progressive school founded by Fanneal Harrison, attended by Mary and her sister and some of her cousins. Her painting technique was already developed before she went to Sarah Lawrence College, where she took a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1935.

Throughout life, despite the moves and changes, Fassett has industriously developed her individual vision; variety as well as volume can be seen in her studio exhibiting oil paintings, etchings, drawings, ceramics and a life size sculpture. She is an artist of stern integrity and she admits, “sometimes this meticulous way of working seems too fussy.” It is however the attention to detail that draws the viewer in to look more closely for the painting’s meaning. Hers is an art that provokes reflection.

The Modernist break with the traditional Academy may influence the content but her style is rooted in the techniques of the old masters. Her sensitive paintings reflect careful observation and attention to detail. Her interest in literary narrative specifically about the human condition is apparent in her loosely symbolic paintings, and her etchings. Her work, Prometheus, an etching done in 1997, calls attention to the power of his prophetic vision, rather than illustrating his torture as many artists have chosen to do, Fassett focuses on his intelligence and his bravery in the face of horror.

Her spirit is independent and she feeds it with her own dry wit, and by translating Proust and playing Bach. She synthesizes the exterior realities of place with inner realities of experience through visual narrative. It is work directed toward the interior mind, suggesting an ethics of living an examined life. In a way her paintings have a relationship to Surrealism. She paints dreaming, levitating or archetypal figures. The engraving, Dream of Eagles, invites the viewer to dream with the subject.

Mary Fassett continues to work today at the age of eighty-seven on Cape Cod. In an artist statement dated October 18, 2001, she said, “Today I am still ruled by the decision I made many years ago. This is a commitment to a truthful integrity of vision.” It is the combination of her love of humanity coupled with her literary interests that make her work intelligent and compelling. In the fragmented confused post-post-modern art period Fassett offers a voice of reason, post-cynical, with an informed ethical vision that we can take into the future. For this exhibition she is showing her memorial urns and her etchings. The totemic power of the funerary object comes from the influence of Etruscan, Greek and Roman vessels and sculpture. She captures the ecstatic spirit of living as her figures dance, copulate, and eat of the goodness of life. She is creating a place of remembrance to honor the dead.

Her etchings and engravings show feeling for humanity coupled with classical literary interests that make her work intelligent and compelling. Fassett’s work offers a voice of compassion and ethical vision that we can take into the future.

 

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