Exhibitions: Current | Upcoming | Past
Exhibitions: Past
Painting Now
Works by Catherine Carter, Candice Smith Corby, Sam Duket, Cristi Rinklin, Blake Shirley, and Laurel Sparks
September 9 – October 21, 2010
Many past exhibitions at the gallery have included paintings – but never has the gallery solely focused on painting as the subject of an exhibition. Given the breadth of the painting experience- the ideas, genres, styles inherent in the medium, no single exhibition can render a complete definition of what painting is – its history is rich and enduring – but this exhibition provides a place for us to begin our dialogue. The exhibition will be the first of several that look at ideas about materiality and representation. The focus of this show is to look at some of the tensions that exist between realism and abstraction.
Throughout history ideas about painting have oscillated dramatically between representation and materiality, illusion and content, and the aesthetics of beauty and theories about art. The artists represented in this exhibition respond to many of these issues in their own works. The layering of information, creation of space, the mirroring of experiences, context, and associations are all, to some extent, subjective and are inevitably reflected in the creative works we make.
Kathleen Hancock
Director
The Artists
Catherine Carter
My art is all about LINE. Line as articulation of movement. Line as found in nature – intricate, flowing, or sharp, like spider webs, waterways, or branches. Line as an indicator of both specific meaning and impressionistic form, as in the contrast between calligraphy and abstraction. Line as a way of exploring and expressing life.
Candice Smith Corby
With the inclusion of found objects, this body of new work is an extension of an ongoing series, Familiar Moments. Typically, I add painted images onto found fabrics, including napkins, placemats, doilies, tablecloths, and hankies, which many have embroidery done by hand. I often think of how these pieces were one of the few creative outlets for women and although there is a lot of care and love put into them, there is also sadness in that exclusivity. I find a personal connection with these anonymous women of another time and era through each of our added embellishments. Another subsequent layer is that each adorned piece of fabric is meant to adorn something else.
The images that I have added to the fabric combine furniture, the human body, and domestic objects. They all deal with conflicted feelings of domestic celebration and potential domestic entrapment and disillusionment. I thought of women I know and how women deal with different roles that aren't always necessarily wanted, but acquired. I considered female stereotypes as a mother and hence "no longer a sexual being," loss of self, and dependency. Collective feelings of abandonment, isolation, and inadequacy can get buried within a well-decorated house. At the same time, the images of beautiful things also embrace the love that is tied into being a caregiver- whether it is of people or objects.
Sam Duket
I make paintings, but the work is generally as concerned with object as it is with subject. This sort of painting begins and ends at the wall it hangs on or the ground it sits on. The boundaries of the piece are as important as the image, if one even exists. The contrast between these poles of object and subject forms the content of my work.
In this series I have crafted elliptical forms from plywood and epoxy and paint. The ellipse can function both as subject, a drawing of a circle in space for instance; and object, the physical projection from the wall, related but quite dissimilar from the aforementioned and presumed circle.
Cristi Rinklin
The ability to artificially create a heightened sense of reality has become so advanced that it permeates every aspect of our contemporary visual experience. From cinema, to gaming, to virtual reality, sophisticated imaging systems have created "seamless worlds" that viewers can psychically inhabit. Powerful viewing apparatuses such as deep-space telescopes, satellite photography, and electron microscopes, have given us visual access to worlds that extend far beyond our corporeal senses. When our ability to imagine visual knowledge beyond what we see with our own eyes becomes augmented by this technology, our imaginary vision for what is dramatic, awesome, and sublime becomes re-calibrated. My work is a response to this condition.
As a painter, I present a pictorial language that is altered by technology, in turn becoming a lens through which we translate our contemporary understanding of space. Imagery in my work is constructed and manipulated through opposing forces and visual impossibilities, via intense color, and optical effects. The seamlessness of layering I employ is a response not only to current widely available digital technologies, but also to the great tradition of illusion in painting. As a historical practice, painting has created a sense of "virtual reality" for centuries; from fresco cycles, to Baroque ceiling paintings, to American Luminism, to the great Panoramas of the 19th century.
These predecessors directly inspire how the landscape is depicted in my work, however, here it is no longer a representation of the natural world we inhabit, rather it becomes a manifestation of desire and memory imposed upon by the artifice of technology. In these worlds, vaporous bodies hover against ambiguous celestial or terrestrial spaces, only to be interrupted by layers of interference in the form of crisply defined graphic details that "snap" the image back into focus. It is my desire to create paintings and installations that seduce the viewer into believing that the impossible spaces that are presented within them can potentially exist.
Blake Shirley
Life is an infinitely layered experience. It's a swarm of trivialities, a mixture of both familiar and the inexorably strange. It's the slippery slope between context and meaning that's in a constant state of play. There are the moments of clarity, if only fleeting, with certainly plenty of uncertainty. There is space. Patterns. There are details of filing cabinets, plaid wallpaper, blue sofas, and blue plastic shoes that go seemingly unnoticed yet inform my perception of reality so thoroughly. We all have filters that distort the way in which we perceive the world, such as the stories that we've been told and stories that we have not been told. The brain processes and saves what it thinks is essential and deletes the rest. We simply cannot take it all in ALL the time. What is between and beside what we notice? I don't remember most of it; the first seven years of my life, my cell phone number, people … Memory is a shape-shifter, so easily distorted. How do we create meaning out of the bits and pieces of information that we process in a world that is constantly changing? The attempt is at times befuddling, occasionally humorous, and frequently scary. If we are, as proverbially stated, the sum of our experiences, yet we cannot precisely remember much and what we do remember can easily be distorted, where does that leave us?
Laurel Sparks
Painting can be hedonistic. I paint abstract portraits of glamour and decay. Decorative and biological elements merge to become icons of excess and marginal beauty.
Venetian chandeliers, Art Nouveau pattern and human bones influence my symbolic lexicon. In the spirit of ornamentation, glitter, papier-mache and objects adorn the surface with theatrical artifice. Pools of chalky paint interlock with sinewy lines and cosmetic smears of intense color. These spectral forms take shape and dissolve within patterned grounds.
Drawing upon early grotesques traditions, queer experimental film and icons of glam rock, clashing elements fuse into an identity that is never fixed.
Biographies
Catherine Carter
Education
M.F.A. University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, 1997
Recent Exhibitions
Walls and Webs, Narrows Center for the Arts, Fall River, MA; Natural Wonders, Hess Gallery at Pine Manor College, Brookline, MA; Sky, Stem, Stream, New England Currents, Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA; Interlacings, Marran Gallery, Lesley University, Cambridge, MA
Awards
St. Botolph Club Foundation, Grant-in-Aid, 2002
Candice Smith Corby
Education
M.F.A. Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA, 2001
Recent Exhibitions
Women of the Cloth, The Art Gallery at Bunker Hill Community College, Boston, MA Dress/Redress, The Women's Studies Research Center, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; Solo Show, Anderson Gallery, Bridgewater State College, Bridgewater, MA.
Sam Duket
Education
B.F.A. Massachusetts College of Art Boston, MA, 2003
Recent Exhibitions
Geometric Abstractions, Still Point Art Gallery, Online Gallery; Homesteady, Machines with Magnets, Pawtucket, RI; Recent Work, Lenore Gray Gallery, Providence, RI; Color Pattern Structure, Umass Boston, Boston, MA; RISCA Fellowship Awards Show, Machines with Magnets, Pawtucket, RI
Awards
Bemis Center for the Arts, Artist in Residence, Omaha, NE, 2011; I-Park, Artist in Residence, East Haddam, CT, 2010
Cristi Rinklin
Education
M.F.A. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1999
Recent Exhibitions
Cristi Rinklin Boundless, FP3 Gallery, Boston, MA; Cristi Rinklin Solo Exhibition, Jancar Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; This is Boston Not LA, Group Exhibition, LaMontagne Gallery, Boston, MA; Behind the Image, Group Exhibition, Suffolk University Art Gallery, Boston, MA; Cristi Rinklin and Michael DeMaggio, Two Person Exhibition, Achilles Project, Boston, MA
Awards
Berkshire Taconic Artist Resource Trust Grant, 2005; Faculty Research and Publication Grant, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA
Blake Shirley
Education
M.F.A. University of Connecticut, 2007
Recent Exhibitions
In Pattern, Mazmanian Gallery, Framingham State College, Framingham, MA; Blake Shirley, Contemporary Gallery, University of Georgia, Athens, GA; Purple and Blender, Curated by Barry Rosenberg, Jorgensen Gallery, Storrs, CT; Radius, Curated by Monica Ramirez-Montagut, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefeild Guild of Artist Galleries, Ridgefield, CT
Teaching Experience
Adjunct Instructor, University of Connecticut, 2006-10
Awards
Full Time Teaching Assistantship, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, 2005-07
Laurel Sparks
Education
M.F.A. Milton Avery Graduate School of Art, Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY, 2004
Recent Exhibitions
Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston, MA; Laurel Sparks, Recent Paintings, Clifford.Smith Gallery, Boston, MA; Biennial Exhibition, Decordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA; Affinities: Painting in Abstraction, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI; Traveling Scholars Exhibition, Museum Of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
