June 25 - July 10 2014
Bebe Beard | Linda Leslie Brown | Mary Ting | Steven Baines | Luanne E Witkowski | Jay Critchley | Joseph Go Mahan
Reception Saturday, July 5th, 6-9pm.
Bebe Beard
Love You 'Til The End Of Time: Poly Amorous
Bebe Beard earned her BFA in 1976, her MFA from Mass College of Art’s Studio for Interrelated Media in 1996. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, St Botolph’s Club Art Foundation and the Gottlieb Foundation Emergency Assistance; held residencies at Djerassi Resident Artists Program, MacDowell Colony and the Experimental Television Center in Owego, NY. She has exhibited in a wide variety of venues – alternative spaces, galleries, theaters and festivals from Boston to Seoul.
Beard is a one-person think-tank. Her artwork blends media and combines equal parts creativity and ingenuity. While all artists experiment creatively, not all invent new things. Her creative experiments surprise us. Not only is the end creation unexpected, but so is her investigation. Styrofoam, ball bearings, rope, and rock. Video projected, video on cellphones. Always trying new things, she puts ordinary objects to new uses.
A teaching-artist since 2003, Bebe Beard shares her creativity and knowledge with art and design students at Wentworth Institute of Technology, Suffolk University and School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts. Website.
Linda Leslie Brown
New Work with Holes
Linda Leslie Brown's
Brown has exhibited her work regionally and nationally. Recent exhibitions include the Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham MA, AMP Gallery, Provincetown MA, Bannister Gallery, Rhode Island College, Providence RI and Vessels Gallery, Boston MA. She is the recipient of grants and fellowship residencies from the St. Botolph Club Foundation, FPAC, Women’s Studio Center, Hambidge Center, and I-Park among others. She is represented by Kingston Gallery, Boston, MA.
She is a Professor and the Foundation Studio Program Director at NESAD, Suffolk University. Kingston Gallery & ArtSlant.
Mary Ting
Insomnia Stories
Mary Ting is a visual artist working in installation, drawing, sculpture, video, and photography. Mary Ting’s varied work is layered in imagery from memories, family stories, folk and literary references. Ghosts, animal and human fragments inhabit a realm of temporality and can be viewed as the residue of experience. Ting’s work as a whole is an evocation of loss.
Recent solo exhibitions in the NYC area include Lambent Foundation, Dean Project, metaphor contemporary art, and Kentler International Drawing Space, and at the Wake Forest University, North Carolina. International group shows include: 2011 Art Stays 9 ,Slovenia; 2009 International Women’s Biennale, Incheon, Korea; the Sofia Paper Biennial, Bulgaria and an upcoming show at the Athens School of Fine Arts, Greece. Recent national group exhibitions include: Formed: NYFA Fellows at Westbeth Gallery, NYC; Soaring Gardens: The First 10 Years at Univ. of Scranton, PA; History! Hauntings and Palimpsests at John Jay College; Feminism and the Artist Book at Central Booking; and the upcoming Uncanny Spaces at Bennington College.
Ting is a two-time recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, 2012 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council MCAF grantee, 2010 Gottlieb Foundation individual grant, Lambent Fellowship, Pollack Krasner Foundation, Puffin Foundation and the Ruth Chenvon Foundation. Residencies include MacDowell Colony, Lower Eastside Printshop Special Editions, Dieu Donne Papermill Workspace, Bronx Museum of the Arts Artist in the Marketplace Program and others.
She has a BFA from Parsons School of Design, advanced studies diploma from the Central Academy of Fine arts, Beijing and a MFA from the Vermont School of Fine Arts. Ting teaches studio art at John Jay College CUNY and the Transart Institute MFA program. Website.
"Mary Ting is a second-generation Chinese American artist whose work is layered with stories, glimpses of memories. She has a degree from Parsons School of Design, as well as a diploma in folk art research from the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, and the Vermont College of Fine Art. But despite her academic credentials, she cites her mother as her primary mentor in all manner of arts and handicrafts. Her work has followed a long trajectory of fine art and folk art inclusions, balancing high culture and the work of the untutored. Her personal mythologies begin with feeling but at the same time address art issues having to do with interesting formal concerns and the poetic acceptance of loss. It is said that everyone is a poet at the age of twenty, but to remain one as a mature artist means that Ting sees the consequences of her family history. ... Although my descriptions of Ting’s strong work tends to emphasize the darkness in humanity, there is a subtle but genuinely positive side to her sensibility. Beauty exists on the other, positive side of horror, which she has characterized as the desire to retain a sense of the esthetic amid the rubble of grief. Ting brings about a resolution by creating a fairy-tale imagery that suggests doubt and despair— think of her use of soot—and then suggests a transcendence made more believable by its origins in harsh reality. She moves beyond a personal mythology into a magic realism of the self, in which turmoil and enchantment coalesce into a deep, and true, reading of her person." — Jonathan Goodman. Mr. Goodman is a writer for Art Asia Pacific, Sculpture, and artcritical.com. He also teaches contemporary criticism and a course on the critical history of photography for Pratt Institute.
Steven Baines
We Are All Islands
Steven Baines oil paintings aim to be metaphors for the passage of time, the brevity of human life. They often continue the traditions of Vanitas and Momento Mori paintings. However they are not heavy or morbid. They are optimistic and humorous, like sad, dark lyrics in a catchy lighthearted melody. Sometimes within romantic settings and other times within bright bold abstractions, figurative images have been chosen for their symbolic value to represent the fragile and transitory nature of life: bubbles, monkeys, bones, birds, UFOs...
Baines lives and works in New York City and has a BFA in painting from The School of Visual Arts. He has shown at many New York City galleries such as Stephen Romano Gallery, White Columns, Brooklyn Fireproof, Local Projects, Pat Hearn Gallery, the South Street Seaport Museum and Artists Space. Website.
Luanne E Witkowski
Placed Gift of Place
"Working intuitively to create abstract contemplative pieces rooted in and extracted from landscape and experience, my work is a process-driven visual and tangible response to the experiences of creating and documenting environmental installations. I am intrigued as I translate experience into visual language... from the tiniest grain of sand to mountains of stone and architecture, from a drop of rain to a raging tsunami, the quietest sparkle of dawn to foreboding dusk. Incorporating the very elements that influence and inspire—clay, pigment, chemistry, technology—engages me to embrace the impact, to understand. Traditional and nontraditional media mingle the place in the piece and piece in the place to capture a perceptual and spiritual relationship as locus for recognition of and solace for the self. This traditional American approach to the identification of the individual with landscape is enlarged by a desire to discover and contact the particular indwelling essence or energy of a particular place."
Luanne E Witkowski is an American artist working in a wide range of media and reflective and social practice, mainly in Boston and Wellfleet + Provincetown, Massachusetts with works in collections throughout the United States and abroad. She is a member of the Kingston Gallery, Boston; represented by Hutson Gallery and AMP Gallery both in Provincetown, MA. She exhibits regularly and produces environmental and site-specific installations as well as studio work. Luanne is a member of several artist organizations including the United South End Artists, Mission Hill Artist Collective, and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.
Her Basic Training for Artists and Creative People Workshops (Healthy Artist/Healthy Studio) are offered in collaboration with public and private institutions and individual consultation.
In addition to her studio practice, she is the Communication Design Studio Manager and co- designer and faculty leader of the international travel course Nepal: Art in Social Practice at Massachusetts College of Art and Design; she teaches Creative Thinking in the Critical & Creative Thinking (CCT) graduate program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and is an internet entrepreneur and business owner.
Honors include: Commonwealth of Massachusetts Lifetime Achievement in Art & Commerce Commendation. For more information please visit these sites: Lew Studio, Kingston Gallery, Hutson Gallery.
Jay Critchley
Fire & Ice: Video
BP: Life is Good (digital, 2:34, 2011), is a refreshing excursion on a frozen pond, part of a series responding to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico; and, Global Yawning for a Small Planet (digital, 2:56, 2009), where a “new day is yawning”. Yawning cools the brain. Will a global yawn cool the planet? These two short videos mix it up, exploring Jay Critchley’s ongoing response to our ecological dilemma. The personal is political!
Jay Critchley’s visual, conceptual and performance work and environmental activism have traversed the globe, showing and/or performing in Argentina, Japan, England, Holland, Germany, Columbia and the United States. He was featured in the LOGO channel’s “Ptown Diaries”, and interviewed by BBC/UK. His solo exhibition at Freight + Volume Gallery in Chelsea, New York City received exciting reviews from the New York Times, The New Yorker and the Village Voice.
A longtime Provincetown, Cape Cod, MA resident, he utilizes the town, landscape, harbor, beaches and dunes as his medium. He founded the patriotic Old Glory Condom Corporation, which won a controversial three-year legal battle for its US Trademark. He produced, wrote and directed several movies and documentaries, including: Toilet Treatments, HBO Audience Award at the Provincetown International Film Festival; The Beige Motel project involved encrusting a 1955 iconic, roadside motel in sand – “an A-frame with wings” before it was demolished.
He has taught at the Museum School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and has had residencies at Harvard University, AS220 in Providence, Rhode Island, Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut and Milepost 5 in Portland, Oregon.
Significant awards include a special citation from the Boston Society of Architects for his visionary, environmental proposal, Martucket Eyeland Resort & Theme Park, and, an award from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum/Smithsonian Museum in NYC for his ecological response to Boston’s Big Dig − mega highway/tunnel project: Big Twig.
Jay’s social art practice includes running the Provincetown Community Compact, which works with artists and the environment and sponsors the annual Provincetown Harbor Swim for Life & Paddler Flotilla, a fundraiser for AIDS and women’s health, celebrating 27 years on September 6, 2014. Website.
Joseph Go Mahan
From Provence
Joseph Go Mahan, is a multi-disciplinary visual artist as well as a performing artist. He recently returned from Provence, France, where he spent the spring as an Artist in Residence at “Ateliers Fourwinds” in Aureille, France, situated in the valley of the Alpilles Mountains. The pieces displayed here are a small part of over seventy works that were created during this recent residency. Impressed by the visual contrast of one side of the Alpilles Mountians, from the other side, whereon, depending upon the position of the sun; one side bathed in light, while the other side sat simultaneously in shadow, led to the making of these two specific smaller pieces. The larger works were duly inspired by the Provencal landscape and Natural surroundings. Joseph Go Mahan, can currently be seen performing as King Claudius in Peregrine Theatre Ensemble’s production of HAMLET at The Provincetown Theatre, running through September 4th.
