August 14 - August 27 2014

Karen Cappotto | Marian Roth | Judy Mannarino | Forrest Williams | Keith Krisa | Shane Adams

Opening Reception: Friday, August 15th, 6-9 pm.

An evening of readings by Michael Klein, Christina Davis, Alden Jones and David Ryan on Saturday, August 16th, 6pm.

Karen Cappotto

One Summer

Karen Cappotto is inspired by evidence of the handmade in a world where technology prevails and is known for her distinct way of combining vintage materials. Her collage works are, in part, a meditation on the tension between the artisanal and earlier articulations of mass production. Using a palette comprised of vintage periodicals, maps, ledgers, and antique papers, she recalibrates and reframes the sites of a previous authorship into a newly imagined terrain. Karen studied at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Ma., Boston College, and Manchester College at Oxford University.

Cappotto's work is in various Museum and private collections and she has received multiple awards and prizes for her mixed media constructions. One of her most distinct collage pieces, “kitchen sink drama” was awarded joint first prize in the 2010 International Picture Works Competition, the prize also including a national poster/postcard blitz worth over 25,000 euros.

She has been included in the Land and Sea Contemporary Artists, by Deborah Forman published Spring 2013. Cappotto has been represented by The Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, MA since 2002 and also exhibits regularly in Ireland (where she also resides) Palm Beach, and Charlotte, N.C.

Karen is a long time summer resident of Provincetown, and maintains her design and painting studios here. She teaches mixed media workshops privately and at Provincetown Art Association and Museum as well at Truro Center of the Arts at Castlehill during the Spring.

Cappotto's paintings have particularly just come on the radar recently after winning the Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed grant for painting, having two successful Museum shows in a year and launching a new company called Peg + Dick© (www.peganddick.com) a fine art standard collection of prints and trays now picked up by Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams, the boutique chain of stores running across America. Cappotto prints have been been seen in Elle decor, This Old House, 666 Park Avenue (TV), and was featured in Kitchen of the year 2012 in Rockefeller center. 
Website.

"An Abstract Expressionist not seasoned by the dark urban angst of New York, Diebenkorn rained skeins of light upon vistas organized by lines of connection, almost not real, but indicating a yearning to span wide gaps. When I saw this, I saw the logic of Cappotto’s Bridge I, an oil painted on a wood panel showing the sketched span of a bridge connecting the wide blue water to the land masses that were separated by the water. The bridge emerges as scratches asserting the struggle to link, offering a strange association between the blended layering of her collages and the frank geographic connections she makes in her paintings.” - Chris Busa, Provincetown Arts Magazine, 2012.

Marian Roth

The Running Stitch

"My mother taught me to sew with the running stitch when I was growing up in Brooklyn. With it you advance the thread by putting the needle halfway through the stitch behind and bringing that forward halfway again to form a new stitch. Every new stitch is built on the past. My moments of artistic creation are always imbued with essences of the past—my ancestors, my village, my culture, my experiences—woven unconsciously into The Now. Originally made from hand coated silver emulsion on paper and exposed in tincan pinhole cameras or in a pinhole van, the images in this exhibition have been reinvented in the lithography studio. The earlier images--be they the original paper negatives or positives — became the basis for another Now in which feelings are perhaps deeper or more complex. In the time between the original exposures and today I have experienced breast cancer and recovery, endured many loses, begun painting and printmaking and have learned to cherish both the light and the dark, both the positive and the negative, both the figure and the landscape, and both the abstraction and the particular. I call the new images “plithographs”, after the Welsh word “plith” meaning “blend”."

Marian Roth was born in Coney island in 1944. Although as a child she dreamed of making art, she became obsessed with social justice as a teenager in the 50’s and studied political science, earning a PHD in 1968. Her beautiful career as a professor ended in 1973, when her feminist activity lead to her politically motivated and highly charged dismissal. A self-taught photographer and painter, Marian moved to Provincetown in 1982 to live among artists, fulfill her lifelong yearnings, and open her consciousness to the mysteries and joy of living once again at the edge of the Atlantic. Marian has spent the last forty years attempting to express her innermost dreams and feelings through her art. Her pinhole photography—with imagery crafted from tin cans, huts, a travelling van and lately a geodesic dome—has brought her great acclaim. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001 and has received various fellowships and grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council over the last 20 years. Her work has appeared in Eric Renner’s classic Pinhole Photography, in various magazines and journals, and a folio of her work was highlighted in Adventures With Pinhole and Home-Made Cameras by John Evans. Marian has exhibited internationally and taught widely. She makes her home in Provincetown.

Judy Mannarino

I'll Be Your Mirror

"I have been working on a series of paintings that are engaged in the exploration of altered emotional and psychological states of women, coupled with ideas of beauty, attitude and consequence. Each painting is the product of memory, perception and shifting points of view.

I combine humor and dead serious drama in these paintings. The images depict the predicament of women revealing the inner and outer results of “covering up” and “acting out”- through ornaments, disguises and facial distortions, exposing vulnerability and conflict.

I am an abstract painter. I am not interested in the accurate physical representation of the figures in my work. The paintings begin with depictions of various women. I combine and juxtapose facial features and move through the construction and deconstruction of that fictitious reality. The shift is abrupt or slight and in some work, difficult to detect.

The paintings that I make are culled from every step I’ve taken, every sound I have heard and images I have absorbed during both waking and sleeping hours. I lug an invisible emotional tool box around and draw from it when I paint. The props included in my work have strong emotional ties to my identity as a woman. A plastic daisy button I once sewed on a sock puppet when I was a child frightened me so much I had to throw that doll away. That button returns to haunt me in the painting “Wink”."

Judy Mannarino is the recipient of the Pollack Krasner Foundation - Emergency Relief Grant, the Joan Mitchell Foundation - Emergency Relief Grant, and a NYFA - Emergency Relief Grant. She currently teaches at both the School of Visual Arts, NY (1987- Present) and Mary Mount Manhattan College (2005- Present).

Over the years, Mannarino has exhibited her work throughout the world. Her most recent exhibitions include: 2014 “Misrepresentation”, Lesley Heller Workspace, New York, NY; 2014 “Spinning Fiction”, 17 Frost Gallery, Williamsburg, Brooklyn; 2014 “I’ll Be Your Mirror”, AMP, Provincetown, MA; 2012 “Faculty”, Hewitt Gallery of Art, Marymount Manhattan College, NY, NY; 2011 “Threads Of Continuity”, Gallery Bergen, Bergen CC, Paramus, NJ; 2010 “Faculty I, Hewitt Gallery of Art, Marymount Manhattan College, NY, NY; 2009 “Octet”, Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey; 2008 “Fresh”, CAM Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey; 2006 “Diversity”, Sulkin/Secant Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; 2005 a solo show at ELL Art Exchange, LosAngeles, CA; 2004 “New Work”, ELL Art Exchange, Los Angeles, CA; 2003 “The Shoe Show”, Project Room 88, New York, NY; 2002 “New York 1998”, Terrain, San Francisco, CA; 2001 “Imaginative Liberties”, The Work Space, New York, NY.

Mannarino's work has appeared in numerous publications, among them: Kuspit, Donald. “42nd Biennial", ARTFORUM, February 1992, p.121; Richard, Paul. “Abstract and Personal”, The Washington Post, September 6, 1991; Gibson, Eric. “42nd Biennial of Contemporary Painting”, The Washington Times, September 6, 1991; Myles, Eileen. “New York Reviews”, Art in America, November, 1990, p. 205; Gerlach, Gunnar. “New Yorker in KX”, HAMBURGER MORGENPOST, June 12, 1990, p. 33; Mahoney, Robert. “New York Reviews”, Arts, May 1990, p. 110; Hess, Elizabeth. “Judy Mannarino”, Village Voice, February 27, 1990, p.84; Ahrens, Klaus. “Durchblick im Labrinth Der Farben”, art, December 1986, p. 109.

Website.

Forrest Williams

Arrival

"Painting is a personal vision that comes from some inner core of yourself. You can't always explain it because sometimes even you yourself (the painter) don't understand its meaning. The painting is like a piece of something that you spend a lifetime trying to figure out.

I can try to say some things about my work. My paintings are about men: about being a man as I see it and about relationships between men. They depict individual men, but they're not portraits. The men inhabit a particular place, but it isn't real. It's an ambiguous, interior territory, where things are and are not what they seem.

The paintings are staged scenarios, theatrical moments, and the men who inhabit them are the actors. The reality lies in the emotional core of this world — intensely felt but highly contained. My model Lorenzo called it "emotional purgatory.

Although they're a group of anonymous men, they're at the same time self-portraits I suppose. Perhaps these are worlds of their own making — worlds with outsides and edges and unknown terrains beyond. This is the region where desire and doubt, longing and reticence, intimacy and uncertainty coexist. It speaks of absence as much as presence."

Forrest Williams has shown his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the US and Canada since the early 90s. Most current solo exhibitions include: 2010 "Crossways" Marx & Zavattero, San Francisco, CA; 2007 "Porches" Heather Marx Gallery, San Francisco, CA; 2005 "Passage" Heather Marx Gallery, San Francisco, CA; 2002 "Interiors" Heather Marx Gallery, San Francisco, CA; 2000 "Pilgrims" Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR; 1999 "Vigil" Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR; and 1999 "Go Figure" Wallspace, New York, NY.

Recent group exhibitions include: 2013-14 "Hello, Goodbye" Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco, CA; 2012 "Two Loves – Sex, Art, and the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name" Kymara Gallery, Biddeford, ME; 2012 "SEEN" Visual Aid Gallery, San Francisco, CA; 2012 "New York Academy of Art Sixth Annual Summer Exhibition" Flowers, New York, NY; 2011 "Sea Change" Marx & Zavattero, San Francisco, CA; 2011 "The Elegance of Refusal" Gensler, San Francisco, CA; 2009 "Seldom Seen" Leslie/Lohman Foundation; New York, NY; 2009 "Figuratively Speaking" Lyons Wier Gallery, New York, NY; 2009 "Then and Now: Site Specific Works in Commemoration of the 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots" The LGBT Community Center, New York, NY; 2008 "Color Key" The Painting Center, New York, NY; 2005 "Point of View" Cypress College Fine Arts Gallery, Cypress, CA; 2005 "Human Figure / Figure Humaine" Galerie de Bellefeuille, Montréal, QC; 2004 "Art 2004" Galerie de Bellefeuille, Montréal, QC.

Articles and publications that have featured Williams' work have recently included: 2012 Keyes, Bob "Exhibition Explores LGBT Art", Portland Press Herald, August 5; 2010 O'Hern, John "Forrest Williams: Oblique Relationships", American Art Collector, November, pp. 152-153; 2010 Eisenhart, Mary "Don't Miss: 'Forrest Williams: Crossways'" San Francisco Chronicle (96 Hours), November 25, p. 17; 2010 Wood, Sura "What's Up at the Galleries This Fall?", Bay Area Reporter, September 2; 2009 O'Hern, John "Formative Moments" American Art Collector Magazine, November, pp. 50-51; 2008 Foss, Paul "On the Back Porch: An Interview with Forrest Williams," artUS Magazine, No. 22, Spring 2008, pp. 50-53; 2007 Young, Paul "A Brutal Kind of Beautiful," Los Angeles Times, February 1, pp. F10-11; 2005 Bing, Alison "Forrest Williams: This Close" (Porches catalog essay); 2005 "(Green) Alley" (reproduction), Bay Area Reporter ("Out & About" section), March 31, p. 37, 2004 Harper's Magazine, (reproduction), January, p. 24. Website.

Keith Krisa

The Way I See It

"I use a Diana (plastic camera) to create my images. Film is exposed in the camera, the developed negatives are digitally scanned and then printed with an inkjet printer using archival pigment inks.

On a technical level Diana cameras are cheap, all plastic, medium format cameras. It was the discovery of these toy cameras about 30 years ago-that opened up the world of creativity for me as an photographer. Because of the lack of quality of the camera body and lens, the images are often distorted and out of focus in some areas. Light leaks often occur, as well as other unpredictable occurrences, and images look like they are coming up from under water or out of a dream. It is this serendipity that brings my images to life. I was able to free myself from the conventions of a sharp and precise lens. This enabled me to be more spontaneous in my shooting and visceral with my content. The simplicity of the camera allows me to be entirely in the moment creatively."

Keith Krisa's photographs, mostly taken with a Diana camera, are testament to his particularly personal vision of the world around him. They are being collected and embraced, as well, for their dream-like quality. This new grouping of images are, in part, from his ongoing Living Room Series, which was exhibited here at AMP Gallery in 2013. Keith lives and works in Cambridge, MA. In addition to his photography, he also works as a bioengineer.

Shane Adams

Out the Window

"In april of 2009, I started work at a Bed & Breakfast as a live-in housekeeper in Provincetown, MA. A tiny room on the third floor of the house (approximately 8’ wide x 14’ long) became my home for the next four and a half years. Moving in as a single man with one small desk, a twin size bed and a view of the Provincetown harbor - my life was about to change in ways that I could never have possibly imagined.

Living in New York City for ten years prior, I was always trying to find outlets to be creative. My head constantly buzzing with ideas and always feeling like a catalyst for everyone else “doing” and me just “dreaming” about making my own art. I have known for most of my life that there was a creative voice just screaming to get out. I even took a few photography classes thinking that is what I needed to get started. Unfortunately, those ten years were all about finding myself as a newly “out of the closet” gay man and included a journey through drugs and alcohol which took me down a road of self-destruction and self-renewal.

It was not until I got sober and moved to Provincetown that I was able to ground myself enough to be open to a new life as an artist. I stared out that small window in my room; out at the ocean and listened for that voice that I knew was there. The voice inside began to speak ... and it spoke loudly. I have since had a show for my paintings, donned the town with my performance art and knitted my way into the hearts of many other creative locals.

In April of 2014, I decided it was time to leave that cozy B&B and open my universe up a bit further. While that window is no longer there for me to stare out of, I will always be grateful for that time in my life. I felt it only befitting to capture and share that window with others. This body of work represents the happiest and darkest of times in that room. It represents my sobriety, my process of letting go of fear and pain and embracing my true spirit as a creative person. It represents a new life with a husband. It represents all things glitter and rainbows and is a thank you to all the unicorn warriors that I have met thus far."

Shane Adams Shane Adams was born and raised in the South. He left home in his twenties to travel the world and work on a cruise ship. Ultimately those voyages landed him in New York City where he settled for ten years and began exploring his creative process by donning drag. He was inspired by such creative forces as The Cockettes and Performance Artist Leigh Bowery. After ten years in New York City he migrated to Provincetown, MA and it was here that he made a commitment to bring his unique style of drag into the Fine Art world. His first painting show in 2009 called There is no Shane, only Shania, represented a years worth of self portraits in drag that he re-created as abstract paintings. In 2010 he shot 18 Ghosts, a short black-and-white silent film as Shania. In 2011 one of his paintings, Gender Bent was featured in Australian Vogue Living and was selected for an exhibit and show presented by TREE at the Charles Lahti Studio in Brooklyn. In 2012 Et Alors Magazine, the first glossy Gay, Drag & GenderBending style magazine, did a feature story and interview highlighting Shania's performance art. Also in 2012, Shania was featured in the film trailer for the Independent film, Spiral. It was at this time that he moved to Los Angeles, California and launched his creative brand Maid by Shania and where he finished his first photography/video project entitled, Bus Talk. In 2013 he packed up his belongs and his husband and returned to his creative center, Provincetown. In the winter of 2013/2014 he completed his second photography project - Out the Window. In the spring of 2014, he published his first coffee table book from this body of work and the photographs you see here, are from that book. He will also be featuring a larger body of work from Out the Window in 2015 here at AMP: Art Market Provincetown. He is currently the Associate Director for On PAR Productions, LLC and is working on a short film called The Making of a Glitter Beard Drag Queen and another coffee table book entitled, Shania: You've Been Served!.