October 10 - December 7 2014

Diane Ayott | Susan Bernstein | Melanie Braverman | Barbara Cohen | Mary Deangelis | Jane Edgell | Jennifer Engel | Victoria Haynes | Marsha Lieberman | Shelley Marlow | Jicky Schnee | Amy Solomon | Lisa Turngren | Champa Vaid | Mo Ziochouski

Reception: Friday, October 17th, 6-9 pm - Women's Week

Documentary Film, clips & discussion with Rebecca Alvin. Saturday, October 11th, 7 pm.

Double Feature: Hot, Deep & Connected, The Art of Sex in Partnership: A Conversation with Felice & Constance + Tease It Out: Readings by Anna Watson & Sacchi Green. Tuesday, October 14th, 4 & 5:30 pm.

Readings by Melanie Braverman, Olga Broumas, Shelley Marlow and Hilde Oleson. Monday, October 13th, 4 pm.

'This Is Not the Ken Burns Effect! Enacting the Archive', Videos and Art by Sam Smiley; plus a Talkback with Sam Smiley and historian Denise Doherty Pappas. Saturday, October 25th, 5 pm.

Diane Ayott

One

The complex paintings and works on paper composed by Diane Ayott show strong evidence of engagement in the contemporary language of abstraction. Layered combinations of markings – dots, dashes, lines, slashes, circles, ovals and loops – contribute to overall spatial patterns and color shifts. Pleasure in the visual is made clear in her work and invites repeated viewing.

Diane Ayott has exhibited extensively in New England, New York, Chicago, and abroad. Her work is represented by Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in NYC. Ayott’s paintings are represented in many private, contemporary collections. She holds an MFA in painting from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and is a full professor at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA.

Recent exhitions include: Piece by Piece, an exhibit of Collage and Assemblage from the Collection of the US State Department Art Bank Gallery, 2011, Washington, DC; Beyond Measure, The Gallery at Barrington Center for the Arts, Gordon College, Wenham, MA; Diction: New Work, 2010, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York, NY; Boston Color, 2008, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York, NY; From Paintings to Drawings, 2008, Hallspace Gallery, Dorchester, MA; Moment to Moment, 2006, Danforth Museum, Framingham, MA; and By Arrangement, 2005, Concord Art Association, Concord, MA & Jane Deering Gallery, Gloucester, MA. website.

“Ayott’s exceptional skill as a colorist is evident in the gorgeous painting Floater; the dazzling peacock blue and orange creates a jewel-like opulence reminiscent of the geometric abstractions of Gustav Klimt.” — Susan Mulski, Art New England, Nov/Dec 2010

“Ayott’s lines and marks come into focus as we near and the penmanship takes on a precision. But Ayott’s precision avoids rigidity and is often a loosely applied geometry as evidenced in her method of patterning. There is a sense that the work is both a study and a doodle, serious and curious; a habit that enjoys fleshing out the meaning by writing it out over and over again. As viewers we read the results, the surface, the play of line, color and the again and again.” — Kathryn Markel, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York, NY

”We are held not only by the perfection of surface, but also by the sheer ability of these paintings to speak. In much the same way that a child will become delighted with one sound, Ayott can fall in love with a single shape, which she then repeats with various levels of intensity... Ayott is capable of telling a number of stories that involve careful looking, each of which can be privately embraced and then retold by the viewer.” — Katherine French, Director, Danforth Museum

Susan Bernstein

Queries

This piece is a temple dedicated to the beauty of asking questions. The value of asking a question lies not in the answer but the process of trying to get to the heart of the matter thru open questioning. Questions are like yeast that elevate our thinking. Asking questions takes strength, intelligence and a willingness to sit in a space of not knowing.

Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientific thinkers of all time, put forth his ideas not in the form of pre-conceived hypotheses but queries. The final edition of his third book The Queries contains thirty-one rhetorical questions (mostly posed in the negative) that read like poetry: “Are not the Rays of light in passing by the edges and sides of Bodies bent several times backwards and forwards, with a motion like that of an eel?” He set a scientific standard of “a kind of exploratory natural philosophy in which the primary source of knowledge was experiment.”*

I made a work that I want people to be able to directly engage with. There is paper, pens and the invitation to seek a question you have that can be practical or philosophical, whatever is present for you in this very moment. One might be confused that the w.w.w. is a place that people can post and blog thoughts and questions which somehow connects us all together, but we are missing something vital when what we share it is not in a tangible, touchable presence.

Susan Bernstein lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is a resident artist in Studio 13 at Mudflat Pottery in Somerville. Her work is all hand built, using coils of clay or slab to build up the piece.

"I have been so inspired looking at books and films of potters around the world from South Africa, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Ghana, Mexico, India, Korea - I watch their hands thumb a big coil of soft clay onto the rim of a pot and I recognize a kinship in this common craft language. In our culture, words usually dominate the areas of intellect, emotional fluency, even spiritual questing. In connecting our hands to clay, there is the opportunity to bypass the mind and linear thinking. We can link to an ancient human craft that transcends time and space. This is the landscape I am most at home in, where touch is the primary language and knowledge and memory resides in the fingertips."

Melanie Braverman

Suffered for Beauty

I like things that are imperfect and in which the hand that made them is visible. I like art that is light (as in not weighed down by its own import or seriousness). If I make something I don’t like, I take it apart and make something else. Transparency, vulnerability, and humility as virtues, not flaws.

Melanie Braverman’s visual work was most recently included in the Queer Threads exhibition at the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York, and is now in the museum’s permanent collection. She is also the author of the poetry collection RED (Perugia Press, 2002), winner of the Publishers Triangle Audre Lorde Poetry Award. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, POETRY, and other journals.

Barbara Cohen

Works on Sail Cloth

Barbara Cohen received her B.F.A. from Tufts University and the School of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with earlier studies in art history at Oxford University. She has received numerous grants including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Artists Foundation Mass Fellowship Program, Polaroid Artist Support Program, Blanche E. Colman Award and grants from the Cambridge and Massachusetts Arts Councils. She received an artist’s residency from the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Barbara has exhibited her paintings and sculpture in numerous galleries and museums across the country.

Barbara is the author of the current book, Venezia: Essenze, 2013, a series of painted Polaroids of Venice, Italy, published by the Italian editor, Damocle. She is also the author of New York Love Affair, 2010, a collection of painted Polaroids of New York City, and Dog in the Dunes Revisited, 2005, published by Fields Publishing. The original Dog in the Dunes, 1998, a series of painted photographs of her black Labrador, Gabe, set in the dunes of Cape Cod, was published by Andrews McMeel. Provincetown ‘East West’, a selection of her painted Polaroid landscapes of this small seaside town, was published in 2002 by University Press of New England. Her other books include, Woman's Best Friend; A Celebration of Dogs and their Women, 1996, published by Little Brown and Company as well as, Dogs and their Women, 1989, Cats and their Women, 1992, and Horses and their Women, 1993. Website.

Mary Deangelis

Off The Rack

Mary Deangelis has been a clothing designer for 26 years and is now trying to figure out the rest. website.

Jane Edgell

Stacks

"I am someone who somewhat obsessively needs to create an interesting and aesthetic sense of objects. I find, collect, and then edit things that exude ‘previous ownership’, generally things which have been cast off as no longer useful. I like the architectural structure of stackable or uncluttered objects or the dichotomy between the neatness of the stacks and the non-uniformity from which the stacks are made.

I inadvertently started objectifying books about two years ago on a visit to a Cape Cod transfer station (the dump) when I open up a very worn, but otherwise average seeming, old bible. The was a plaintive, pleading letter inside written to the writer’s god asking for relief from the inescapability of loss. It was too sincere and intimate to ignore. Why did I have to reach the length of my arm behind a shelf to reach the slouched book? And so it began. I like the process of finding what emerges, whether it be the ephemera found inside, the way volumes look together, the social commentary or interests of a geographic region, or of American culture in the 20th Century, almost more than the collections themselves. Once they make sense it’s time for me to change them."

Jane Edgell currently lives and works and observes in Provincetown MA.

Jennifer Engel

Don't Ruin It

These conceptual artifacts reflect the practical, the political and the precious. The words and objects are an offering of apology, a declaration of hurt feelings and a cathartic exercise in response to a conflict or event. Historically, hand stitching has been the vernacular, recording familiar feelings and painting familiar images. The finished product becomes a meditation on a moment and embraces the accuracy and misnomer of a place in time.

Jennifer Engel makes her living decorating sets for Film and TV. She is currently in Baltimore working on HBO's VEEP.

Marsha Lieberman

Landscape Within A Landscape

"I grew up in Revere, Massachusetts and spent much of my childhood at the beach. The ocean and the sky were constant companions. I studied both painting and dance as a child and returned to visual media after a nearly three decade long career as a dancer. That career left me with a lasting interest in pattern and in the structure of space.

Landscapes Within a Landscape is a series of small and very small mixed media paintings made of two superposed landscapes at very different scales.

The background landscapes are underpainted in gold, silver, bronze, or copper metallic paints. This layer is then painted over with earth-toned oil paints and incised with a sharp implement to create an irregular grid structure. The colored pulses are added to complete the background atmosphere. The background landscape is of ambiguous scale.

The foreground landscapes are a combination of oil and metallic paints, pencil, ink, wire, and cotton or metallic thread. These paintings are composed in many layers of paints varying in both consistency and degree of transparency. These are meant to resemble places we have actually been or seen and include recognizable detail, from blades of grass to skies.

I always work on at least two pieces (and usually many more) with the same subject, at the same time. This way, the subject always pushes me much further than I ever imagined I could go.

My work has been exhibited and reviewed in regional and national juried shows, galleries in Western New England, France, and Turkey. I am currently represented by Gallery 37 in Milford, Delaware."

Shelley Marlow

Hope Street

Shelley Marlow's first novel Two Augusts In a Row In a Row will be published by Publication Studio, Portland, Oregon, February 2015. Marlow is fiction editor for Ping Pong Magazine, out of the Henry Miller Library; collaborates with performance artists; exhibits paintings and drawings; and writes novels. Marlow's writing and visual art are published in the St. Petersburg Review; LTTR (Lesbians to the Rescue); Drunken Boat; saint-lucy.com; Zingmagazine; Allupinit; Log Illustrated; New Observations; and in various art catalogues.

"Marlow’s true story of self-discovery takes one on a trip further out of the ordinary, bending one’s mind more than much fiction." about Notes In Kyzyl, Anne Wolfe, New Pages

Marlow wakes up in the middle of the night thinking about how all colors and their interrelationships are proof of the existence of magic.

Jicky Schnee

Mend and Rend

For my works in the Pianoforte; Tempanissimo series, the title of each song acts an emotional starting point; each holds sweet and naive, but also cloyingly sentimental, cliché truths that derive from universal nostalgias. This duality reveals the changes of forms of expression over time but also demonstrates that the truths of human living, loving and sentiment are ever enduring and unchangeable, unaffected by the fashion of each era’s form of expression. The scrolls proved to be linear, narrative and a visually cohesive marking of a story in time. I use the primitive markings, line, circle, and cross, as an acknowledgement of each songs’ lyrics most basic and universal message, to distill each song to its own greatest simplicity.

Jicky Schnee received her B.A. in Art and Art History from Rice University and studied drama at BADA in Oxford, England. She works as both a painter and actress. Her most notable roles have been a supporting role to Marion Cotillard in The Immigrant which premiered in NYC in April 2014, the lead role in The Afterlight also starring Rip Torn and the title role in Arabian Nights at The Classic Stage Company in NY. Jicky lives and works between NYC and Woodstock, NY. website.

Amy Solomon

Altered

Employing a variety of mediums including acrylic, medium, watercolors, sharpies, and pencils, a new context begins to appear in Amy Solomon's work that is initiated by found discarded photographs. The works are scratched with razors, rubbed with sponges, immersed in water and then sewn together to create a sense of age, place, romantic imagery, relativity, and change. Thoughts of 18th century landscape painter Corot surface in Solomon's process, along with a love of pure color, form, and the spontaneity of natural elements.

Amy Solomon is a painter and mixed media artist who has been scratching with razors on canvas and building on painted surfaces with wax and various mediums found around the studio. She has a BFA from Mass College of Art and Design. She has been teaching art in and around the Boston area for the last twelve years.

Lisa Turngren

Mark Out

"My mixed-media work, created in a series, is process oriented and investigates personal and social gender constructs and the patterns they create. Along this continuum exists an exploration of the inheritances and legacies across generations, through the passing down of objects and unconscious processes, investigating what these objects and processes symbolize personally and culturally while examining the social norms/constructs, ideals and traditions bequeathed overtly and implicitly. My work explores how these symbolize and form gender ideals, stereotypes and traditions that relate to shared experiences perhaps outside of a perceived norm and fundamental awareness. Viewers are encouraged to investigate their collective histories and personal narratives and recognize how these intersect to form a relationship with or disconnect from societal and individual patterns that are created and repeated."

“Lisa’s collaged paintings are reminiscent of Robert Rauschenberg’s “combines”—an acknowledged influence—in their energetic mixing of recognizable materials and evocative abstract compositions. Her use of domestic items, especially sewing patterns, as well as found text shows she has another forebear in Berlin Dadaist Hannah Höch, whose small collages made of similar elements interrogated Weimar Germany’s media construction, the Modern Woman… Lisa’s creations extend these discourses as well as hit other notes, from nostalgia to irony, while they invite the viewer to consider his or her personal associations with the media and imagery.” - Margo Hobbs, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Art History

To hear an interview with Dr. Hobbs about Turngren’s work please visit: website.

Lisa Turngren is a New York City–based mixed-media artist who holds a BFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art/Temple University. Her post-graduate studies include an MSW from Fordham University. Turngren went on to practice psychotherapy as an LCSW specializing in children and adolescents, while continuing studies in child and adolescent psychoanalysis and art therapy, all of which inform her current work. She most recently received two consecutive grants from the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance, a Puffin Foundation grant and was awarded a solo exhibition at Martin Art Gallery/Muhlenberg College. Turngren has shown her work in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. website.

Champa Vaid

Dreams and Memories

"I started writing poetry at the age of 60, at a time when most people stop. I could tell you that I started writing late because an Indian woman of my generation with kids raised them until they were done with their studies, and had no time. That is a convenient explanation. But the fact is that creativity has its own clock. It does not see age, or being overworked, or not getting enough time to be with oneself. When it comes, it comes.

Thus I came to painting very late in life, at the age of 76. The reason was, ironically, my declining health. I could not think or write, so I started drawing on paper. In our family, nobody was a painter. But I had the urge to create, so I took to colors and paper, and then to canvas. Though I had no formal training, I spent a lifetime seeing art and artists. My husband is also a writer and our passions have always involved art, music, literature, dance and the world of ideas. Our closest friends are poets, writers, artists, dancers and playwrights. I think that context of friendships, exhibitions, museums, readings, concerts and support informs my work.

Today, I am still painting, I breathe through them, continuing to produce a lot of work. There is something that pushes me through to keep going regardless of age. I call it a dialogue with myself. First, it was with words, and now, it is with colors. Colors are my best friends. I talk to them in their language before they become one with me during the time I am working. They remain with me in my dreams also. And I want to share my enthusiasm and the language of colors with others. Whenever I get waves of energy, I immediately transfer them to my painting. The choice of the colors becomes automatic. They surprise me in the end. I do not want to say much about my own work except that it gives me a reason to live and happiness."

Champa Vaid is an abstract painter and poet who lives and works in Texas. Born in 1930 in India, she started painting in 2006, at the age of 76. Her bold and confident acrylic based paintings are characterized by energetic strokes, experimental style, and a unique blend of color, texture and emotion. Vaid’s paintings were featured in three group shows held in New Delhi in 2007. She has had four solo exhibitions in India, two in Delhi—at India International Centre and Ekatra 2008; one at the Alliance Francais in Bhopal 2009, one at Indore sponsored by Sanskriti Prashad, also in 2009. The Art Market Provincetown exhibition was her first solo show in the United States in July 2012.

Champa Vaid is the author of five books, including four collections of poetry in Hindi and one collection in English titled, The Music of Bones (New Delhi: Vani Prakashan 2011). Educated in India (M.A. in Hindi from Panjab University) and the U.S. (M.Ed. from Boston University), she is a mother and grandmother, and married to the Hindi writer Krishna Baldev Vaid.

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