September 4 - September 20 2015
Barbara Cohen | Anne Corrsin | Barbara Hadden
Opening Reception: Friday, September 4, 6-9 pm.
An evening of readings by Michael Klein and Elizabeth Bradfield. Saturday, September 5, 7:30 pm.
Barbara Cohen
Current Model: New York City Dumpsters
“Looking back over the years of my career as a painter and sculptor, a common denominator for my imagery continues to be the square and the circle. Constantly recycling textural surfaces of previous paintings, I begin each new work with a trace of the geometric forms that came before: a gentle pentimento lifting the inner spirit to what is yet to be.
This sampling of my own visual imagery, blending tones of past and present, is the motor that keeps me charged to take simple, everyday objects to their point of exhaustion: working line and color to what feels like a temporary conclusion. And just when I think I’ve finished, the dance continues for another round; an even more relentless stretch of mind and matter until the hunt for ways to see a particular form – my own Platonic quest – mysteriously ends, only to be replaced by another ubiquitous yet singular item.
Most recently, it was the almost empty traces of the Venetian Sling, a commonplace yet culturally unique part of Venetian landscape that embodies positive and negative space. The more I worked its form, the more possibilities possessed me. The Venetian streets are also filled with small, colorful “pipes”: their blending of circle and rectangle caught my eye as a subject for exploration.
These days New York City trash containers on wheels are my passion, those every day, mostly overlooked and none too tidy boxes that get towed from demolition sites to incinerator vehicles.
The boxy, rusted, colorful figures bring back the colors and shapes of my Pennsylvania youth, box carts at the Hershey Amusement Park fair grounds or Wheelie toys zooming down roller-coaster ramps, with their tones of indigo blues, forest greens, fire engine reds, sunflower yellow and mandarin oranges: flickers of color memory lights the spirit against the hardcore edge of New York.
The dumpsters stand tall, slender and strong regardless of how they are tossed and torn around. I’m taken by their holding of tons of waste and useless debris. The hard-hat fellows on the job “don’t get it,” but they generously assist in posing the armatures for the camera. How could a tossed-around piece of street furniture get a rise so high? Perhaps that’s the definition of my work: to be captivated, caught up in a quest. The process of editing such basic shapes follows its own logic, as the work unfolds for weeks, months and years on end.”
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.
Anne Corrsin
The Reverie of Opposition
"My work is focused primarily on sculpture, installation and drawing. I look to strike a balance between formal and conceptual concerns. Materials I use vary and the choice (paper, glass, metal, textile, wood) is part of the process and the idea.
The phenomenon of opposition is an area I have been investigating: natural vs. industrial, female vs. male, obvious vs. hidden. Often it is about the necessity and tension in these relationships."
Anne Corrsin is a multi-media artist based in Somerville, MA. She received a BFA in Sculpture from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Boston. The grants and fellowships awarded to her include an Individual Artist Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council (through Somerville Arts Council), a Professional Development/Travel Grant (to study Glassmaking and Design in Copenhagen and Ebeltoft, Denmark) from the Boston Athenaeum and an Artist Residency Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center.
Anne’s work is held in a number of private collections. She has exhibited locally and nationally at galleries including Barbara Krakow Gallery (Boston, MA), Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT), Sacramento Street Gallery (Cambridge, MA), HallSpace (Dortchester, MA) and Luhring/Augustine Gallery (New York, NY).
Barbara Hadden
Remembering it Wrong
“When a painting or a photograph works, I feel a wonder about where it came from, what has intervened to make it happen, as I do with leaf patterns or graffiti or cave paintings in France. Science and guesswork still can’t tell us who made the cave paintings or when. At the base of some of them are scratch marks, not made by human hands (perhaps by bears), which to me are the most interesting. Yes, this is a bison, and this is a human hand, but what are these scratches?
I’ve spent years in the darkroom making photographs and then in the studio making paintings, observing strict rules about keeping the two activities separate. Now I am combining the material and tools of paint with the figuration and tools of photography, and the ability of both media to evoke and abstract. I use tape, trowels, scrapers, rags, and brushes, and also overhead and slide projectors.
Most of the time it takes months to resolve an image, and I don’t always know when it is right. Sometimes others have to tell me. The process mirrors how I live and make sense of life: I make mistakes, struggle with communication, and get into trouble. Sometimes I feel that rightness, that wonder, as though a member of some other species made that scratch, left that trace.”
Barbara Hadden is a visual artist who explores the intersections of film, photography, and painting. Her work has appeared in two exhibits this year, one at the Hampton Gallery at UMass Amherst, and the other at the Oxbow Gallery in Northampton, MA. In 2012 her films were featured in the 25th New York Queer Experimental Film Festival. Hadden studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which awarded her an Alumni Traveling Fellowship for her work in photography. Hadden was a finalist in the Regional Fellowships for Visual Arts, awarded through the New England Foundation for the Arts.
