July 15 - July 28 2016

Karen Cappotto | Larry Collins | Pasquale Natale

Opening Reception: Friday, July 15, 6-9 pm.

Karen Cappotto

In My Own Defense

“Whenever I see a chair abandoned on the curbside, I am reminded of one particular scene in the ‘70s comedy “The Jerk”. Steve Martin grabs an item that he absolutely must have before he walks out the door, and says: “All I need is this chair...”

I frequently see them discarded and up for the taking. Whether it is a generic office seat haphazardly held together by strips of black tape or an exquisite abandoned Bentley rocker, they are equally odd and interesting.

I have come to find these chairs so visually alluring that in turn they create a dialog/language for abandonment, displacement, and transition. Tossed by society into a social bin, in the midst of our accelerated gentrification, now only a very few have a seat at the proverbial table. This can and does have lasting implications. Perhaps these chairs I find on the side of the road are a call to consider the preservation of a habitat that has always thrived on diversity.”

Karen Cappotto is inspired by evidence of the handmade in a world where technology prevails. She 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 museums and collections, and she has received multiple awards for her mixed media constructions. One of her collage pieces was awarded joint first prize in the 2010 International Picture Works Competition. The prize also included a national poster/postcard blitz worth over 25,000 euros. She has also been included in the Land and Sea Contemporary Artists, by Deborah Forman published Spring 2013. Cappotto exhibits regularly in Provincetown, Palm Beach, and Charlotte, NC. In 2015, she completed a six-week residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Cappotto’s paintings particularly came on the radar after winning the Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Grant for painting, and having two successful Museum shows.

Larry Collins

Remember Me

“My latest paintings are based on my experience as an infantry soldier in the Vietnam War. They are ideal portraits of young men I knew who were killed there.

The brush work and color are decidedly expressionistic and my inspiration comes from a diverse field, Tintoretto and Edvard Munch, and the surreal films of Jean Cocteau. From antiquity I have looked to Greek and Roman marbles as well as the idealized Olmec jade masks of ancient Mexico.

The largest painting in this exhibit is a marine nocturne. It began as a calm, glassy sea reflecting the moon, however it has become a raging storm, like war, whose power is utterly overwhelming.”

Larry Collins was born in Spokane, Washington, in 1945 and raised in Del City, Oklahoma. His artistic career began at age 17 when Dorothy Miller, former curator at MoMA in New York, selected one of his abstract paintings for an important regional exhibition at the Oklahoma Art Center. After receiving his BFA from the University of OK in 1967, he was drafted into the Army and sent to Vietnam. During the war he served as an infantryman and a combat illustrator. He received his MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 1980. Collins has exhibited internationally, and his paintings, drawings, photographs and artist’s books are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, International Center of Photography, Sheldon Art Museum, Wadsworth Atheneum, Worcester Art Museum, PAAM, and others. He has collaborated on limited-edition books with poets Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Eileen Myles. In 2010 he was honored with a career retrospective exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, “Larry R. Collins: Finding Light.”

Pasquale Natale

Chairs

“They are serious, his chairs, their plain shapes insisting on a straight back and level gaze, feet flat as a field or a board. The finish is two thousand degrees hard and so smooth it is nearly impossible to sit without sliding like a fool to the floor. But look again: the artist has endowed his chairs with mercy, slumping their backs humbly so that they appear not fixed but flexible in their devotion. Some of them are intertwined, like a piggy bank whose treasure is unattainable without being broken, which, paradoxically, some already are; broken and perfect as in the lack of nothing essential to the whole. Chairs are meant to hold, to elevate, to save us from the difficulty of having to get ourselves up off the ground. But mid-epidemic, Pasquale’s chairs began melting, the safety they inferred no longer anything any of us could count on. Is it a coincidence that they are ceramic? Because no matter how deformed they grew, surely he understood that, once fired, they would remain intact for thousands of years, that some essential gesture of his would outlive illness or sorrow. In this sense, context is everything, no? For who, digging with a spade in the garden one day far into the future, would unearth such objects and not be delighted by the fact of them glinting in the morning sun?" – Melanie Braverman, Provincetown Arts Magazine"

Pasquale Natale graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. He is both artist and curator. Numerous solo exhibitions of his work include: 2013 and 2015, A Gallery, Provincetown; 1998, 2000-01, 2003-06, The Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown; 2003, Battelle /Harding Gallery, Greenfield MA; 1998, Carrie Haddad Gallery, Hudson, NY; 1994-96, Albert Merola Gallery, Provincetown; 1993, “Chairs,” Academy of Performing Arts, Orleans MA; 1992-93, Berta Walker Gallery, Provincetown.

Group exhibitions over the years include: 2013-14, A Gallery and PAAM; 2014, AMP Gallery, Provincetown; 2012, A Gallery, FAWC, and PAAM; 2011, ARTStrand, Provincetown and PAAM. Other gallery shows and permanent collections include: Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston; Cape Cod Museum of Art, Glimpses of Provincetown Collection; The Collection of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum; Barbra Mathes Gallery, NYC; Grammercy Park Hotel, NYC; Chateau Marmont Hotel, Los Angeles; ART Chicago Art Fair, NYC; Santa Fe Art Fair, Santa Fe; Takara Gallery, Houston; 1995 Armory Show, NYC; Citicorp Building, NYC; Watershed Center for the Arts, N. Edgecomb ME.

As a Curator, Natale has been responsible for exhibitions including: 1993, “Positive Alliances,” PAAM; 2000, “The Art Colony’s First Century,” PAAM; 2001, “Emerging Artists,” PAAM; 2007, “James Hansen Retrospective,” PAAM; 2012, “Getting to Zero,” Art Current; 2013, “Susan Baker, Painting a Building, Building a Painting,” PAAM; 2013, “James Balla, Into the Blue Again,” PAAM; 2014, “Couples/ Duos,” PAAM.