May 26 - June 8 2017

JAY CRITCHLEY | JACKIE LIPTON | DOROTHY PALANZA | JICKY SCHNEE

Opening Reception: Friday, May 26, 6-8 pm | 2017 Season Opening

Jay Critchley

Sand Paintings: People of Colors

Working with the sands of time for over thirty years – encrusting cars and a motel, sandblasting and filling a car – these sand drawings seem frail and intimate. Fracturing the stylized gloss of fashion magazine advertisements with the rawness of naturally colored sands exposes the bones and artifice of the human body on the flat page.

How is our perception of an image altered when a gritty veil or mask of sand is applied? The sand may be black, white, pink, orange or beige. What shades of color do we perceive? What shades of color do we defy?

Jay Critchley is a conceptual and multi-media artist and activist whose work has traversed the globe, showing across the US and in Argentina, Japan, England, Spain, France, Holland, Germany and Columbia. He founded the controversial patriotic Old Glory Condom Corporation, Miss Tampon Liberty and his backyard septic theater, Theater in the Ground. He created the inspired “Ten Days That Shook the World” in 2012 before the demolition of the 1953 Herring Cove Beach Bathhouse.

With sea level rising, Jay’s legal spat with Florida Governor Scott, a climate change denier, takes on real consequences. His use of the beloved state seal of Florida in the “o” of the Mobil logo in his project, Mobil Warming – go with the flow, draws a direct connection to the corporation’s decades of denialist propaganda.

The Prayer Ribbons initiative of the Swim for Life, which has collected 2,800 personally inscribed colored ribbons since 1988, memorialized the 49 victims of the Orlando nightclub shootings. The Provincetown Community Compact, founded and directed by Jay, shared a special strand of Orlando ribbons with the families of the victims. The 49 Black Ribbons with inscribed names in gold were then displayed at Orlando City Hall. The ribbons also traveled to the Capitol in Washington, DC for a special event for World AIDS Day.

Jay’s movie, Toilet Treatments, won an HBO Award at Provincetown Film Festival in 2002, where he was featured in 2015 in conjunction with his survey show at the Provincetown Art Association & Museum, Jay Critchley, Incorporated. The show traveled to Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.

He has taught at the Museum School at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and has had artist residencies at: Harvard University; AS220, RI; Harvestworks, NYC; Williams College, MA; Real Art Ways, Hartford; Milepost 5, Portland, OR; Fundacion Valparaiso, Mojacar, Andalucia, Spain; and CAMAC, Marnay-sur-Seine, France.

His one act experimental musical, Planet Snowvio, about the meeting of Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was recently read at UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Bound East for Easter Rebellion, a mash up musical of the centennials of O’Neill and Irish Rebellion leader Padraig Pearse, was performed at AMP last summer.

Jay was honored in 2012 by the Massachusetts State Legislature as an artist and director of the Provincetown Community Compact.

Jackie Lipton

Out on a Limb

Eileen Myles, well-known and much-admired poet and art critic, wrote an essay, "Lavish Interiors" about Jackie Lipton's paintings, published in Provincetown Arts magazine. In the interview she conducted with Jackie at Ms. Lipton’s studio, when asked about creative process Jackie discussed her lifelong need to paint and be working actively in the studio, where she equates painting with survival. Describing her motivation for painting, Jackie is quoted as stating her intention in doing art and painting as an idea is to touch you and shake you.

In 'Out on a Limb', a show of recent paintings at AMP Gallery, Jackie Lipton shows how the experience of painting itself becomes alive.

Jackie Lipton has an active career spanning decades. She has received grants and awards for painting and drawing, from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, granted three times, and from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation's special funds. She received a NYFA boot camp award, and earlier a NYFAI collaborative arts award, among others. Her fellowships and residencies include the MacDowell Colony, the Cummmington Community of the Arts (no longer there), and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; in Iceland, she was awarded a grant at a small residency program from the Gallery Boreas, of a studio and apartment in Reykjavik.

Selected exhibitions include ARC at the Whitney Museum, the Art Resources Center of the Whitney Museum’s Gallery, the Aldrich Museum, Condeso/Lawler Gallery, WARM Gallery, the Art Resources Transfer Gallery, Gale/Martin Gallery, Gallery Boreas, Corinne Robbins Gallery, Life on Mars Gallery and Westbeth Gallery in NYC; the Schoolhouse Gallery and AMP Gallery in Provincetown, Mass. She is currently showing work at AMP Gallery where a show of new paintings and prints is planned for May/June 2017 and at Anthony Philip Gallery. Lipton works in her studio in Chelsea and lives in Westbeth Artist Housing in NYC with her life partner, J. Christopher Bolton and their two amazing cats.

Dorothy Palanza

Waste Not, Want Not

Dorothy Palanza was born in Massachusetts, into a classic Italian-American family. She maintains both Italian and US citizenship, is fluent in multiple languages, and has traveled throughout Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and the Americas. Palanza is a graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (BFA) and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (MFA), studying painting with Jeremy Foss and John Grillo (thesis advisor, a student of Hans Hoffman), and printmaking with Fred Becker. In the following years, she worked as a muralist, fine artist, decorative painter and designer, first in New Orleans and then NYC, where she retains a following. She apprenticed as a decorative painter with European master Alfred Junke and NYC’s Vincent Inamorata, and in 1992, founded Colorfields Studio in NYC. During 1999, she moved Colorfields Studio to Berlin, living and working there and in NYC. In 2008, Palanza relocated Colorfields Studio to Provincetown, MA (the oldest continuous art colony in America), in 2011 re-opened a studio in NYC and in 2014 added a sculpture and welding studio in Hancock, NH. Palanza has always felt passionately about painting and working with color. A rich knowledge of paint chemistry, and effects of color, form and texture on large surfaces, is evident in her work. Resisting thematic conventions, her work reflects the personal, environmental and sociocultural influences from her life experience and history of exploration and collaboration in the arts. Palanza has had numerous commissions, group and solo shows, museum exhibits, and is collected by private patrons internationally. In addition to fine art, decorative, restorative and design endeavors, she has also co-authored screenplays, animated series, and two popular European children’s books, ‘Helma legt los’ and ‘Helma legt die Gockel rein’.

Jicky Schnee

Camera Obscura

Camera obscura (from Latin "camera": (vaulted) chamber or room, and "obscura": darkened), also referred to as pinhole image, is the natural optical phenomenon that occurs when an image of a scene at the other side of a screen (or for instance a wall) is projected through a small hole in that screen as a reversed and inverted image (left to right and upside down) on a surface opposite to the opening.

Our bodies serve as our own camera, a sort of room from which we are allowed our own pinpoint view of the world, yet this perspective, like that of the camera obscura, is often an inversion of the truth as we are warped by fears, insecurities, and a deep feeling of otherness.

Like in the Miller’s tale where the maid must spin straw into gold or be sent to her death, straw is the raw material of the human experience and we must evaluate what has worth and what is superfluous. Indulging in allowing the obscured inversion to become the real will lead to a discordant end of separation and isolation from both self and other.

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. Jicky currently has a solo show in Woodstock, NY at D-Day Gallery and an upcoming show in Hudson, NY at Mc Daris. Her most notable roles as an actor 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 Michael Kelly and 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.