July 14 - July 27 2017

MARTIN R ANDERSON | DIANE AYOTT | MIDGE BATTELLE | BEBE BEARD | LINDA LESLIE BROWN | BARBARA E COHEN | ANNE CORRSIN | JAY CRITCHLEY | M P LANDIS | STEVE NOVICK | SARA OVERTON | CHRISTOPHER PENNOCK | ARLENE SHULMAN

Opening Reception: Friday, July 14, 6-8 pm

Martin R Anderson

Elevations and Excavations

“The thing you need is often nearby.” James Joyce

“I am in the construction business. Constructing. Reconstructing. Deconstructing. I work with materials readily available, redeeming things that have been scrapped, overlooked, ditched, abandoned, repudiated, run over, forsaken. I often frame space first, housing the shapes, colors, textures and planes that have been organizing principles since I was a boy planning to be an architect. I draw (literally) on dreams I have of the mid-century-modern house I grew up in with large windows open to the Connecticut woods that were my playground. I am deliberate with compositions, playing chess with the elements at hand. But I have no fear of mistakes, missteps, mishaps or out-and-out calamities. I repaint rooms. I move the furniture around. I replace it.”

Martin R Anderson has been an actor and director, pinhole photographer and teacher, TRAGER Bodywork Practitioner and Tutor, a daydreamer, a painter, an assembler, a drawing teacher, a dune shack dweller and a beach comber, a bicycle rider and a street comber. He imagines that he can speak French. He stays close to home (Brookline), but occasionally makes forays to Provincetown and New York City.

Diane Ayott

Sweet Spots

The painter, Diane Ayott creates works of art that vibrate from her sensitivity to color and her attention to the accrual of marks. In addition to paint, she uses various collage elements in her painting, which are often very physical in nature. There is a love of material inherent in the surfaces of her paintings and works on paper. Vibrant color relationships have a depth of quality in this painterly endeavor. The intensity of her very focused, and meditative work is experienced in optical pulses. Repeated viewing opens up pleasure in the visual.

Diane Ayott received her MFA in painting from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and is currently a professor of art at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA. She lives and maintains a studio practice in Salem, MA.

Ayott has shown her work at many venues over her career to date. Among those are: Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, NYC and Bridgehampton, NY, Trident Gallery, Gloucester, MA, OK Harris, NYC, Washington Square East Galleries, NYC, Woman Made, Chicago, IL, AMP, Provincetown, MA, Danforth Museum, Framingham, MA, Fitchburg Art Museum, Fitchburg, MA, Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, MA, Clark Gallery, Lincoln, MA, HallSpace, Boston, MA, Merrimack College, North Andover, MA, Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA, Art Museum, University of Durham, NH, McIninch Gallery, Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH, Warm Springs Gallery, Charlottsville, VA, US Department of State Art Bank Program, Art Bank Gallery, Harry S Truman Building, Washington, D.C.

Midge Battelle

Pythagorean Dreams

“My foundation in both the fine, as well as the graphic arts, has evolved into a studio practice focusing at present particularly on drawing and painting. The work engages the linear abstraction of geometric forms and grids as containers for expression of the subtle and contemplative aspects of color. My palette though simple, can also be perceived as complex upon extended viewing.

Currently I have also been engaged in a daily reading and thumbnail drawing practice, which is extending towards larger more finished drawings, some of which are studies for paintings. The paintings are mainly of a high key with low contrast chroma using a palette knife and oil paint. Expressionist/ minimalist work that is both intuitive as well as thoughtfully developed.”

Midge Battelle was born in 1945 in Worcester Ma. She has been a year-round resident of Provincetown, Ma. for the better part of the past fifty years, having first arrived as a wash ashore in 1967. Battelle graduated with honors from Greenfield Community College in Greenfield Ma., studying photography, color theory, drawing, Graphic Design and printmaking. She furthered her education at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston Ma. graduating with a BFA. Battelle also works as an independent curator, having served on the Exhibition Committee at PAAM, and is currently working for The Julie Heller Gallery in Provincetown, Ma.

Battelle is represented by AMP Gallery in Provincetown, Ma.

Bebe Beard

Zulu Lima - Message Received But Not Understood

Beard is a one-person think-tank. Her artwork blends media and combines equal parts creativity and ingenuity. Not only is the end result unexpected, but so is her investigation, which creativiely and ecologically expands our notions of ordinary objects offering new life and context.

“I became fascinated with packing Styrofoam when I saw first-hand how it deteriorates into ever smaller particles around the edges of a fishing village in Maine. Our desire for the pastoral is so at odds with our actual built environment...”

Bebe Beard earned her BFA in 1976, her MFA from Mass College of Art’s Studio for Interrelated Media in 1996. She has just received a significant New England Artists’ Trust grant as overseen by the Berkshire Taconic Foundation. Past grants include the Massachusetts Cultural Council, St Botolph’s Club Art Foundation and the Gottlieb Foundation Emergency Assistance. Beard has held residencies at Djerassi Resident Artists Program, MacDowell Colony and the Experimental Television Center in Owego, NY.

She has exhibited in a wide variety of venues – alternative spaces, galleries, and theaters throughout New England and New York. Her most recent group exhibition was at Site: Brooklyn between Red Hook and Park Slope, and her most recent solo show was at Hallspace, in Dorchester MA this past Spring, 2017.

Linda Leslie Brown

Wall Holes

“Like unearthed, archaeological treasures, a key part of (Brown’s) sculptures’ strengths lies in their inscrutability...The humble, funky, at times awkward silhouettes encompass a range of contradictions-organic and manufactured, bright and muted, sharp and smooth, foreign and familiar—embracing binaries in a way that embodies wisdom and pathos.”-Shana Dumont Garr

My recent sculptural work draws upon the transformative exchanges between nature, objects and viewers’ creative perception. These works are rife with allusions to the body. At the same time they suggest the plastic, provisional, and uncertain world of a new and transgenic nature, where corporeal and mechanical entities recombine. And because they are small- no larger than a human head- they invite viewers to engage in an intimate examination that is both delightful and disturbing.

In Katherine Behar’s discussion of object-oriented feminism in works of art, she notes “three significant aspects of feminist thinking in the philosophy of things: politics, engaging with histories of treating certain humans (women, people of color, and the poor) as objects; erotics, employing humor to foment unseemly entanglements between things; and ethics, refusing to make grand philosophical truth claims, instead staking a modest ethical position that arrives at being “in the right” by being “wrong.””

My recent “Wall Holes” series employs tactics in sympathy with Behar’s ideas. These works were begun at an artists’ residency at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, MA during the summer of 2016. Unlike the free-standing sculptures that preceded these works, the pieces hang on the wall: exposed, lumpy and somewhat disconsolate. Elements of the form reach back to touch the wall, appearing to retreat from the frontal plane. You want to peer behind them, and into their holes.

This work is small and humble (not to say humiliated) in affect- it conveys a definite turning away from sweeping gestures, apparent mastery and polish. The surfaces look almost over-handled, loved to death, slightly worried. The pieces employ a language of breaking and mending that reaches for and then deliberately misses any resolved finish or any fixed form. Discontinuity, disruption and even violence have been part of the making process. This group of works has survived something, enduring some physical rupture that threatens their holding together. Still, there is humor in these sculptures: a flickering smile in recognition of the clay, plastic, metal and plaster fragments, and how they are presented as carrying on: sticking out, clinging, broken-and also remaining full of life force.

Linda Leslie Brown’s work engages the interdependent relationships between nature, objects and human creative perception. Brown's recent mixed-media sculptural works are rife with allusions to the body. At the same time they suggest the plastic, provisional, and uncertain world of a new and transgenic nature, where corporeal and mechanical entities recombine.

Brown has exhibited her work regionally and nationally. Recent exhibitions include Kingston Gallery, Boston, MA, Popop Studios Gallery, Nassau Bahamas, Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham MA, AMP Gallery, Provincetown MA, Bannister Gallery, Rhode Island College, Providence RI and Vessels Gallery, Boston MA. She is the recipient of grants from The Artists’ Resource Trust of the Berkshire Taconic Foundation, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Travelling Fellowship, Suffolk University, St. Botolph Club Foundation, and FPAC, among others. Fellowship Residencies include Haystack Mountain School, Ballinglen Foundation, Popop Studios International Artists’ Residency, Women’s Studio Center, Hambidge Center for the Arts, I-Park, and Mass MoCA, among others. She is represented by Kingston Gallery, Boston, MA.

She is a Professor of Foundation Studies and Fine Arts at NESAD Suffolk University in Boston MA.

Barbara E Cohen

NYC Dumpsters and Venetian Slings, Deconstructed

Barbara E. Cohen received a 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. Awarded grants include: The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Artists Foundation Mass Fellowship Program, Polaroid Artist Support Program, and Blanche E. Colman Award, as well as artist residencies 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, and is currently represented by AMP Gallery. She is the author of eight published books including, Venezia: Essenze, New York Love Affair, Dog in the Dunes, and Provincetown ‘East West’. Barbara lives and works in New York and Provincetown.

Anne Corrsin

Reverie of Angles

“My recent sculpture continues an investigation into the play of angles as they meet and intersect. The addition of color to the objects adds a layer of space and movement. Flat planes are met and joined, as well as held in resonant parallel.”

Anne Corrsin is a multi-media artist based in Somerville, Ma. She has a BFA in Sculpture from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Boston. Anne has been awarded grants and fellowships that include an Individual Artist Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a Travel Grant (to study Glassmaking/Design in Copenhagen and Ebeltoft, Denmark) from the Boston Athenaeum and an Artist Residency Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center.

Anne’s work is included in a number of private collections. She has exhibited at galleries that include Barbara Krakow Gallery (Boston, Ma.), BF Annex Gallery (Boston, Ma.), Real Art Ways (Hartford, Ct.), Sacramento Street Gallery (Cambridge, Ma.), Sikkema Jenkins and Co. (NYC), Metro Pictures (NYC) and AMP Gallery (Provincetown, Ma.)

Jay Critchley

The Whiteness House - tarred and feathered (A Proposal)

Color can play tricks on us. What we see is not always what we get. And what we think is not always what we see. Is seeing the same as perception? Is white the binary of black? Can white exist without black?

The White House. The Whiteness House. The nation’s home takes on an ominous presence with a white President who has defined much of his Presidency based on color – following a black President. How white is a Whiteness House after a black President? How does a white house express its whiteness?

The Whiteness House – tarred and feathered is the model for a proposal to build a walk in scale model of the White House, tar and feather the exterior and activate it with artist and community collaborations.

We ask, Who is being tarred and feathered? We, the People? The present tenant?

The project will draw upon cultural signifiers, such as: the White Cube; White Christmas; White Flight; Shades of White; Whitewash; Snow White; White Lies; White, Whiter, Whitest; Whiteout; White Race Films; Black & White mixed race films; People of Color Films; White Lite; White Rainbow; White Lightening; Whitened Teeth.

*Tarring and feathering is a form of public humiliation used to enforce unofficial justice or revenge. It was used in feudal Europe and on the American frontier, mostly as a type of mob vengeance. It is meant to humiliate and severely criticize a person.

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.

M P Landis

flowers

Flowers as people. Flowers as ideas. Flowers as energy. Flowers as music. Flowers in a storm. Flowers everywhere, falling apart, blooming out of nowhere. I never try to make something that looks like a flower but they pop up anyway.

M P Landis, as a child, traveled throughout the world with his Mennonite missionary parents. After studying political science, philosophy and literature for a few years he dropped out of Millersville University of Pennsylvania to help open a bookstore in downtown Lancaster, PA. In 1989 he moved to Provincetown, MA, to concentrate on making visual art, his intention since early childhood. He quickly began exhibiting there and was awarded a solo exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in 1995. In 1996 he moved to Brooklyn, NY, where he lived and worked until the spring of 2015 when he and his family moved to Portland, Maine.

Since 1990, he has had over 30 solo exhibitions and his work is represented in many private and public collections, including the New York Public Library, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the DeCordova Museum, the Naples Museum of Art, and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.

Landis has taught workshops at F.A.W.C., Maine College of Art, the Brooklyn Workshop Gallery Foundation, through Farm projects and independently.

His current work is a palimpsest of the processes, materials and emotions of his existence - meaning a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain. He has collaborated with musician Tom Abbs, visual artists Michael Sanzone and Les Seifer, writers Nick Flynn and Fred Schmalz, and others.

Steve Novick

A Means of Persisting

My process involves the modification and assemblage of found objects and materials. Collecting these—from thrift stores, yard sales, and flea markets—is an important facet of my work. In this phase, I often will undertake the use of a new item or form, or realize the solution to a previously intractable problem.

Although the physical resolution of my sculptures may be quick, the ideas behind them tend to gestate slowly. Simple items, and parts of more complex ones, are fitted together via a process of trial, error, and serendipity. Cleaning, polishing, and refinishing aside, virtually all objects and materials are used as-is.

The work’s subjects are fragmentary, memorial, residual, perishable, in-between. A sense of solidity, and a directness of form, material, and color, give these objects and their themes an air of permanence, a means of persisting.

Steve Novick was born in 1966 in Worcester, Massachusetts. He earned a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1988, and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1991.

Novick has exhibited his work in solo shows in Boston, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Connecticut. He has participated in group shows in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Montreal. Novick's work has been reviewed in the New York Sun, the Newark Star-Ledger, and the Boston Globe.

A recipient of Pollock-Krasner and Massachusetts Cultural Council grants, Novick is Professor of Art and Design at New England School of Art and Design, Suffolk University.

Sara Overton

New Works

“My visual art includes painting, drawing and constructions. It is often abstract, contemplative and inspired by materials at hand, the natural world, and especially light.”

Sara Overton is an artist based in New York City. Her work has been shown in galleries and images of her work were part of TEDx Washington Square, where she also gave a talk on the mindfulness-in-nature art project she is developing, the Awake in the Wild Experience. Sara received a B.A. from Kenyon College and a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Christopher Pennock

Cape Codpiece

“Christopher Pennock is a master of juxtaposition. Rounding up a disparate collection of paintings for Muster at Whitney Art Works, Pennock mixes a range of subjects into visual cocktail based in abstraction and geometry that is equally literal and representational His palette is composed of grays and drabs punctuated with hallucinatory color. Like a good lyricist, he combines the prosaic and the exotic, catching you with hooks and leaving you itching for a replay. Does anyone fully understand how Bob Dylan could write "All Along the Watchtower" when watchtowers aren't conducive to going "along"? Not likely, but the song with its abstract and existential dread has taken on such a specific significance in our cultural milieu that its persuasive and poetic powers are not limited by its non-sequiturs. Likewise, Pennock proffers fragments of wisdom like "I am the sum of my parts" but presents them as complex geometric abstract paintings. The viewer is left to sort out this tricky hierarchy and make of it what he or she will. Even paintings based on other subject matter ranging from modern paintings installed in museums, Japanese gardens, and oblique snapshots of landscapes, are both intriguing and inscrutable. There are slivers of barbed wisdom in the irony of certain scenes like those using bleak modern installation as a subject for a realistic painting. Pennock is reverential of Modern art but doing things his own way, installing his work on mural-laced walls and in the case of a 2008 exhibition at Solo Gallery in Tel Aviv, changing elements of exhibition throughout the length of its life at the gallery. The opacity of modernism is reapplied as a critique on the art world and as a stylish lens using a calculated palette of either objective grayscale, dull real life colors, or absolutely hallucinatory color. When used as a way of seeing traditional landscapes, galleries, snapshots and phrases the result is cool and restrained, but with the attitude and obscure wisdom of a rock song. One gets the sense that Pennock is compiling and cataloging, in an effort to take on some big questions. "What is all about?" "What is this art world?" "What is an artist supposed to do?" A closet poet, Pennock paints together fragments that critique and coagulate into verses about, well...life.” – Celeste Parke

Christopher Pennock is a New-York based artist, graduate of the School of Visual Arts.

Arlene Shulman

Life Goes On

LIFE GOES ON continues my exploration with gestural figures. They are now living in Apple/Mac boxes. Why Mac boxes? Mostly because of their whiteness, which remind me of the boats in Provincetown Harbor near sunset and because of their beautiful architectural form. The symbolism of alienation in a digital age is strictly an afterthought but a powerful one indeed. At first these little figures were filled with sense of silent isolation but as I worked with them they seemed to want to want to begin relationships, often sexual ones with a voyeuristic edge. Finally, it was hard to glue the pieces down because they seem to want to keep moving and evolving.

But here they are, now frozen in time and gesture.

Arlene Shulman has had the great gift of four, one-woman shows where she had the opportunity to fill four large rooms with her photographic and found object constructions and installations. She is mostly a self-taught artist who is also a psychotherapist and spiritual teacher. She studied photography at The New School and here on Cape Cod. She has been collecting “stuff” for years which she not only transforms into art but which she perceives as already existing art in it’s "stuff” incarnation.