May 25 - June 6 2018

ZEHRA KHAN | M P LANDIS | SUSAN LYMAN | SHEILA SCHWID | LORI SWARTZ

Opening Reception: Friday, May 25, 6-9 pm | 2018 Season Opening

Voices of Poetry, June 2, 5-7 pm.

Zehra Khan

Art Cannibal

"I cannibalize my older drawings, paintings and photography into new work. I scavenge, re-appropriate, reincarnate, repurpose and repair.

Animal characters activate environments and installations. Recognizable realities collide with drawn counterparts. I draw characters to integrate the personal within an art history canon, lampooning stereotypes with a visual vocabulary of hairy women. These animal/women exaggerate romantic and domestic relationships, and the glories and tribulations within."

Zehra Khan is a multi-disciplinary artist who likes to make things by hand. When she's not drawing, she may be making sculpture, installations, performances, costumes, photography or films.

A Pakistani-American born in Indonesia, Khan lived in Paris and Switzerland before moving to the US for high school. She attended Skidmore College and received an MFA from the Mass College of Art & Design low-residency program at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in 2009.

Khan has attended art residencies at Yaddo, I-Park, the Vermont Studio Center, the Post-Contemporary, and the Virginia Mountain Lake Biological Station. She is a current participant of the NYC Drawing Center Viewing Program and the deCordova Museum Corporate Lending Program. She co-authored the children’s book “A Sunny Day for Flowers” and contributed to “The Resistance Coloring & Activity Book”. Art New England selected Khan as one of “10 Emerging New England Artists”, March 2018.

“What keeps me intrigued about Zehra’s work is that it eschews any naturalism. Constructing the characters and the environments they inhabit is labor-intensive and process-driven yet it ultimately gets to something very simple yet also very beautiful and intriguing. In Zehra’s work there appears to be a struggle that is engaged fully, and that engagement has a strength that convinces one to go along with her—one wants to believe even when one doesn’t know what one is believing.” - David Grozinsky, admissions manager, Vermont Studio Center

M P Landis

b a l a n c i n g

"Something, everything about the current political and social climate brought some of my work back, unconsciously at first, to the figure. It is somewhat of a return to the work I made during my first real working period in Provincetown from 1989 until I left in 1996. Along with the brand new diptych’s are some older related work from that earlier period."

M P Landis has been working in various visual media since childhood. In 1989 he moved to Provincetown, MA to concentrate on painting and began exhibiting almost immediately in galleries there and was awarded a solo exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in 1996. Soon after he moved to Brooklyn, NY where he lived and worked until 2015 when he and his family moved to Portland, Maine. Since 1990 he has been in over 30 solo exhibitions and many 2-person and group exhibits and is included in many public and private collections.

Susan Lyman

Washashore

“Ten years ago I “met” a stand of 500-year-old English oak pollards in Windsor Great Park, south of Windsor Castle. The venerable trees seemed to hold a body trapped in their contorted and convoluted forms. My encounter with the body in nature there fueled my longtime fascination with the woodland landscape. Out on the tip of Cape Cod, I scavenge materials from the beach, or fallen in the woods, choosing fragments and shapes that I carve, assemble, deconstruct, and paint into figural “drawings” in space. Holding on to a memory of the woods, I work from this pile of shapes in the studio, juxtaposing the fragments intuitively without plan into sensuous hybrid relationships, often punctuated with color. Trunks and massed together sections of saplings assume the role of head or torso; branches, saplings, and roots posture as arms or legs.”

Lyman will be exhibiting her signature sculpture in wood evoking the body in the woodland landscape with simple juxtapositions of found wood – bark-covered pencils, root masses, knots, sections of old yellow pine beams, and charred wood collected from beach fires. She collects the wood locally from the Seashore beaches, the woods, and tree dumps, and in her travels, from beaches as far-flung as the Olympic Peninsula in Washington and the Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts. She then cuts, carves, grinds and coerces the weathered wood fragments into sensuous, hybrid relationships, often punctuated with color.

Susan Lyman is a sculptor and a painter. She has lived and worked in Provincetown for over 35 years since arriving as a Visual Arts Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center. In March 2017, she had her third solo show, “Sculpture in the Unmaking”, at Boston Sculptors Gallery where she has been a member since 2012. Her work was recently included in the international exhibition, “Branching Out: Trees as Art”, at Peabody Essex Museum, and in “Working Women: 36 Contemporary Women Artists” at Colby-Sawyer College (catalog). In summer 2018, Lyman and poet and Alison Deming will exhibit their collaborative work in “Breath and Matter”, an exhibit of poet/sculptor collaborations at Boston Sculptors Gallery. Lyman has exhibited her work for over 35 years in Japan, New Zealand, and the U.S., and her work is represented in private, corporate, and museum collections.

Sheila Schwid

Reflections on 14th Street

“There I was, on the 14th Street bus, looking out the window. The people were in a hurry, the signs on the buildings were everywhere, the window displays were bright and the people were each, slightly worried, or very worried, or just distracted, or just alone.

Then I noticed that the bus windows and the truck windows and the display windows were catching the light in a certain way so that they were sending their images back and forth like a crazy ping pong game. So I took some pictures.

When I got home and looked at the pictures I saw that these ping pong images filled up the whole pictures so that you could hardly tell which was real and which was just a reflection. This craziness could be a metaphor for the consciousness of the people.

Then I noticed that some of the reflections were actually stronger than the people. The reflecting image would cover up part of the person, so, it seemed as if the signs and the displays were stronger than the people and yet, impossible to pin down. The images had strength but no responsibility. They filled the consciousness of the people and jumped around, so you couldn’t wrestle them down. Yet, the people just kept on with their business. It was as if they knew what was going on but couldn’t do anything about it.

I got excited, so I started the series of paintings “Reflections on 14th Street.”

I have been working on this series since, 2011.

I do not even try to copy the photographs exactly. I am no photo realist. I get from the photographs my inspiration, scene, colors, subject matter, and from that my composition, rhythms and shapes. Most of all I get the mood.

When civilization was young, we had the gods of thunder, lightning, the sun the moon, the wind, the water. The gods had myths which explained the forces around us. Now we have the forces of sirens, automobiles, trucks, construction, loud speakers, loud music, people talking, screaming. We have the lies of advertising, politics. These reflections represent the aggressive forces that fragment these fragile human lives, and cumulatively take their toll on our very centers.”

Sheila Schwid: "I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, October 25, 1932. Our family, consisting of my parents, Dorothy and Harry Schwid, and my brother Steven and me moved to Omaha, Nebraska in 1941.

I studied art from the age of thirteen. At age fifteen I went to life class. I went to Benson High School my first year of high school, I went to Technical High the middle two years, where my friend and I painted a large mural in the cafeteria, and I graduated from Benson High School in 1950 where I was Art Editor of the Yearbook. I attended the University of Omaha, where I got my BA in English Literature. I studied art with Milton Wolsky, Bill Hammon, Frank Sapousek, and John and Hettie Marie Andrews during college and afterwards. In 1956 I went to Art Center School in Los Angeles, where I got a scholarship. I returned to Omaha and worked in the Art Department of the home office of Bozell and Jacobs Advertising Agency. I also did lay-out, copy editing and distribution for my parents for their magazine, The Omaha Greeter and Convention Guide.

In 1959 I married Jay Milder, figurative painter. He had been living in New York and we went there on July 3rd, 1959. We found an old sail loft on Ferry Street, next to the Brooklyn Bridge. We went to Provincetown for the summer, where I met Walter Chrysler, who had a museum there, and who collected Jay Milder’s paintings. We hung out with Bob Thompson and Red Grooms and Mimi Gross, Chaim Gross’ daughter.

We returned to New York. Jay had a show at the City Gallery in early 1960. Jay and I took part in Red Grooms’ Happenings at the Delancey Street Museum. Our first child, Rachael was born on March 6, 1960. Our second, Rifka was born August 28, 1962. I was an angel in Robert Franks’ movie, “The Sins of Jesus,” by Babel. We moved to a lot of different places, in New York, Puerto Rico, and Yellow Springs, Ohio, where we had our third child, Joshua, December 23, 1963, and I had my first show, of sculpture, at Antioch College. I taught Life Drawing at the Dayton Art Institute.

We returned to New York in 1965 and moved to a lot of different places until we finally ended up in Westbeth in 1970. In 1974 Jay and I split.

I taught art in the New York City Public Schools, then worked for Film Planning Associates, doing animation on the Oxberry and then went back to the Public Schools. During this time I also made animated films and taught animation at Long Island University in Brooklyn. I retired from teaching in 1995. Since then I have been drawing and painting on a full time basis. In the Westbeth Gallery I curated a show of four painters, including myself, had a solo show and curated the Generations Show which included generations of artists in all the arts, dance, writing, theater, film, music. Everyone in the show had to have someone of either the older or the younger generation in his/her family also in the show. I also curated the Summerlight Show many times.

My shows are listed in my resume.

I am represented by the Carter Burden Gallery.

Lori Swartz

It Is Always Important to Have a Fire Escape

"Lie in the grass or on a sidewalk or on your roof. Look at the sky. Feel your boots laced tight around your calves.

Pile rocks. Get dirty. Take the t.v. antenna off your forehead. Be where you are, even for a snap.

We are lured by the fastest, cheapest, biggest. We forget about authenticity. Art takes time.

We are taught that there is value in canned, pre-packaged, foil-wrapped and zip-locked. There are too many plastic things marketed as originals. We all have stories to tell. Use this work as a prompt for your own story. Be present and see. Be curious."

Lori Swartz began as a metal smith, creating sculpture, furniture and jewelry. She is also a painter, writer and a performer of circus arts (acrobatics, aerial fabric and aerial chain). Working as a multi-media artist has allowed her to express herself in ways that are both private and public. She does not have divided loyalties. She has one loyalty (art), with multiple expressions. Her work can currently be seen in galleries and boutiques across the country, on her website www.loriMetals.com and at her home studio in Madrid, NM.

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