May 24 - June 19 2019

DEBORAH BRIGHT | ARNIE CHARNICK | DAVID CHICK | RICHARD DORFF | JACKIE LIPTON | DAVID MACKE | LORI SWARTZ

Opening Reception: Friday, May 24, 6-9 pm

Deborah Bright

Photographs & Painting

“After 35 years as a photographer I have returned to my first love, drawing. Photography involves a collaboration, mediated through technology, between the photographer and subjects in the world while drawing is the shortest possible circuit among eye, brain and hand. I enjoy both modes of expression and problem-solving and relish their differences. The photographs of toy horses (“Being & Riding” series) were made in the mid-1990s. I was interested in recapturing the mystery, beauty and power I’d felt in childhood as I played with my model horse collection, creating fantasies about being a horse as well as having a horse. Twenty years later, my colored pencil drawings explore more overtly queer historical and autobiographical sources, including diverse artists and pop culture expressions that continue to move me, the weird and scary political times we live in, and my life-long fascination with certain gender signifiers, particularly shoes, hats and neckties.”

Deborah Bright’s career as a photographer brought international recognition with exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Fogg Museum, Harvard; Smithsonian Museum, DC; ArtSpace, New Haven; Leslie-Lohman Museum, New York; Artists Space, New York; Art in General, New York; Katonah Museum of Art, New York; Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Schwules Museum, Berlin; Museet for Fotokunst, Copenhagen; Nederlands Foto Instituut, Rotterdam; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa; Vancouver Art Gallery. Her works are included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian; Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA;, Leslie-Lohman Museum, NYC, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; Boston Athenaeum; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University; Binghamton University Art Museum; California Museum of Photography, Riverside and the RISD Museum of Art.

Bright has received numerous grants, fellowships and awards including a Research Fellowship in Photography/Media Studies from Plymouth University; Artist in Residence, CEPA Gallery, Buffalo; Mary Ingraham Bunting Fellowship, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; David and Reva Logan Award for writing on photography and grants from the Massachusetts Arts Council, New England Foundation for the Arts, Art Matters, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Bright serves on the board of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York.

Arnie Charnick

Keys to the City

The Keys to the Cty, is a dynamic series of 12 panels depicting various neighborhoods around NYC, were visualized at age 13 during a bop into Manhattan, and painted at age 60.

Arnie Charnick, a “meanderthal”, Bronx born in 1947, has been painting murals world-wide for the past 6 decades. He is a veteran painter who has created many large site-based works in public and commercial spaces around New York, as well as in other locations both nationally and internationally. Arnie has had many shows in Provincetown and NYC, with all works having sold. He is well-known for his iconic mural at Veselka on Second Avenue in NY, and for his recent mural work at the Edison Hotel in NY. Here, Arnie is notable for his many shows over his decades-long connection with Provincetown, his murals at Spiritus, and for restoring the work of Bob Gasoi from the old Shop Therapy.

David Chick

Photograhs

"As a child, I was always inspired by color and light, escaping through television…watching cartoons, and the razzle-dazzle of old Hollywood films. Like Alice in the looking glass, I always felt myself believing so hard in what I was watching that I wanted to fall into the movie, to be a part of the action and to be carried away through the story, and to this day I still do, I want to create, and to make pictures and artworks that speak this special visual language to the viewer, that can tell a story, and allow the viewer entrance into my world. That’s when I feel most effective, by creating pictures that reach out to you, but that also have the ability to pull you in…"

David Chick is a graphic and video artist, illustrator and photographer who has worked as an art director, stylist, and costumer. Chick attended Montserrat College of Art, outside of Boston, as a painter, later furthering his education at Parsons' prestigious Fashion Design program in NYC.

He first began to use photography only as a medium for documenting the things which inspired him. His professional photographic career jump started when he was hired to follow the rock band Aerosmith across America, while he was still in school. He pursued photography seriously at the New England School of Photography, and while in Boston became art director for local magazines such as the Improper Bostonian. With his varied interests and passion for learning he continued his study of painting and photography abroad in Florence, Italy, and later at UCLA, in Los Angeles. His talent for drawing and painting, most recently, allowed him to become the featured artist for the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, creating illustrative works that featured literary giant Tennessee Williams and his circle of friends. Chick washed ashore in Provincetown, during the summer of 2011, and has spent the past six summers here, where he began showing his work.

This year marks the sixth season that he will be exhibiting with AMP Gallery Chick’s work is imbued with a sense of humor and curiosity, and despite his sly sense of irony, he’s never without a personal connection, that he shares with his subjects, most of whom are friends or persons known to him on some level, artists, writers, actors, personal heroes ... the common man. He finds beauty in, and respect for the margins of society.

Originally from Boston, David Chick has made his home in New York City, Los Angeles, and Provincetown.

Richard Dorff

White Box

Richard Dorff is a visual artist and set designer working in the realm of sculpture and installation, and is currently the co-artistic director of Fort Point Theater Channel, and a founding member of Atlantic Works Gallery in East Boston. He designed the sets for Fort Point Theater Channel’s “Indiscreet Discretion” and “On With Living and Learning’s Hidden Faces of Courage”.

In 2014/15, he created the installation pieces for a production of “Krapp’s Last Tape” and ”In the Summer House”, both in collaboration with the FPTC. Rick exhibited “Rock Scissor Paper,” an installation at the Atlantic Works Gallery.

For 2015’s “inter-actions”, Rick curated and created kinetic sculptures responding to various performers, sound, dance, and poetry at Outside the Box Boston Common Festival and at the Fort Point Channel Center garage. He designed and constructed the set for “Jeanne, the Story of a Woman”, an opera by Mark Warhol and James Swindell for the FPTC. In addition, he exhibited an installation entitled “Teapot” at the Underwater Museum in East Boston.

Jackie Lipton

CourRAGE | paintings

Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world. - James Baldwin – Nobody knows my name: What it means to be an American

It is something to know we exist - Samuel Beckett—Waiting for Godot

"I shut my eyes in order to see. I’m here, now.

My paintings give you permission. They are a simple or complicated language. Color poems, poetry by color. Trying to speak to you.

I paint to talk about things, to tell the things that matter. It’s my way of being in deep with you, it’s a heart to heart. I said that."

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 Cummington 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 in May and early August 2019. Lipton works in her studio in Chelsea and lives in Westbeth Artist Housing in NYC.

David Macke

Color Work, Photographs & Film, "13 Chewing Gum"

"I am often reflecting about how we feel in some sense separate from the natural world while always longing to be part of nature. It’s an existential dilemma, leaving most of us with a loneliness in just being. The photographs speak to that edge, that longing. I consider the forms of people like the forms of nature, often embracing natural environments yet posed and contrived. Never being able to make it ok, but always trying. For me it’s about youth and death and future space."

David Macke is Artistic Director, YOUR NAME HERE: Theatrical Productions; Film director: Jeremy and Big Al. Visual work includes: Riverzine: A Tribute, in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Video Portrait Exhibitions: ArtSTRAND, AMP Gallery; Queer Portraits Videos; Queerocracy Symposium PhotoFeast. Art books: NY Art Book Fair, Artbook @ MoMA PS1; LA Art Book Fair, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA; 80WES Gallery, Printed Matter Pop-up Shop, NY; 8 Ball Zine Fair, NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1. Artwork: Marginal Press, Tokyo; Art Metropole, Toronto; ARTBOOK@ MoMA PS1; PM@Walker Art Center; Printed Matter.

Recently David was in the group show, “Divided States of America”, curated by Alison M Gingeras, Robb Leigh Davis and Stuart Comer.

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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