June 21 - July 10 2019
SHEZ ARVEDON | STEVEN BAINES | NANCY BERLIN | JAY CRITCHLEY | RICHARD DORFF | RENE LAMADRID | JENNIFER MOLLER | FRANK MULLANEY | JICKY SCHNEE | CHARLIE WELCH
Opening Reception: Friday, June 21, 6-9 pm
Shez Arvedon
Instinct and Intellect
Shez Arvedon, omnivore artist (b. 1959), mixes multi-media fine art skills with a fertile collection of elements gathered from her life on the Cape Cod shores to the Hawaii island volcano. Inspired by native and invasive species, the combination of journey with substance and form invent a visual rhythm within her totemic sculptures. She takes you with her on an expedition uncovering a new terrain with texture, tension, balance, and refuge.
Steven Baines
Turmoil and Fabulous New Beginnings
Steven Baines' oil paintings aim to be metaphors for the passage of time, the brevity of human life. However they are not heavy or morbid. They are optimistic and humorous, like sad, dark lyrics in a catchy lighthearted melody. Sometimes within romantic settings and other times within bright bold abstractions, figurative images have been chosen for their symbolic value to represent the fragile and transitory nature of life
These latest paintings continue with an underlying sense of humor but also as metaphors for universal ideas of turmoil and a psychological escapism with paintings of giant waves mingling with energetic stripes, volcanoes, and an orange painting of a hurling astroid.
Also an ongoing, almost ritualistic series of watercolor splatter ufo drawings on paper. These allow the watercolor freedom with its natural exuberance contrasting the odd stiffness of the drawn ufos while the titles become very important being written on the front leading the work in wildly different ways.
Steven Baines lives in New York City and works from his studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn where his primary focus is on oil painting. He received his BFA in painting from The School of Visual Arts. He has exhibited his work at The Grand Central Library in NYC, Artists Space, New York, Stephen Romano Gallery, New York, Temporary Storage Gallery, White Columns, New York, Brooklyn Fireproof, Brooklyn, The South Street Seaport Museum, New York, Local Projects, Queens, Pat Hearn Gallery, New York, Visual Arts Gallery, New York, AMP Gallery in Provincetown, and more along with being included in many art fairs and included in Center for Maine Contemporary Art’s (CMCA) Biennial
Nancy Berlin
Flying by:a birders notes
"For many years I have been trying to learn the art of birdwatching, and have often been frustrated by glimpsing colors and forms at the periphery of my visual field. In “Flying by: a birder’s notes” I try to recollect these quick flashes of color and form and interweave them into a composite, which may include one or several species.
Recently i have noticed changes in the species that I observe. After confirming this with research regarding climate change, I have begun to incorporate this phenomenon in the work. On digital prints of long established and now diminishing species in my area, I superimpose the patterns, colors and shapes of the new arrivals."
Nancy Berlin was born in New York City and, after graduating from Barnard College, received her MA in painting and printmaking from Hunter College. She has received grants for her drawings from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Berkshire Taconic Foundation. She has had residencies at the American Academy in Rome, at Centrum in Port Townsend, Washington, and at the New Pacific Studio in Mt. Bruce, New Zealand. Her work is in the collections of the Cape Cod Museum of Art, the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, the Boston Public Library and many corporate and private collections. She has exhibited her drawings, prints and paintings in one-person and group shows at galleries she has been affiliated with in New York City, Boston, Seattle and Charleston, West Virginia. She currently lives and works most of the year in Truro, Massachusetts. Her work has long been concerned with mapping change.
Jay Critchley
Re-signing of the Mayflower Compact 2020, Democracy of the Land Project & First We Take Manhattan, Then We Take Berlin
The cultural, political and environmental stakes are high in how we understand and regulate our relationship with the land, climate and culture. Like the layers of soil, we dig deep into layers of human occupation on the land to discover our history, and the filters we use when we view and experience its elements.
The Pilgrims weren’t the first European visitors to the Cape tip, but they certainly created an uproar! In 2020, it will be 528 years since the arrival of a wave of invaders – precipitated by the notorious Christopher Columbus and company.
Next year we commemorate the historic and exalted Mayflower Compact, a democratic document signed in Provincetown Harbor in 1620 by forty-one bedraggled white, Christian men. Native Americans were not consulted. Neither were women.
Now it’s time for the ladies to hoist the sails of state and take command: the Re--signing of the Mayflower Compact 2020. We beseech you to reclaim and recreate a value-added Mayflower Compact - for now and for the future! Caesar said it with flair, as did the Pilgrims: Veni, vidi, vici. We came. We saw. We conquered. And now it’s women’s turn!
With so many activist women of importance in US history, the selection process for the forty-one re-signers of the Mayflower Compact 2020 was agonizing. Just how have women unburdened themselves from the thousands of years of oppression, run through the Christian grinder of western ideology and prosper on American soil?
These forty-one female signers are just the tip of the melting icebergs in my attempt to redress the treatment of women in our country’s narrative. Creative, activist women make up almost half of the signers, from Marion Anderson to Cher, from Audre Lorde to Rachel Carson, from Zora Neale Hurston to Gertrude Stein. And muckraker Ida Tarbell who brought down Rockefeller’s Standard Oil!
Other signers include Lucille Ball, Rosa Parks, Whoopi Goldberg and Sojourner Truth. And two of Provincetown’s local exemplars, poet and activist Grace Gouveia and Mary Heaton Vorse, a radical journalist. We also honor the recently elected Congresswomen, two Native Americans - Debra Haaland and Sharice Davids, and two Muslims - Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
Recalibrating our history and our vision for the future begins right here. Rise up and join the insurgency! (Please inquire about exhibiting this two-sided, free-standing banner at your “Get out the vote 2020” action.) Curriculum guides for middle and high school students based on the Re-signing The Mayflower Compact 2020 project are available. Inquire at www.jaycritchley.com/mayflower
America, America, God shed her grace on thee. And crown thy good with womenhood. From sea to shining sea.
Jay Critchley is a longtime resident of Provincetown and the shifting dunes, landscape and the sea are his palette. He has utilized sand, Christmas trees, fish skins, plastic tampon applicators washed up on beaches, pre-demolition buildings and selected sites in his work. He is a conceptual and multi-media artist, writer and activist whose work has traversed the globe, showing across the US and in Argentina, Japan, England, Spain, France, Holland, Germany and Columbia.
He recently gave a TEDx Talk: Portrait of the artist as a corporation
At Jay’s two-month residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute, he created, The Whiteness House: tarred & feathered about race, ethnicity and whiteness Other residencies include Fundacion Valparaiso, Mojacar, Andalucia, Spain, CAMAC, Marnay-sur-Seine, France, and Harvard University where he has also lectured.
His movie, Toilet Treatments, won an HBO Award and his 2015 survey show at the Provincetown Art Association & Museum traveled to Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, FL. He has received awards from the Boston Society of Architects and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in NYC for his environmental projects.
Jay was honored in 2012 by the Massachusetts State Legislature as an artist and founder and director of the Provincetown Community Compact, producer of the Swim for Life, which has raised $6.5M for AIDS and women’s health. The 2019 event is September 7.
Jay is teaching a weeklong workshop at Castle Hill in Truro, July 28- Aug 4, and giving a public lecture on July 30, both entitled, Democracy of the Land.
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.
Rene Lamadrid
Information Withheld, 2nd Series 2015
These works reference the difficulty in communicating. Clear exhange of ideas is impossible, even when the intent is there. Add secrecy and deception. mixed with inaccuracies and doubt, and you have the post-truth era.
Rene Lamadrid: "I grew up in lower Manhattan, when the area was a huge artist community. I've made art as long as I can remember. I make it with short money, which is how I learned to do it in my youth - using reclaimed materials and ephemera. The objects are not precious, the ideas are. I see the visitors to exhibitions as participants, not viewers. I was lucky to spend time with Carl Tasha in his studio on Howland St, where I learned as much about art as I did anywhere else."
Jennifer Moller
Mighty Plenitude
Jennifer Moller was born in Hartford Connecticut. She received her MFA in Studio Arts in 2003, and she received a BA from the University of Connecticut in 1981, in Latin American Studies. She worked as a professional photographer in Santa Fe, New Mexico from 1989 until 2000. She is currently in Massachusetts, where she has continued making artwork, exhibiting, and teaching art since 2003. Her client list includes, MS Magazine, Mothering Magazine, Outside Magazine, The Santa Fean Magazine, and The Santa Fe Reporter, along with many individual clients. John Waters hired her in 2009, and 2011 to assist him in he making of his conceptually driven photographic self-portraits. In addition to photography she also works in video, animation and sequential drawing.
Jennifer Moller’s arts career has been twofold, working for over a decade as a commercial photographer in New Mexico and then working for over a decade as an arts educator. She has taught at several schools including: the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University, New England School of Photography, University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and Northern Essex Community College. In 2010, she was selected to be a visiting artist and to teach at the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe for one-year in their New Media Department. She continues to teach and create content for free-lance clients using skills in photography, animation, and video arts; in addition she has an ongoing drawing practice. Moller has won several awards and her video installation work titled “seas” is in the private collection of the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, Massachusetts.
Frank Mullaney
Portent
“This series-in-progress, Portent, is a visceral reaction to these times in the Trump presidency era. It grew from a mood of unease and anxiety that began, for me, in the lead up to the election. The daily papers and television news shows carried constant stories of deceitful behaviors, corrupted politics, conspiracy theories, and the threat of nuclear war. The feelings of dread, fear and mortality became hyper-realized for me and I sensed it in others as well. Social behaviors changed. All around me I saw people appearing angrier, acting rasher, reaching a little more desperately for the proverbial brass ring. I began to take notice of, and photograph, things that appeared almost as foreboding omens; a single crow alighting on a rock, silhouetted figures, a darkness in people's eyes. At first, these sightings seemed alarming, then surreal, and, finally, cinematic.
I have been shooting in digital raw format since the medium was brand new. I was an early convert. I've always been a color photographer, but as this series germinated, I looked at the preliminary images and realized that they had to be converted into black and white. The story I was telling through my camera was one that was devoid of any color. I had to see in a way that was new for me.”
Frank Mullaney: I was born in Cambridge, MA and moved to New York City in August of 1977, the same week Elvis died and the Son of Sam was caught.
My aesthetic was shaped watching Hammer Studio horror films every weekend at the Capital Theater in Arlington, MA. Everything else I learned at the International School for Photography in NYC.
My photographs have been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Provincetown, The Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colorado, various venues in the Catskills, and the California Museum of Photography in Riverside.
Jicky Schnee
Treachery of Images I, II, III, IV & Gun
As Magritte’s Treachery of Images (This is not a Pipe) questions the difference between representation and reality, Treachery of Images I, II, III and IV questions the same yet regarding death. Are the described medical conditions truly death or are they a merely an exit point or strategy for a being’s departure from what we identify as life? As the Conservation of Energy theorem of physics states, energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather it can only be transformed from one form to another. When this theorem is applied to human life, there is no death. These lungs filled up (with grief), this brain decamped (from loneliness), this heart grew too big for its casing and this stomach does not want to digest (life’s sadness) could merely be exit points into what we identify as death. Yet the law of the Conservation of Energy suggests that no such death exists and that it is only that we have no comprehension for what lies beyond death that limits our perception to designate death as an endpoint.
Gun is a projected film on what is called a ‘controlled reader’, a device that was used improve the reading speeds of school children when I was growing up. In using this device the words of a story would flash across the screen and the teacher would continue to speed the frame setting until comprehension decreased. As a child dyslexic, I hated this machine and learning under this orchestrated pressure felt to me the way the machine looked, like being exposed to the constant firing of a gun.
With two children in primary school I worry, like most parents today, about school shootings. In coupling E.E.Cumming’s poem Buffalo Bill’s Defunct, a poem that Cummings intentionally shaped as a bullet, I condemn this new norm in which America has traded the basic right of all, to go to school with the assurance of safety, for a right of the few, to own a gun/s. Current data shows that around 35% of all households in America own ONE gun, this most commonly being a hand-gun used for self-protection. A vast majority of guns are owned by what are called ‘Super-Owners”. For the most part these are the owners of assault rifles and automatic machine guns and these owners own dozens/hundreds of guns.
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.
Charlie Welch
Hyper Hybrid (2019)
We are expected to make things bigger and better - our food, our homes, our jobs, ourselves, and there is competition in who has the most. Rather than accepting and appreciating what is, we are force-fed the need to manipulate our environment and our self to meet these goals.
In this project I physically manipulate flowers using basic materials - tape and string - to attempt to make a more beautiful one.
It was born out of a focus of the negative of (forced) change but in the process I ended up making something positive and better - an “other” and something out of the norm. This is parallel to how we are able to change and construct our own identities as we find ourselves and find comfort in ourselves. It’s the same flower but now with additional qualities - stronger, more flourishing, and more beautiful.
Charlie Welch is a photographer living in Philadelphia, PA. He received a BFA in Photography at Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design in 1989. Additionally, he studied at Metáfora International Workshop in Barcelona, Spain from 2006-2008 focusing more on sculpture, installation and public intervention.
After he graduated college in 1989 he moved to New York and assisted various fashion and portrait photographers and then slowly transitioned into visual display for store’s like Barneys and Bergdorf Goodman. This eventually transitioned into work as a set designer and prop stylist for advertising and magazines.
All of the experiences from his various jobs comes into play in his personal work. Photography is the main medium but also incorporates sculpture and collage into it. Construction and playfulness are a big parts of his work to help create his narratives, which range from identity to public and private spaces and how we navigate them physically and emotionally.
