July 12 - July 31 2019

BARBARA E. COHEN | MEGAN HINTON | AMY SOLOMON | FORREST WILLIAMS | RICK WRIGLEY

Opening Reception: Friday, July 12, 6-9 pm

Barbara E. Cohen

Life Jackets and Displacement Camps

“My work over the past few years has been focused and inspired by the growing crisis of refugee displacement and flow of humanity. Throughout my travels to Germany, India and Central America, I was drawn to the settlements of families who were forced to leave their homeland, escaping terrorism, violence, poverty and war. In a recent trip to Poland and Israel, the memory of my own people, the Jews of living during World War II, who were pulled from their homes and taken to death camps, resonated with my work.

Currently, millions of immigrants, in their deepest willingness to abandon one’s lifetime belongings, run for shelter with no guarantee of a life anywhere, in order to escape the terror of their country.

Seeing images of florescent orange vests surrounding the hearts and chests of children and parents abroad sardine packed boats seeking freedom created the “LIFE JACKETS” series. Displacement camps of tents and boxed shelters are the subjects of my current project as I recycle images from past work.”

Barbara E. Cohen received her 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. She has received numerous grants including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Artists Foundation Mass Fellowship Program, Polaroid Artist Support Program, Blanche E. Colman Award and grants from the Cambridge and Massachusetts Arts Councils. She received an artist’s residency from the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Barbara has exhibited her paintings and sculptures in numerous galleries and museums across the country.

Barbara’s most recent book, “Venezia: Essenze”, is a series of painted Polaroids of Venice, Italy, published in 2013 by the Italian editor, Damocle. She is the author of “New York Love Affair”, 2010, a collection of painted “Polaroids of New York City”, and “Dog in the Dunes Revisited”, 2005, published by Fields Publishing .The original “Dog in the Dunes” 1998, a series of painted photographs of her black Labrador, Gabe, set in the dunes of Cape Cod, was published by Andrews McMeel. “Provincetown ‘East West’”, a selection of her painted Polaroid landscapes of this small seaside town, was published in 2002 by University Press of New England. Additional books include, “Woman's Best Friend; A Celebration of Dogs and their Women” 1996, published by Little Brown and Company, “Dogs and their Women” 1989, “Cats and their Women” 1992, and “Horses and their Women” 1993. Barbara is currently working on a new book of painted photos of Yofi, her 3 ½ pound, 10 year old Morkie, living an Upper West Side life in the famous French one hundred year old building, the Ansonia, in New York.

Barbara divides her artistic time between Provincetown, MA and New York. She travels extensively enhancing her continued work on the lives of displaced people. Her personal politics are projected throughout her abstract paintings and sculpture from her past and present surroundings.

Megan Hinton

Revisit

My recent paintings derive from a personal narrative, unleashed and dismantled through means of discarded imagery and remnants of material. This layering defies traditional means of painting from a flat field to a build-up of material off the surface in assemblage.

These pieces define the spaces humans occupy. The belt represents a stand for the body, making the figure’s rendering unnecessary. Here metonyms for power, weight, and masculinity arise. Hands also become expressive isolated gestures to link objects and material.

I cut up, fragment, photocopy, and reconfigure drawings. Things weathered and scuffed show a rough-hewn nature that draws out the texture of use and history. These intuitive strategies allow me to practice chance and spontaneity to seek connections between imagery and material. A hypothesis is drawn out through the making allowing the work to operate poetically. Questions arise about human experiences from the marks, objects, and images.

Megan Hinton (American b. 1974) has been exhibiting her work in New England and beyond for over fifteen years. Hinton is currently a Master of Fine Arts Candidate at Mills College in Oakland, California. Hinton also holds degrees from Ohio Wesleyan University, The School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and New York University. In Summer of 2019 she will be an artist in residence in Provincetown’s annual 20 Summers Program at the historic Charles Hawthorne Barn. Megan has been awarded artist residencies from The Women’s Studio Workshop, The Vermont Studio Center, Nantucket Island School of Design, and Les Amis de la Grande Vigne in Brittany, France, and Frans Masereel, an International Printmaking Center in Belgium. She has also been the recipient of three local Massachusetts Cultural Council grants for recent exhibitions in Wellfleet, Massachusetts at Preservation Hall and The Harbor Stage Company. Her paintings are included in the permanent collections of The Cape Cod Museum of Art, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, and The Artists Association of Nantucket. Hinton is also published art writer, art educator, and lecturer.

Amy Solomon

The Daily Drawing Project

These drawings are part of my daily drawing project for 2018. Inspired by making tea maps with my young students I would soak paper scrolls in tea each morning and from there the dot series began. Mostly working with ink, whiteout and sometimes acrylic paint, at first the dots were evenly ordered lines but then they became quite crowded together in a field of color. Then they gathered together to form organic shapes. Sometimes my morning drawing would be on tiny papers with words pieces stitched together and some of these drawings are four feet long and physically consuming.

These drawings became my early morning meditations throughout 2018 and my best escape from the daily tornado of politics we are bombarded with. These days I've moved onto a single four foot drawing per week. The first of these are here too.

Amy Solomon is an artist and arts educator with a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Amy merges her dual interests in community activism and art via a monthly First Friday event at her Brookline Village art studio with the goal of empowering artists while raising funds for important causes. Amy was the principal organizer behind monthly exhibits benefitting the World Central Kitchen project to feed Puerto Rico following the devastation of Hurricane Maria. Amy also led a fundraiser for the McAllen Refugee Center in McAllen, TX, and art auctions supporting Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and the Christchurch mosque in New Zealand.

Over the past year Amy received a grant from Jewish Collaborative Arts and had work shown at Post-Cubicle Gallery in Boston, MA and Chandler Gallery in Cambridge, MA.

Forrest Williams

Silent Noon

"My work is about relationships—and about separateness—but fundamentally the paintings are about the self. I'm interested in that place of tension between the containment and the expression of feeling, and in how to portray that visually.

The paintings depict individual men, but they aren't portraits. The men inhabit a particular place, but it isn't real. It's an ambiguous, interior territory, where things are and are not what they seem. The paintings are like stages upon which dramas play out--theatrical moments--and the men who inhabit them are the actors. The reality lies in the emotional core of this world, intensely felt but highly contained. My model Lorenzo called it "emotional purgatory." Perhaps these are worlds of their own making—worlds with edges and outsides and unknown terrains beyond, just out of reach. For me the paintings are often as much about what isn't seen as what is.

Although they're a group of anonymous men, they're at the same time in some way self-portraits. This is the region where desire and doubt, longing and reticence, intimacy and uncertainty coexist. It speaks of absence as much as presence."

Forrest Williams has shown his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the US and Canada. Current solo exhibitions include: 2017 “Ghosts”, 2016 “Lowlands” and 2014 “Arrival” AMP, Provincetown, MA; 2010 “Crossways” Marx & Zavattero, San Francisco, CA; 2007 “Porches” Heather Marx Gallery, San Francisco, CA; 2005 “Passage” Heather Marx Gallery, San Francisco, CA. Recent group exhibitions include: 2013-14 “Hello, Goodbye” Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco, CA; 2012 “Two Loves – Sex, Art, and the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name” Kymara Gallery, Biddeford, ME; 2012 “SEEN” Visual Aid Gallery, San Francisco, CA; 2012 “New York Academy of Art Sixth Annual Summer Exhibition” Flowers, New York, NY; 2011 “Sea Change” Marx & Zavattero, San Francisco, CA; 2011 “The Elegance of Refusal” Gensler, San Francisco, CA; 2009 “Seldom Seen” Leslie/Lohman Foundation; New York, NY; 2009 “Figuratively Speaking” Lyons Wier Gallery, New York, NY; 2008 “Color Key” The Painting Center, New York, NY.

Rick Wrigley

Scultures

"After 25 years as an art-furniture-maker and over 10 years designing and building houses, I am now finding new inspiration as a sculptor. Prior to this career change, my creative process involved working within the tight constraints set by the function of the object or building I was designing. For instance, a successful design for a chair, a table, or especially a house, must meet a very particular set of functional criteria. In the case of a commission, the needs and desires of the client as well as the budget add further constraints.

For many years I enjoyed the challenge of solving aesthetic problems within these types of strict parameters. The work required a discipline I was comfortable with — a discipline that, with time, became automatic for me. But I now feel drawn to move beyond the functional limits inherent in architectural and furniture design. Exploring new aesthetic challenges as a sculptor has become my current focus.

Authenticity is far more important to me than the concerns of formal development. While I would not discourage intellectual reflection as part of the viewer’s experience with my work, I hope “thinking” is secondary to “feeling” and “sensing.” Toward the aim of evoking an emotional and sensory response in the viewer, I make intuitive choices regarding materials, the use of texture, color, and asymmetry. The archetypal spiral form often appears in my work, as does an irregular hand-drawn line.

I bring decades of experience as an art-furniture maker and designer to my practice as a sculptor. My work is informed by a concern for craftsmanship and an intimate knowledge of how to shape and manipulate my materials. As the craft of what I do is now second nature, I am free to watch for the visual surprises that often occur as a sculpture evolves from sketch to mock-up, to the actual making of the final work. It is in these discoveries that I find opportunities for an authentic artistic expression to emerge."

Rick Wrigley's work has evolved across disciplines: First as an Art Furniture-Maker, then as a designer and builder of houses, and currently as a sculptor.

His career began with an apprenticeship to a classically trained British cabinetmaker. He then received a B.F.A. from the School for American Craftsmen, R.I.T., Rochester, NY.

Recognized as an important figure in the Studio Furniture movement, Rick received a New England Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and participated in invitational exhibitions at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Montreal, and The Silvermine Gallery in New Canaan.

He won a Connecticut Commission on the Arts competition to design and make 44 large hearing room doors for the Legislative Office Building, Hartford. A pair of these doors was subsequently exhibited at the American Craft Museum, NYC.

Rick's work is in the permanent collection of the Renwick Gallery.

In addition to his studio practice, Rick has worked as an architectural designer/builder completing six houses in Provincetown MA.

His most current work is as a sculptor. His sculpture has been exhibited at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. He is represented by AMP Gallery in Provincetown where he shows regularly.

A LIVE GALLERY SPACE