September 9 through October 3
MIDGE BATTELLE | SUSAN BERNSTEIN | PHYLLIS EWEN | KATHI ROBINSON FRANK | BARBARA HADDEN | M P LANDIS | MARIAN ROTH | FORREST WILLIAMS
Opening reception: Friday, September 9, 6-9 PM
Midge Battelle | Everything is Everything | Cyanotypes
"Intuition, serendipity, curiosity, and purpose run through the new Cyanotype work like a rogue liminal thread. Inspiration from unexpected sources like the slanting shadows of window frames in morning light moving so slightly across the white studio wall. Angular yet also soft shapes that became drawings in real time and then next moved through the Cyanotype process. The images here are connected and interwoven through spirit and the altering of process itself with an extemporaneous mix of spices, salts, vinegar, soap suds, plastic wrap, et al, added onto the traditional Cyanotype chemistry. A blend of elementals, feelings, energies, wonder, and blind faith… in the place where everything is everything." Midge Battelle was born in Worcester, Ma.,in 1945. For the past 55 years she has mostly lived and worked in Provincetown,Ma. where she currently resides. A graduate of Greenfield Community College, Battelle went on to receive a BFA at Massachusetts College of Art in 1988. She works in the mediums of photography and painting, and has been active in the Provincetown arts community for thirty plus years, exhibiting regularly, teaching, curating, and as a gallerist. Battelle’s work is in private, museum, and corporate collections. She is currently represented at AMP Gallery in Provincetown, and is having an exhibition of her cyanotypes at PAAM from August 26th through November 13th of 2022.
Susan Bernstein | What Will Be?
“The erosion of ground, even that which we thought was stable, has left many of us with deeply unsettling questions about where we are all headed. Our rights, our climate, and the core tenants of democracy here and around the globe are in jeopardy. This work is an offering of a space for shared grappling, taking us out of isolated despair and into community. The low table sits on an absence of foundation, representing the sense of disorientation and loss of territory of our rights. We have held onto, as MLK stated, that ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice’. Do we have faith in this as truth anymore? The table is bordered by stools that sit close to the earth. What is it we can offer one another besides a shared despair? What we are reckoning with and must continue to strive for cannot be fought alone. You are invited to leave a note and place it on the table; a poem, drawing, your fears, dreams, whatever you wish to share and read from our fellow human beings in the struggle. The paper floating above the table is the future yet to be written. While we often feel powerless, what we deeply care about, what we fight fearlessly for absolutely matters. Let our voices rise up to meet the challenges ahead.” -Susan Bernstein Susan Bernstein’s work is all hand built, using coils of clay or slab to build up the piece. Her ceramics speak to the time and place where they are made. This is made relevant in the work by her keen awareness and intimate connection to eve-ryday life, yet it can also reveal what it means to be human. “I am inspired by look-ing at images and films of potters around the world from South Africa, Burkina Fa-so, Nigeria, Ghana, Mexico, India, Korea. Even within widely diverse cultures, there is an inextricable kinship within a common craft language. I am in love with the dense physicality and pure nature of clay in all its stages. However, my great-est artistic challenge and passion lies not just with clay and ceramic form but its capacity to transcend its physical state and touch something deeper about our shared humanity.” Bernstein is a resident studio ceramic artist and teacher at Mudflat Studio in Somerville, MA. She has exhibited her work at AMP Gallery since 2013.
Phyllis Ewen | My Mind's Eye
Phyllis Ewen’s lithographs have come from drawings done during the Covid pandemic. The pandemic opened new avenues of exploration and expression in her studio practice, far from her 3-d work on the climate crisis: imagined sculptural landscapes and waterscapes. The prints in MY MIND’S EYE, come from her interpretations of MRI images of a brain. These allowed her to explore her internal experience, thoughts, and insights. Turning inward time to time during isolation and drawing from these images brought quiet and solace. The lithographs were developed and printed in collaboration with the Muskat Studios in Somerville. Phyllis has studios in Somerville MA and Wellfleet. She has had a long connection to the cape and over the past years has shown at AMP and Off Main Gallery in Wellfleet. Last year she had work in the SALLY exhibits in several Wellfleet venues. SALLY will show in September at the Brickbottom Gallery where Phyllis has her studio. Phyllis Ewen's 3-dimensional sculptural drawings invite us to imagine ourselves within the seascape above and below the surface of the water. These sculptural drawings have been shown widely. In 2017 she and two Icelandic artists had an exhibit at he Reykjanes Museum of Art, Við Sjónarrönd/Above And Below The Horizon. With a Cuban printmaker in Havana, Phyllis was a coordinator of a printmaking exchange between North American and Cuban artists. June 2022, her print along with those by other American artists was shown in Havana. In March, work by Cuban printmakers, was shown at the Brickbottom Gallery, where she has a studio. Her art is in public collections, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Reykjanes Museum of Art, the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, the Boston Public Library, Harvard University, MIT Sloan School of Business, and numerous corporate and private collections. Phyllis is represented by the Kingston Gallery in Boston where she will have a solo show in February 2023.
Kathi Robinson Frank | In Bed and Shroud
It is that moment of recognition – the “making sense of where the marks are coming from” that Frank waits for. Though she describes herself as “not cautious with paint,” essential to her process is listening for the cues from the marks. The figure appears undeniably as a corpse, horizontal in. one painting and vertical in another the delicate realism and the penciled translucent feet is a breath-taking juxtaposition to the dark band of the body. Behind one corpse in the picture plane floats an ephemeral net like grid of pencil lines, whether lifting or dissolving is unclear. Given the context of these paintings-the death of her husband- the singularity of the lines that reference his body and his death room cannot help but invoke the horizontal axis of mortal existence and the vertical axis of transcendence as well. - Millicent Young, Review Kathi Robinson Frank, Four Quartets 2018 "I am making paintings which are abstract images that overlap one another so that the layers of previous marks are present along with the later marks. I refer to this body of work as Pentimento. The meaning of which "is an alteration in a painting evidenced by traces of previous work, showing that the artist has changed her mind as to the composition during the process of painting." I use spackling tools to lay the first surface, with the unstretched raw canvas laid out on the studio floor. I gesso the canvas adding glazes while still wet. When this dries I stretch the canvas and continue to work on it upright against the wall. I draw and paint using brushes, charcoal, pastels, rubbing, scraping, repainting, redrawing until I begin to find my voice. There is a lot of looking also. I am exploring the relationship between connection and separation. My layering unblocks thoughts and opens up questions. The subject matter is expressionistic, the juxtaposition of light and dark, form and feeling." Kathi Robinson Frank Born in New York City, Kathi Robinson Frank studied at The Art Students League with Will Barnet while in high school and majored in art at Bard College. Her early influences were Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Rauchenberg, and Larry Rivers. In the 1990s she began working in natural fiber and adobe weaving large hanging nest-like structures, which she referred to as habitats. Then after seeing an Anselm Keifer show she began her three-dimensional paintings using adobe, paint, and natural found vegetation from her property in the Hudson Valley. These paintings formed a body of work called The Yeats Series (2009-2011). Her latest paintings on large canvases (72”x56”) incorporate oil, acrylic, charcoal, pastel, ink, fabric, and feathers. Graphic interconnecting lines suggest wires or strands symbolizing communication and the human struggle to stay connected. She has shown at the Provincetown Art Association, Berta Walker Gallery, and AMP Gallery in Provincetown; Byrdcliffe Kleinert/James Center in Woodstock, New York; Summergroup Gallery and Barrett House in Poughkeepsie, New York; Tivoli Artists' Gallery in Tivoli, New York; The Bell Gallery in Rhinebeck and Woodstock. New York. She has also shown in two Invitationals at the Pocketbook Factory in Hudson, New York; The Firlefanz Gallery in Albany, New York; The Wired Gallery in High Falls, New York; Core Gallery in New Paltz, New York, and Casa Morada Galley in Bucerias Mexico. She had a solo show at P.S. 209 Gallery in Stone Ridge, New York; and The Wired Gallery in High Falls, New York. She is currently with Amy Zook at 1st Dibs in New York City. She lives and works in Stone Ridge, New York and Bucerias Mexico.
Barbara Hadden | Selected Paintings
"Life is slowing down. The paintings take more time. Instead of working in a frenzy, I now focus on inch-by-inch, and then let the paintings sit for a while. The process is less precise and more fun, a series of puzzles on their way to cohesion. Even when they reach their finish, much is hidden. Though the paintings have their origins in randomness, a figurative thread runs through them. That porous thread is made of myself and a crowd of outside influences. From clothing ads and catalogs I pick images of a gesture, an action or an environment I want to be in. I also find ideas in my ever-reconstituted collages, with their cut ups and discards, and my own photographs and drawings. It’s challenging to explore what’s hidden and find myself in connection to other people’s questions and their efforts to understand each other. I’m motivated by paintings that spark a love and recognition of feelings not embodied in other media. Telling the story of my work is difficult, there are a lot of loose threads. It’s a little like tracing my own shadow." “…Barbara Hadden’s layered northern landscapes alternate between spatial representation and flat modernist abstraction. The figures present don’t stand apart from the land but are part of it, dissolving both human and animal individuality into the natural world. Generated from photographic imagery. Generated from photographic imagery (the artist is also a photographer), Hadden’s paintings belie their origins through masterful paint handling.” – Richard Klein, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Barbara Hadden was born in 1955 in Hamburg, Germany, and spent her childhood in Europe and the Middle East. She studied painting, photography and filmmaking at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She was awarded an Alumni Traveling Fellowship from that school for her work in photography. Hadden was a finalist in the Regional Fellowships for Visual Arts, awarded through the New England Foundation for the Arts, and has also been awarded a Fund for Individuals by the Berkshire Taconic Artist’s Resource Trust. In the last decade, she regularly attended artist residency programs, which have deepened her commitment to landscape-based painting and photography. She lives in western Massachusetts.
M P Landis | Selected Works
M P Landis (b. 1965, Lancaster, PA) 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 and was awarded a solo exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in 1995. 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 35 solo exhibitions and a multitude of various 2-person and group exhibits and is included in many public and private collections. “Through my work I am always interested in the dialogue between process and artifact, the doing and the finished. This tension is ever present in how I work and what I choose to exhibit.”
Marian Roth | Selected Works
Marian Roth moved to Provincetown in 1982 to fulfill a dream of living and making art in a community of creative people. She has never thought of leaving. Well-known in the world of photography for her innovative camera obscura work, Marian has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pollock Krasner Fellowship, a fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and was honored with a lifetime award for artistic excellence by PAAM. For the last fifteen years Marian has also been exhibiting painting and lithography. She is currently on a journey with clay.
