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.
FDS (Female Disappearance Syndrome) is a limited edition series of throw pillows (goose down with 100% cotton cover; dimensions, patterns and colors vary,) featuring hunky Alexander Henry male pinups. Each pillow contains, buried within it, a short biography, encased in a vial, of a different woman who lives with or has died of HIV/AIDS. Inspired by Chilean writer Lina Meruane's description of HIV-positive women as suffering from "the syndrome of disappearance," FDS is an object-based reminder of this phenomenon, meant for living with.
Heather Kapplow is a self-trained conceptual artist based in the United States. Kapplow creates engagement experiences that elicit unexpected intimacies using objects, alternative interpretations of existing environments, installation, performance, writing, audio and video. Kapplow's work has received government and private grants and has been included in galleries, film and performance festivals in the US and internationally.
Furnishings refers to familiar furniture shapes that refer to their linguistic designation and implied use. Placing the furnishings outside also calls attention to the ambiguity of the room/space.
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.
“I repurpose, create, and combine in a search for affinities among objects that together come to speak of something more. I experiment with geologic processes to tumble clay shards with sand and water. These small stone-like forms, inspired by those the sea turns up, led me to contrasting big flat clay stones that, when strung together, came to speak of weight. With found block and tackle we are able to experience that weight. Forms left from the production of one thing are gathered to find form together or are sorted in invented taxonomy. The installations are responses to the physical nature of these parts--the weight of the clay, the natural way a pile of arcs forms and falls, the way objects speak to each other.”
Judith Motzkin studied Asian Studies at Cornell University ’76, focused on Asian Art, History, and Chinese. It was there that she began working with clay while studying the history of ceramics in Asia. Influenced by travels to Mexico and China, while at Clay Dragon Studios (1977-1985), she began to experiment with smoke and fire on polished classical, sensual clay forms. She went on to establish her own studio in an old stable next to her Cambridge home. Over time, her work has expanded to include mixed media, assemblage, installations and photography.
Judy has had several solo shows and her work included in gallery and museum exhibits nationally and internationally. She was founding director of the original Cambridge Artists Open Studios (CAOS), one of the first neighborhood based open studios events, carrying on a tradition of inviting people into the working studio begun at Clay Dragon. She curated “Smooth and Smoky” (2009) an international exhibit of pit, smoke, and saggar fired ceramics at Vessels Gallery, Boston, and co-curated the exhibit “Legacy of Fire: Clay Dragon Studios Revisited” (2015) at Fuller Craft Museum. Her saggar fired work is in permanent collections including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Crocker Museum of Art, and Jingdezhen Ceramics Museum in China. She has taught at MIT, Harvard, and Castle Hill Center for the Arts, as well as other workshop venues.
“As an artist, scenic designer, and woodworker I am fascinated by the ways in which spatial relationships inform context and story. What is the life of objects? What is it we build? And what do our environments reveal? In the 20 x 20 Gallery I will explore these questions.”
Ellen Rousseau is an artist, scenic designer, and woodworker living and working in Provincetown, MA. For years Rousseau has been making things for herself and others. Her favorite toys as a child were building toys. Blocks, Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets, Legos. Through art, theater, and design, Rousseau sees and interprets the world around her. Inspiration can be the spiral of a shell, an industrial landscape, a word, the people she meets or, the curvature of the world.
"When Deb asked me for a title and an idea of what I had in mind for the installation in front of the gallery, I knew only that I wanted to work with water and earth. I said I wasn’t sure what it would be yet, I would have to see how the water falls. Thus we called it: “See How the Water Falls”. In August, I realized the piece had come to have a second title in my mind: “Potter’s Falls”.
My yoga practice has found its way into the studio; I use drawings and clay figures to examine the balance of poses I am exploring. Anticipating the swimming season in June, one of these figures took to the AMP waterfall in a back bend. More of these figures came to the waterfall at AMP as the season has passed. Surely more will come.
I came to remember a summer while I was in college when I regularly and illicitly skinny dipped at a waterfall between the dams of the local reservoir. (If caught the charge was lewd and lascivious behavior). It was there, on large flat rocks, that my friend Josh and I taught ourselves how to do sun salutations, a series of flowing yoga poses. It was there that I came to know the draw and the power of waterfalls. After that summer, fences were installed, so people stopped swimming there. I was not yet a potter. This place was presciently named “Potter’s Falls”."
Judith Motzkin studied Asian Studies at Cornell University ’76, focused on Asian Art, History, and Chinese. It was there that she began working with clay while studying the history of ceramics in Asia. While working at Clay Dragon Studios (1977-1985), influenced by travels to Mexico, New Mexico and China (197, she began to experiment with smoke and fire on polished classical, sensual clay forms. Motzkin established her own studio in an old stable next to her Cambridge home. Over time, her work has expanded to include mixed media assemblage, clay installations, digital image and design.
Judy had several solo shows and has been included in numerous international gallery and museum exhibitions She was founding director of the original Cambridge Artists Open Studios. She curated “Smooth and Smoky” (2009) an international exhibit of pit, smoke and saggar fired ceramics at Vessels Gallery, Boston, and co-curated “Legacy of Fire: Clay Dragon Studios Revisited” (2015) at Fuller Craft Museum. Her work is in permanent collections including Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Crocker Museum of Art, and Jingdezhen Ceramics Museum in China. She has taught at MIT, Harvard, and Castle Hill Center for the Arts .
Weed Science Theater (+14inches gallery): Not unlike the rest of Provincetown, a seasonal drama will unfold in the +14inches gallery at AMP. Invasive species and weeds vie for space to live. A short growing season means they have to work extra hard to survive the winter ahead. There's not enough space to grow around. Encroaching development from Japanese Knotweed threatens the wetlands. Rhizomes out-compete roots. Who will survive the Provincetown summer season at the Weed Science Theater?
This installation is comprised of weeds and invasive species transplanted on a weekly basis from the B-Street Gardens in Provincetown. The sound track includes, audio interviews from a conference from the Weed Science Society of America which address the question, what is a weed?
Folius Electronicus (outdoor installation): This plant is native to Radioshack, but has taken root outside of AMP for the summer season. It is a 4 season plant, and has no known predators. As an attractor to listeners, it will be playing audio interviews with gardeners from the B-Street garden in Provincetown through "speaker buds" throughout the summer season.
sam smiley’s intersectional identities include media artist and educator, forager, and gardener. She is also a doctoral student at Tilburg University through the Taos Institute. Her dissertation, called “From Ornamental to Invasive: The Secret Lives of Weeds” explores weed and plant subjectivity. smiley uses STS, cultural studies, history of science and arts-based research to do a cross cultural comparison of the development of Japanese knotweed as “invasive species”.
Furnishings refers to familiar furniture shapes that refer to their linguistic designation and implied use. Placing the furnishings outside also calls attention to the ambiguity of the room/space.
Richard Dorff is a visual artist and set designer working in the realm of sculpture and installation. Previously, he designed the sets for FPTC's Indiscreet Discretion and On With Living and Learning's Hidden Faces of Courage, a collaboration with FPTC. He is a co-artistic director of Fort Point Theater Channel and a founding member of Atlantic Works Gallery in East Boston. Website
This collaborative project asks for your help in testing an experimental premise about our political system: Is it possible that our civic life suffers not because of the fetishization of bureaucracy but because bureaucracy is not fetishized enough? Do we feel alienated from local, regional and federal democratic processes because they fail to arouse us?
As in any relationship, if you want to bring a little blood flow to regions that have been forgotten for awhile, someone has to make the first move. The “powers that be” are terrible at flirting and queers are typically fairly nimble and playful, so I'm inviting you to participate in discreet, distributed, group sexual stimulation in the service of Democracy.
Civic Engorgement attempts to build more intimacy into our experience of the State by eroticizing the entire zone of things that we think of as civic or political. This is an invitation to take the political VERY personally: to respond to the traditional taunt aimed those who criticize this country's political policies that they should “love it or leave it” by literally loving it. My hope is that this will invigorate our collective political passions, or at the very least, make politics seem dirty in a different way than usual...
Heather Kapplow is a self-taught American conceptual artist using writing, interactive performance, installation, audio and video as tools for carrying out her work: exploring very simple philosophical questions about the workings of daily life. Kapplow’s investigations are earnest but playful, encouraging audiences to be active agents in the exploration (and art-creation) process. Her work has received government and private grants and has been included in galleries, film and performance festivals in the US and internationally. Website
Postcards From the Fringe is an ongoing interactive installation of stories and letters in postcard form. They are meant to be read, enjoyed and replaced for the next person to discover.
Daniel Gómez Llata is a native of Southern California. After college he left the United States for nearly a decade, rubbing elbows with locals in over forty countries on five continents. Daniel has resided in California, London, Madrid, Tokyo, New York, Washington DC and has enjoyed a diverse career path which includes teacher, drug councilor, diplomat, whale videographer and more. He is also a local letter carrier with many stories to tell based on his travels and unique life experiences.
He has lived in Provincetown for the last nine years and contributes to the local arts community with his writings, drawings, paintings, cinema and photography.
Beginning in his youth helping his grandfather, a master mason, Jesse Cartwright has spent his life exploring the many materials and techniques of that trade. In 2012, while living in Red Hook and exploring New York by bicycle, Jesse became fascinated by the rhythms of the brick, stone, and steel that the city is created from, and wanted to capture a snap shot of traveling past those changing patterns of urban facades and terrain. These sculptural paintings, reflect that experience.
Jesse Cartwright is a native of Provincetown. He studied sculpture and photography at The University of New Hampshire.
Elizabeth Bradfield and Broadsided Press offer the Outpost, part storyboard, part art, part notice board, this installation will accrue over time with the open participation of viewers. Each month, a new visual/literary collaboration will be posted and you are invited to take pen (or crayon, pencil, chalk, dirt) and leave your own responses (poems, notes, drawings).
We are more than passive ingesters of what is put before us. We deserve more than advertisements on our streets. Our participation in the dialogue is essential. Partake.
Since 2005, Broadsided has been publishing monthly collaborations between writers and visual artists with the goal of putting literature and art on the streets. Available free of charge on the website, "vectors" around the world print the letter-sized collaborations and post them in their communities. Modernizing the centuries-old tradition of the broadside and harnessing the power and spirit of guerilla art, Broadsided Press has received attention in the Utne Reader and Poets & Writers for its innovative project. Website
Working intuitively with Mother Nature as collaborator, we create our abstract contemplative piece here as a process-driven response to the given environment using a variety of media. We engage in mingling the place in the piece & piece in the place using many strategies to create a perceptual & spiritual relationship with this place as locus for recognition of & solace for the self. This approach to the identification of the individual with nature is enlarged by a desire to discover & contact the particular indwelling essence or energy of this particular place
Strongly influenced by the shore and woodlands of outer Cape Cod, Maine, and now Nova Scotia, my ‘research sketchbook’ consists of documentary photography and video of environmental installations I create as references for my mixed and multi-media works in painting, photography, and video projection. I work intuitively to create abstract contemplative pieces that are rooted in and extracted from landscape and experience.
Process-driven, using non-traditional materials, I am intrigued as I translate experience into visual language… from the tiniest grain of sand to mountains of stone and architecture, from a drop of rain to a raging tsunami, the quietest sparkle of dawn to foreboding dusk. Incorporating the very elements that influence and inspire –clay, pigment, chemistry, technology– engages me to embrace the impact, to understand. I am reaching beyond the limits of the expected while expanding the possibilities of outcome and reflection.
Luanne E Witkowski is a studio and environmental installation artist and consultant (Boston, Wellfleet & Provincetown, MA) with works in collections throughout the United States and abroad. She is a member of the Kingston Gallery, Boston, and is also represented by Hutson Gallery in Provincetown, MA. Luanne is a member of several artist organizations including Provincetown Art Association & Museum, the Mission Hill Artist Collective, the United South End Artists, and the MassArt Alumni Association. She exhibits regularly in group, competition, invitational, and community shows, and has produced large scale environmental installations in Wellfleet & Provincetown MA; Deer Isle, ME; and Ingonish, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Luanne offers Basic Training Workshops for Artists and Creative People publicly and privately in a variety of venues. In addition to her studio practice, she is the Communication Design Studio Manager at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, a faculty member of the Critical & Creative Thinking (CCT) graduate program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and an internet entrepreneur and business owner.
Luanne E Witkowski received a BFA from MassArt and an MA from the University of Massachusetts. In 2010 she received a Commonwealth of Massachusetts Lifetime of Arts and Commercial Achievement Recognition. Recent exhibitions in Boston, MA include Kingston Gallery, Massachusetts State House, Boston Public Library, Bakalar and President’s Galleries at Massachusetts College of Art and Design; as well as Hutson, Schoolhouse, PAAM, and AMP Galleries in Provincetown, MA; Cook’s Dune & Drummer Cove in Wellfleet, MA; and Haystack School of Arts and Crafts, Deer Isle, ME. Website
Shez Arvedon's Cape Cod Kitsch will exist as a loving totem-like assemblage of Arvedon's father's life-long, extensive collection of Cape Cod art and artifact to be installed sometime late this summer. Arvedon's work will be in the gallery in September.
Elizabeth Bradfield and Broadsided Press offer the Prime Vector Project, part storyboard, part art, part notice board, this installation will accrue over time with the open participation of viewers. Each month, a new visual/literary collaboration will be posted and you are invited to take pen (or crayon, pencil, chalk, dirt) and leave your own responses (poems, notes, drawings).
We are more than passive ingesters of what is put before us. We deserve more than advertisements on our streets. Our participation in the dialogue is essential. Partake.
Since 2005, Broadsided has been publishing monthly collaborations between writers and visual artists with the goal of putting literature and art on the streets. Available free of charge on the website, "vectors" around the world print the letter-sized collaborations and post them in their communities. Modernizing the centuries-old tradition of the broadside and harnessing the power and spirit of guerilla art, Broadsided Press has received attention in the Utne Reader and Poets & Writers for its innovative project. Website
Climb is a site-specific, evolving installation employing the organic and inorganic to focus on light, reflection, and place created by Linda Leslie Brown and Luanne E Witkowski for AMP: Art market Provincetown's 2012 summer season.
The collaborative installation treats landscape as an arena for the deployment of light. Prismatic refraction, reflection, projection and mirroring/doubling are all used as strategies for creating a perceptual and spiritual relationship with Place as locus for recognition of and solace for the self. This traditional American approach to the identification of the individual with landscape is enlarged by a desire to discover and contact the particular indwelling essence or energy of a particular place.
The energy of place is directly expressed in living ecosystems of plants and animals. Growth and interdependent activity are found in an infinite variety. The fragile systems of beauty and power that exist in the natural world are accessible through the creative process of perception and felt by us when we allow ourselves to relax and use our five senses.
Witkowski’s architecturally installed mirrors and design capture and multiply light and space into infinity while Brown is interested in enticing and catching these reflections. Ropes of crystals create webs of light that define new spatial relationships in the landscape of climbing vegetation. The energetic reach of heirloom scarlet runner beans continually alters the colors and shapes in the piece.
Both artists also work with video as a way of extending the immediate experience of landscape into a flexible temporal dimension. As part of the installation’s evolution they will create an evening experience for visitors using video, light projection and sound to reveal further dimensions of the work.
Linda Leslie Brown
I approach my art from a number of perspectives: there is generally a confluence of my intellectual interests, my involvement with the sensuousness and symbolism of the materials with which I work, and an underlying framework of the Buddhist psychology and practice that informs my daily life. In my work it is fundamental that the materials, the methods of making and the ideas are interrelated on multiple levels. I find that the installation format allows the materials, objects, sounds and images to enjoy a playful relationship that creates a generous array of images and ideas. Elements within the installation may include crystals, motors, living plants, sound, video, wire, fabric and resin.
Linda Leslie Brown is a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work was included in RISD’s New England Biennial 2009 exhibition. She has exhibited her work nationally, including shows at Louisiana State University, University of Southern Maine, Wentworth Institute of Technology, Emmanuel College, the Danforth Museum of Art, Boston Center for the Arts, and galleries in Chicago, Montreal, Philadelphia, and New York. She has received recent grants and awards from Suffolk University, the Saint Botolph Club Foundation, and Hambidge Center for the Arts.
Brown's recent work incorporates a variety of techniques, including sculpture, painting, video/sound, and large scale digital photographic prints. Her work engages the interdependent relationships between the energies of nature and human creative perception. Site-specific installations create habitats that attract and protect the energy of place.
Linda Leslie Brown lives and works in an artist's cooperative building in the Fort Point neighborhood of Boston. She is Professor and Foundation Studio Program Director at NESAD, Suffolk University, where she has been teaching drawing, painting, design and critical studies in contemporary art since 1980. Her work is represented in Boston by the Kingston Gallery.
Luanne E Witkowski
Strongly influenced by the shore and woodlands of outer Cape Cod, Maine, and now Nova Scotia, my ‘research sketchbook’ consists of documentary photography and video of environmental installations I create as references for my mixed and multi-media works in painting, photography, and video projection. I work intuitively to create abstract contemplative pieces that are rooted in and extracted from landscape and experience. Process-driven, using non-traditional materials, I am intrigued as I translate experience into visual language… from the tiniest grain of sand to mountains of stone and architecture, from a drop of rain to a raging tsunami, the quietest sparkle of dawn to foreboding dusk. Incorporating the very elements that influence and inspire –clay, pigment, chemistry, technology– engages me to embrace the impact, to understand. I am reaching beyond the limits of the expected while expanding the possibilities of outcome and reflection.
Luanne E Witkowski is a studio and environmental installation artist and consultant (Boston, Wellfleet & Provincetown, MA) with works in collections throughout the United States and abroad. She is a member of the Kingston Gallery, Boston, and is also represented by Hutson Gallery in Provincetown, MA. Luanne is a member of several artist organizations including Provincetown Art Association & Museum, the Mission Hill Artist Collective, the United South End Artists, and the MassArt Alumni Association. She exhibits regularly in group, competition, invitational, and community shows, and has produced large scale environmental installations in Wellfleet & Provincetown MA; Deer Isle, ME; and Ingonish, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Luanne offers Basic Training Workshops for Artists and Creative People publicly and privately in a variety of venues. In addition to her studio practice, she is the Communication Design Studio Manager at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, a faculty member of the Critical & Creative Thinking (CCT) graduate program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and an internet entrepreneur and business owner.
Luanne E Witkowski received a BFA from MassArt and an MA from the University of Massachusetts. In 2010 she received a Commonwealth of Massachusetts Lifetime of Arts and Commercial Achievement Recognition. Recent exhibitions in Boston, MA include Kingston Gallery, Massachusetts State House, Boston Public Library, Bakalar and President’s Galleries at Massachusetts College of Art and Design; as well as Hutson, Schoolhouse, PAAM, and AMP Galleries in Provincetown, MA; Cook’s Dune & Drummer Cove in Wellfleet, MA; and Haystack School of Arts and Crafts, Deer Isle, ME. Website
Richard Dorff has constructed two large movable-at-will "commas or yin/yang-like" sculptures in wood and paint infusing the gallery's historic structure with a modern inversion and playful tension.
Dorff is primarily interested in the space that his work occupies and how that space and the objects themselves interact. By making these connections, primarily through placement and lighting, he has transformed the historic home of high-line fisherman Capt. Frank Gaspa into a space that one might have not have intuited it could become. Using a variety of mediums, he has created an environment of works with their own inner space that extends beyond their physical dimensions. His exploration of space and objects, light and perception transports the viewer into a world of his own making.
Dorff's work will be in the gallery in May and June.
Shari Kadison will transfer part of her outdoor site-specific installation, Family Tree, Five Generations from 'Appearances' earlier this season, to AMP for a new interpretation in early September. Family Tree is comprised of a series of nests with nearby telephones at varying points in their stylistic development. Kadison manages to, in part, deftly address the morphing displacement of nature with a new form of modern bird song, the tweet. Kadison's work will be in the gallery in September.