Hello My Name is Gallery opening Saturday night

Hello My Name Is Gallery
838 Whalley Ave., Apt. 4, New Haven
More songs for the Broken Hearted: New paintings by Hannah Barnes and Craig Olson
Diode Therapy: New work by Paul Theriault
Sept. 6—28, 2008.
Opening reception: Sat., Sept. 6, 6:30—10 p.m.

Press release

Hello My Name is Gallery is pleased to announce two exhibitions opening on Sept. 6. In the first floor gallery Hello presents new paintings by Hannah Barnes and Craig Olson. The exhibition, titled More Songs for the Broken Hearted, presents new paintings that explore the communicative inadequacy, specificity and transcendence of language and form.

Craig Olson creates paintings that use reference points to topography, landscape painting and op art in a dizzying combination that at once attracts and repels the viewer into distant lands and strange voids. In "Border Beneath the Sun," Olson sets up an optically shifting pattern of black and white lines that barely conceals an ephemeral, ominous mist of primary reds and blues. These two conflicting zones present opposing form languages that echo the myriad contradictory ways we organize and define the way we see the world around us.

Barnes' work uses forms culled from memory and specific experiences to craft paintings that are, as Barnes' put it, "objects with lives, accumulations of being and becoming." Barnes' work springs from the sense of loss and heartache that arises from a sense of geographic displacement. In Barnes' paintings everywhere is nowhere, and nowhere is everywhere.

Upstairs, in the second floor gallery, Hello presents Diode Therapy, a new exhibition of sculptures and digital prints by Paul Theriault. Paul Theriault's work uses a variety of sources and materials to reflect the ephemerality of information and virtual space. In "Black and Light," Theriault takes a now common source of information—digital images—and reduces it to its core. The end result is a textured void of pixels that howls like an old dial-up modem.

More songs for the Broken Hearted: New paintings by Hannah Barnes and Craig Olson and Diode Therapy: New work by Paul Theriault will both be on view from Sept. 6—Sept. 28. There will be an opening reception on Sept. 6 from 6:30 to 10:30 p.m. Hello My Name is Gallery is open Mon—Sat. by appointment, and Sunday from 12—4 p.m. For directions and more information please visit Hello My Name is Gallery.

Our opening is partnered with a music event downstairs, which begins at 7 p.m. ArLoW presents a performance by Welcome, a three-piece electropop group from New Haven. Visit Welcome's Web site for more information. Also taking place that night is the world premiere performance of London-based composer Adam Delacour's (Web) piece "Game-Hate Box" for solo vocalist with DVD accompaniment. The piece will be performed by New Haven vocalist Anne Rhodes (Web). For more information about music at ArLoW, please contact Adam Kubota at adam.kubota [AT] gmail.com