Silvermine September exhibits open Sunday

Silvermine Guild Art Center
1037 Silvermine Rd., New Canaan, (203) 966-9700
September Exhibits at Silvermine
Through Oct. 1, 2009
Opening Reception: Sun., Sept. 13, 4—6 p.m.

Press release

The fall exhibits at the Silvermine Guild Arts Center, located in New Canaan, CT brings a range of works that will spark interest for all art lovers and collectors. Opening Sept. 6 and running through Oct. 1, the show will feature new works by Silvermine Guild Artist members Gerald Saladyga, Jeanine Esposito, Nash Hyon and Director's Choice with Janice Mauro and Joanne Pagano. All are welcomed to the opening reception on Sunday Sept. 13 from 4—6 p.m.

The Director's Choice exhibit The Tidal Decade is a collaborative effort by artists Janice Mauro and Joanne Pagano. Through the construction of artifacts for an imaginary society future's past, the artist duo creates a world that draws us into a place outside of time. A place which hauntingly reveals the possibilities that lie on the edge of present day man's misuse of science and technology. In the remote mountaintop caves the ancestors of this imaginary society not only have endured the ending of humanoid civilization but created art that just may be a testament to their ordeal. The Tidal Decade exhibition opens in collaboration with the Williamsburg Art Gallery Association, at Art 101 located in Brooklyn, New York, opening on Sept. 11.

Janice Mauro, from Redding, teaches figurative sculpture at the Silvermine School of Art in Connecticut and the Art School at Old Church in New Jersey. Her award winning sculpture has been exhibited in New York at The National Sculpture Society, Lever House, and the Inter Church Center, as well as at City Without Walls and the Meadowlands Center for the Arts both in New Jersey. Mauro's museum exhibits include the National Academy of Design Annual Exhibition in New York, the Paterson Museum, NJ, and in Connecticut at the Discovery Museum, the Mattatuck Museum, and the New Britain Museum of American Art. Ms. Mauro is a sculptor member of the National Sculpture Society and member of the Silvermine Guild of Artists.

Joanne Pagano is an artist, writer, and performer residing in Sunnyside, New York. She has designed and collaborated on numerous sets for the long-running Alternative New Years Day Spoken Word/Performance Extravaganza. As a member of The No Chance Ensemble, a troupe of writer/performers that she also directs, she has brought multimedia interpretations to such venues as St. Marks's Poetry Project, Dixon Place, The Bowery Poetry Club, and The Knitting Factory. Joanne Pagano Weber exhibits at Art 101 in Brooklyn, NY.

In his new works Landscapes After the Battle, Gerald Saladyga's investigative intensity brings together a variety of scientific and political source material to create multi-layered "landscape" paintings that astound the viewer with their bold colors and spurs contemplation of the tragic results of man's devices. For this New Haven artist, "representing landscape is a very important part of my work. But I see landscape painting not as a romantic representation of the past, but as an ongoing inspiration of an ever-changing environment challenged by urban sprawl, pollution, industrialization, victimization and conflict." His approach is different in that this artist prefers the fantasy underlying the reality to bring the viewer in with color, form and texture and then let him go with a sense of unease that there is something wrong and it's just below the surface.

Jeanine Esposito is a sculptor and installation artist who creates conceptual works using an unusual combination of paper pulps, textiles and found materials. She has had several solo shows and her work has been chosen for over 25 juried shows throughout the Northeast, and has won several awards. Her new one-person show, Daily Shower, explores the fragmentation of how life is actually lived. According to the artist, who lives in Westport, "No matter what events, joyful or catastrophic, or what situations or states of mind we are in, all of it is lived in one day increments." Through conceptual installations, the works in this exhibit takes every day discarded and overlooked materials and transforms them into meditative compositions exploring this fragmentation. The works reflect upon the emotional and psychological nuances of everyday life.

Working primarily with encaustics in her exhibit Convergence, Wilton artist Nash Hyon explores the connection between man, nature, beauty, art and science, and above all, what it means to be human. The meticulous process of melting, layering and scraping give Hyon's pieces an almost archaeological feel with depth and substance, a sense of history, and how even the sharpest remembered experiences gradually fade with the passage of time. She combines the raw materials of an artist—paint, paper, graphite—with a passion for every aspect of human culture, mixing concepts in science and medicine with striking symbolic imagery, thereby transforming them into timeless, emotionally evocative works of art.