January shows open Sunday at Silvermine Guild Art Center

Silvermine Guild Art Center
1037 Silvermine Rd., New Canaan, (203) 966-9700
January Exhibits at Silvermine
Jan. 10—Feb. 19, 2010
Opening Reception: Sun., Jan. 10, 2—4 p.m.

Press release

Silvermine Guild Arts Center, located in New Canaan, is starting the new year with exciting exhibits featuring works by the new Guild Artist members of 2009, a daytime Emmy Award winner, and a collaborative exhibition that explores the relationship of two artist's diverse works. All are welcomed to the opening reception on Sun., Jan. 10, from 2—4 p.m. The exhibits will run through Feb. 19, 2010.

Wilton resident and Silvermine Guild Artist David Dunlop's solo exhibit, A Closer Look, features a selection of his recent oil paintings, showcasing works that explore the artist's interest in interior and exterior spaces, as well as looking at his interest in the visual phenomena of light, motion and reflection. For this Daytime Emmy Award winning artist, painting is about making poetry. As poetry, his paintings offer the sensual experiences through blurred ambiguity and suggestion. In 2008, David developed a series for PBS, Landscapes through Time with David Dunlop for which he received television's 2009 national EMMY award for writing. He has had solo and groups exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally, and his works are included in many private collections.

Complementing David Dunlop, who has been a Guild member since the early 1990's, the New Members Exhibition will showcase the works of nine new Guild Artist members inducted in the spring and fall of 2009, representing a variety of mediums. The new members include: Binnie Birstein (Painting) from Weston, CT. "Flying, falling, floating, fitting in or not are the themes expressed in my art. Abstract and figurative, the visual stories are my reflections, reactions to our society...personal to me, while universal at the same time." As an artist, her goal is to create a feeling of dichotomy and tension. A dream-like dissonance with a sense of mystery opens her work to personal interpretation and provokes thought and dialogue.

Chris Durante (Drawing) from West Redding, CT. "I make complex drawings about simple things. String. Sticks. Moments of clarity when things seem to line up and then move, only to line up again. Grids. Accidents and chance. All abstraction comes from somewhere. I make drawings of things I know but have yet to see. I make drawings because that is what I've always done."

New Haven, CT artist Silas Finch (Sculpture); "The simpler the sculpture, the harder it is to create. It takes more craftsmanship to make it look natural. I love the search, to sit and connect individual parts, repositioning each one until they achieve a natural, effortless union. The form, shape, color, and texture it owns, is what brings my ideas to life. I find pure enjoyment in pulling the sculptures right out of the pieces themselves, like they were meant to be there, with just a little bend and twist."

Robert Gregson (Mixed Media, Conceptual Art) is from Orange, CT; "My work tends to be a social activity. It exists in the ambiguous territory between artist and audience. The pieces are invitations that provide permission to be involved. They are less about me and more about us. For me, the act of creation is a balancing act between autonomy and connectedness. Like a performance, I like the idea that the work is never actually completed but continually reinterpreted and refreshed through those who encounter it."

Susan Halls (Ceramics) is a resident of Easthampton, MA; "My obsession with animals and animal imagery has been more or less constant since my childhood so it is right that they should be the dominant subject in my work. In my sculpture I'm trying to create an image which traps a kind of animal truth. Direct representation does not interest me. I strive to create work which reinvents animal form, enhancing the facts without being slavish to mere appearance."

Linda Kuehne (Photography) from Pound Ridge, NY; ".... my work explores the idea of the sublime as it does or doesn't exist today, given the state of the world. I am interested in photographing vernacular, mundane objects juxtaposed against interesting backgrounds of a landscape or the city. One can't quite tell what these objects are or where they were taken because I am interested in the suggestive, abstract qualities of the image rather than the literal. When attention is drawn to the ordinary, the ordinary can become a poetic comment on what it means to live in our culture, in our time."

Yen-Hua Lee (Mixed Media) from White Plains, NY; "Walking around the lagoon is a way for me to relax and ponder my art. In my show, the platform functions as a stand to define a territory for my work, with the gallery floor reflecting images like water. A recorded dripping water sound is played as a background evoking a sense of peace and quiet in the viewer's minds. The floor, covered with silica powder in a shape of a square on which some Chinese characters are written, and sculptures placed inside the square, keep a walking space between the platform and the square. Wandering through this "in-between space" one feels as if one were walking on shallow water."

Constance Old (Mixed Media) is from New Canaan, CT; "Having worked in publishing, I became conscious of all the 'free color' available in the world. My art reflects our time and gently comments on the excesses of the American consumer economy. I use the traditional women's craft of rug hooking to make pieces out of three dimensional 'found color,' using in particular obvious symbols of our consumer economy like sales receipts and assorted recycled plastic. Combining the traditional craft technique of rug hooking with contemporary materials, I see my work as both timeless and an index of our time."

Bradley Wollman (Photography) a resident of Pearl River, NY; "Our culture is saturated with visual media, and as we absorb information from all types of outlets, it is important to realize the removal of the viewer from the reality conveyed to them. My large scale color photographs depicting recreations of events from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are meant to act as a catalyst in deconstructing the notion of photography as a documentary medium. Each image represents a fictional truth while the whole of the body of work addresses the conflict between how the war is idealized, how it is in actuality and how it is presented to us in our everyday lives."

The Director's Choice, IN RELATION TO... is a collaborative exhibition bringing together the whimsical found object sculptures of Jody Silver with Arlé Sklar-Weinstein's vibrant fiber-photomontage. In this exhibit, these two Guild Artists demonstrate the exchange of ideas to create a dialogue between materials that inform, challenge and expand each other's working process. For Jody Silver, found objects become the raw material for three dimensional objects which pay homage to their original forms while reorganized into animals, people and the like. Arlé Sklar-Weinstein, on the other hand, uses stitching and the layer images along with quilting techniques to channel the flatness of the surface in her fiber constructions. The climax of this dialogue is reached in a playful installation in which both artists' work physically interacts with each other.