Thursday night opening at Yale Medical Group's Art Place

Yale Medical Group's Art Place
800 Howard Rd., New Haven, (203) 737-5276
Exhibition XVI
May, 2010—Feb., 2011.
Opening Night Reception: Thurs., May 13, 5—7 p.m.

Press release

Art Place, a nonprofit arts organization founded and supported by The Yale Medical Group is very pleased to announce Exhibition XVI, a group show of "artwork that heals," featuring new work by 6 regional artists. The exhibition will be on display throughout the five floors of the Yale Physician's Building at 800 Howard Street, through February 2011. Highlights include: new landscape paintings by Joan Levy, photographs and constructions by Kevin van Aelst, mandalas and clay sculptures by Melody Lane, color field paintings by David Morico, large charcoal drawings by Anita Soos, and an installation of travel photography by Eddie Torres in the International Gallery. To celebrate Art Place’s ten-year anniversary curators Terry Dagradi, Rosemary DeLucco-Alpert and Sarah Fritchey have organized a Retrospective of Work from the Permanent Collection, to honor those who have generously donated their work over the years. The retrospective will be on display in the North Wing of the fifth floor.

There will be an Opening Night Reception for Exhibition XVI on Thurs., May 13, from 5-7 p.m.

Joan Levy makes paintings and pastel drawings of mountain ranges, glens, bluffs, and forests in a style she calls Mystical Expressionism. She finds endless inspiration in her lush organic surroundings, and believes that Nature is a pulse that unifies the human body, mind and spirit with the Earth. She explains her role as the artist as one of deliverance and translation. For Levy, the artist is responsible for perceiving the senses of the physical world, and finding a way to record their structural and spatial dynamics into a tangible realm, where the viewer can access these ideas and feelings.

Kevin van Aelst photographs common materials and household scenes, which he imbeds with unusual artifacts of everyday life. His gestalt images explore identity and existence. In Exhibition XVI, he presents a series of "Finger Print" photographs that document various manifestations of a solitary prints left behind—in the crinkled folds of a Typewriter paper, in the unwound tape of a music cassette on a wooden floor, in the grains of a Sweet and Low packet on a Diner table, in a bird's-eye view of a Cherry Pie cooling on a Checkered Table Cloth. While the images are unconventional, the truth and accuracy of their illustration are just as valid as their traditional depictions. They are simultaneously pictures of Thumbprints and Typewriters, Tapes, Fake Sugar, and Cherry Pies. For van Aelst, his work is about creating order where we expect to find randomness. His pieces hint at the notion that the reliable minutiae all around us are capable of communicating much larger ideas.

Melody Lane works in clay and glass to make sculptures that evoke themes of ancient cultures. She follows a complicated thousand-year-old process that involves reduction firing, painting in terra sigilata, burnishing, smoking, carbon wash, and waxing. The final result yields objects with a distinct, hand-made feel, whose core elements (earth and fire) are emphasized in the design. In Exhibition XVI, Lane presents a series of mandalas that seek to shed a contemporary light on ancient motifs. Mandalas, an ancient Sanskrit word meaning "circle, or center point," are historically interpreted as a symbol for God, the Universe, totality or wholeness, from which all energy and life begins; Hindus with chakras, American Indians with sand paintings, Christians with rose windows, etc. Lane's mandalas are alive in the moment, as sunlight passes through the stained glass, the colors and shadows change with the cycles of the day.

David Morico paints large-scale abstract field-color paintings. In this new series, "Glimpses," Morico builds up shapes and hues into compositions that feel like landscapes or split-second images of what we see or think we see. Morico always begins his process with simple quick sketches. After the issues of composition have been fleshed out, he applies acrylics and mixed media to his canvases—ranging from resin to molding paste to ripped canvas, that attend to the issues of mood and atmosphere. For Morico, his role as an artist is to make images that contain a certain familiar feeling that his viewers can relate to. Connection is his ultimate goal.

Anita Soos has photographed water for 20 years. For Exhibition XVI, she will present new, large charcoal drawings from her "Water Walking" series that investigate the mysterious properties of the malleable liquid—its movements, events, layers, and uncanny ability to hold light and shadow. Her depictions of water are detailed, and drawn from a birds-eye view. The water floods each, spilling over all four corners—there is no hint of environment. In black and white, the water takes on dynamic properties, temperatures and speeds. In one drawing, the water is turbid and sluggishly moves in spirals, in another the water is clear and streams reliably in one direction. The drawings make us think about the life and journey of water in relation to our own.

Eddie Torres is a documentary photographer who travels around the world to capture the emotions and stories of various people and cultures. On display in the first floor International Gallery, Torres presents a selection of color prints taken over the span of two weeks, in six different locations across Ecuador, where he recently traveled with a missionary group. The photographs document private households, public marketplaces, school playgrounds, churchyards, rural river scenes, and portraits of native Ecuadorians.