Thursday night opening at Middlesex Community College

Middlesex Community College Pegasus Gallery
100 Training Hill Road, Chapman Hall, Middletown, 1-800-818-5501
Paul Gobell: Floral Menagerie
Middlesex Community College The Niche
100 Training Hill Road, Founders Hall, Middletown, 1-800-818-5501
Michael Donovan: Sculptural Apparatus
Sept. 13—Oct. 21, 2010.
Opening reception, Thurs., Sept. 23, 5:30—7:30 p.m. in the Pegasus Gallery

Press release

Sculptor Michael Donovan creates quasi-mechanical implements that momentarily suspend muscular operations of expansion and contraction. In works like “construction for flexure,” considerable physical tension is enacted on the skeletal form where danger lurks in its potential for spontaneous motion. Donovan’s contraptions exploit the visual, associative and inherent physical properties of his chosen materials. Warm strips of wood are contorted against gray planes of structural steel by welded and fastened springs, cables and pulleys. These sculptural works are expressions of momentary action and embody the imaginary and inventory spirit of the da Vincian tradition.



Donovan is a Cheshire resident and M.F.A. Graduate of the University of Connecticut. He has exhibited his work in Connecticut and New York.

Paul Gobell’s floral series paintings portray dream like worlds that mediate both intimate and monumental botanical scales. In works like “Annabelle on the Hudson,” the pristine, closely framed and truncated rose is treated with the figurative significance and moralizing precision of a Baroque vanitas still life. The background landscape vista is expansive as if to reference the compositional order of Romantic period expressions of the picturesque. Surreal spatial effects are evoked by these dramatically staged figure ground relationships that delight in as much as disorient specific interpretations of time and place. Gobell's vision of coexisting cultivated and wild topographies draw the mind deep within his compositions where still life and landscape traditions blend to celebrate the intrinsic beauty of nature.

Gobell is a Middletown Artist Cooperative resident and B.A. graduate of Central Connecticut State University. His works have been shown at the Renana Gallery, The William Benton Museum, New Britain Museum of American Art and are included in several private collections.

There will be an opening tomorrow, Thurs., Sept. 23, from 5:30—7:30 p.m. in the Pegasus Gallery.