Two openings Thursday evening at Middlesex Community College

Middlesex Community College Pegasus Gallery
100 Training Hill Road, Chapman Hall, Middletown, 1-800-818-5501
Mark Williams: Can’t We All Just get Along?
Middlesex Community College The Niche
100 Training Hill Road, Founders Hall, Middletown, 1-800-818-5501
Thanakhon Likhitlerdrat: Silken Forms
Through Jan. 6, 2011.
Opening reception, Thurs., Nov. 18, 5:30—7:30 p.m. in the Pegasus Gallery

Press release

Mark Williams’ exhibition Can’t We All Just Get Along? addresses issues of militarism introduced to children as war toys. In this series of paintings, the mock art of war is transformed into new modes of visual play. Williams’ positions colorful monolithic forms derived from Play-Doh molds to overpower heroic fixed-posed army action figures. A doughy banana cluster, frog, bear, and a roster form ride piggyback atop toy soldiers posed for action. In works like “untitled (transparent white elephant)”, only a solder’s legs, torso and rifle protrude beneath a pudgy elephant as if smothered in soft squishy amour. Williams’ work transmits a universal statement of peace and critiques the militarist theft of childhood innocence.


Williams lives in New Haven and has exhibited throughout the Northeast, Canada and Bulgaria.

Silken Forms showcases a series of recent silk covered boxes and pottery by Thanakhon Likhitlerdrat. Likhitlerdrat lives in Bangkok, Thailand where traditional arts and crafts associated with silk are highly prized cultural and economic commodities. Thai silk fabric is renowned for its complex surface luster, fine texture and intricate woven patterns. Its production and artesian training is presided over by Thai royalty as a means to preserve its exceptional quality and future practice.


The silk pottery works produce by Likhitlerdrat are at once, intimate, delicate, and electrifyingly vibrant. The finely thrown and sculpted vessels reveal and conceal their three-dimensional forms as the eye is insistently drawn back and forth between surface and form. The sumptuous and elaborately patterned silks and trim reflect light in dynamic and unexpected ways to unify their appliqué surfaces and sculptural complexity.

Likhitlerdrat studied drafting at the Institute of Technology in Bangkok and is training in silk craft practices in a Thai Government program developed to promote arts related entrepreneurship.

There will be an opening tomorrow, Thurs., Nov. 18, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. in the Pegasus Gallery.