Sunday opening at Silvermine for three shows

Silvermine Guild Art Center
1037 Silvermine Rd., New Canaan, (203) 966-9700
Director's Choice: Karen Hillmer
Sergio Gonzalez-Tornero: At the Tribal Carving Shed
New Members Exhibition
Jan. 9—Feb. 20, 2011.
Opening Reception: Sun., Jan. 9, 2—4 p.m.

Press release

Winter exhibits at Silvermine Guild Arts Center, located in New Canaan, CT always brings the highly anticipated Annual New Guild Members show plus exciting exhibitions featuring South America’s finest modern printmaker, Sergio Gonzalez-Tornero and Director’s Choice, Karin Hillmer. All are welcomed to the opening reception on Sunday, Jan. 9 from 2—4 p.m. The exhibits will run through Feb. 20, 2011.

Director’s Choice, Karin Hillmer, is a painter, a photographer and above all a storyteller. Her pictures represent a new reality—maybe “surreality"—shaped by a lifelong interest in philosophy, history, art invention, music and science. Her images combine the avant-garde with the historic, have a deep intellectual reference, are enigmatic and humorous, mysterious, and original. They also combine Renaissance and technology, genetics and Botticelli.

The meaning and experience of time has always been central to Hillmer. Researching this topic led her to the Argentine poet and writer, Jorge Luis Borges. His enigmatic fictions inspired her current work, Infinity & Dreams: photographs inspired by the short stories of J.L. Borges, where she explores visually the concepts of time and the infinite moment as it pertains to dreams or different forms of reality.

“The characters in my photographs, as in Borges’ fiction, represent the human experience; they are independent of space-time and connect the past, present and future in unexpected ways. My images have several layers of meaning, some obvious, others only revealing themselves over time. I invite the viewers to engage in a dialogue with my photographs, to explore this journey and to find their own personal experience along the way,” explains Hillmer. Photography itself, a product of the scientific process, has evolved into exciting new frontiers to give the artist innovative forms of expression. In Hillmer’s work the camera is no longer directed at one single object in a single moment, but explores multiples of space and time merging into a new visual landscape.

One of South America’s finest modern printmakers, Sergio Gonzalez-Tornero’s current works in his exhibit At the Tribal Carving Shed” are a fusion of two distinct entities: a compulsion towards modernist form with its abstract notion and a fascination with the historic cultures of the Pacific Northwest.

“I respond to their art above all, which I choose to see as a deeply spiritual and gloriously formalist view of life. I like to think that my work is an outsider’s painterly and ongoing romantic adventure into the spirit of the First Nations of the Northwest Coast of North America,” states Gonzalez-Tornero.

This connection began with the first of many visits to Haida Gsaii, “Land of the Haida,” also known as the Queen Charlotte Islands, an archipelago located 100 miles off the coast of British Columbia and Alaska. The unique signature element of Sergio’s paintings is his use of red and white. For Gonzalez-Tornero, red serves as a substitution for black. He feels that black is a cold and lifeless color and by using red, he is infusing energy and life into his works. According to The New York Times, “His way of putting paint to canvas shows how texture and volume can be represented by using fairly heavy-handed, and somewhat unusual, cross-hatching techniques. His emphasis on line may remind some of woodcuts, where the white of the paper, or in this instance, the white of the painted areas, suggests the pristine voids common to most woodcut prints.”

Each year in the spring and fall, new members are selected through a jurying process into the Silvermine Guild of Artists. The Guild of Artists is a distinguished group of professional artists comprised of over 300 members who work in a wide array of media and are represented in museums, and prestigious private and corporate collections. Selection into the guild is based on several criteria such as creativity, uniqueness or timeliness, excellence of technique, compelling notion or idea, cultural or social relevance, professional presentation of work, clarity and continuity of style, and professional accomplishment.

The New Members Exhibition will showcase the works of eleven new Guild Artist members inducted in the spring and fall of 2010, representing a variety of media. The new members include:

• Amy Bilden (Web) of Greenwich, CT (sculpture);
• Kerry Brock (Web) of Weston, CT (printmaking);
• Sharon Cavagnolo (Web) of Mount Kisco, NY (painting);
• J. Henry Fair (Web) from New York, NY (photography);
• John Harris (Web) from Norwalk, CT (painting);
• Mindy Horn (Web) of Weston, CT (ceramics);
• Jane Lubin (Web) of Westport, CT (mixed media);
• Anca Pedvis (Web) of New York, NY (painting);
• Connie Pfeiffer (Web) of East Haddam, CT (sculpture);
• Margaret Roleke (Web) of Redding, CT (wall relief); and
• Anita Soos (Web) from Guilford, CT (drawing).