Connecticut Art Scene: Questions of scale

A-Space Gallery at West Cove Studios
30 Elm St., West Haven, (203) 966-9700
Scale Factor
Through May 15, 2011.

I didn't spend much time taking notes at Saturday's Scale Factor opening at A-Space Gallery, located in West Cove Studios in West Haven. So this post's textual element will be fragmentary. The show features primarily paintings, the loose theme concerned with elements of scale.

On facing walls are both a series of miniature paintings by Emilia Dubicki and a large-scale work, "You Remember the Sky." Dubicki's paintings often reference real landscapes. "You Remember the Sky," according to Dubicki, is a work of the imagination untethered to any particular real world locale; the title comes from a poetic fragment inscribed in the bottom left of the work. Still, the sense of landscape is embedded within its gestural sweep of bold colors: elemental, fragrant with wind and sea brine. Dubicki's paintings on the facing wall, probably little more than 5" by 5", are more intimate, as if she is concentrating on just one element in a larger gestalt.

Dubicki's miniatures invite, almost demand, that the viewer inspect them closely. Cham Hendon's "Equal Justice Under Law," hung to their right, is a massive acrylic painting that paradoxically thrusts a viewer back to take it all in while pulling you in to absorb the painterly details. The "big picture" is of the imposing facade of an official court building. But by fusing his colors with a gel medium, Hendon creates swirls of colored abstraction within the overall representational aesthetic, as can be seen in the images below.

Jonathan Waters' (Web) works strike me as engaging more with perspective factor than scale factor. Although many of them are quite large—primarily painted panels inhabiting both the realms of painting and sculpture—they pique the interest particularly by considering them from different angles. One large work, when viewed directly, appears to be a series of several wood panels painted black and abutted against each other. But the edges of some of the panels are painted white. Viewed from the side, the white edges are visible and merge with the white wall on which the work is hung, creating the illusion that there are three separate black panels hung in close proximity.