Artists' reception for two shows on Sunday at Kehler Liddell Gallery

Kehler Liddell Gallery
873 Whalley Ave., New Haven, (203) 389-9555
Amy Browning: Sounding the Silence
Joseph Saccio: Memory and Transformation
Oct. 11—Nov. 11, 2012.
Opening Reception: Sun., Oct. 14, 3—6 p.m.

Press release from Kehler Liddell Gallery

Two shows open this week at Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville and will run through Nov. 11, 2012. There will be an artists' reception for both shows on Sun., Oct. 14, from 3—6 p.m.

• Amy Browning: Sounding the Silence

Amy Browning: "Lighting the Lamp"

Serious injuries, sustained in an automobile accident last year, forced Amy Browning to consider how she paints and what she paints. No longer could the artist stand for hours inches away from the wall or easel; she needed to develop a new approach.

Light dawned, and she contemplated the floor. It became her support. Browning stretched canvases on the floor and went to work, slowly moving over the surface with brush, bottle, and plastic utensils—anything she could lay my hands on. Her preferred stance was hovering over the artwork at a height of two or three feet and constantly circling. The mystery appeared, disappeared, re-appeared, and after much struggle and good fortune revealed its hidden reality.

Amy Browning’s new work is an exhilarating revelation of order within disorder. Pre-ordained rules yield to the mysterious needs of the canvas. What emerged is what was already there before she began—silence.

• Joe Saccio: Memory and Transformation

The title and theme for Joe Saccio’s exhibit, Memory and Transformation, stems from his discovery when working on a four foot by twenty-foot section of a hollow black oak tree trunk. Saccio divided the old hollow trunk into three six foot sections and split each vertically to create three triptychs, or three open books revealing the old tree’s inner life and history.

The footprint for each six-foot high book section is seven feet wide by three feet in diameter. The inner, concave surfaces and the outer, convex bark surfaces are transformed in various ways to suggest new, strange growth and life in a tree that refuses to die.

Joseph Saccio: "Mouth of Medusa," detail

Gallery visitors can actually walk into the inner space of the tree and imagine the force and struggle of living, dying and finally regeneration into another form. Joe Saccio has created another large wall sculpture that is an eight feet high variation of the Medusa. In this case the serpents emerge from her mouth and not her hair.