Anita Soos and Ken Lovell at Gallery 195; reception in September

Gallery 195
195 Church St., 4th floor (First Niagara Bank), New Haven, (203) 772-2788
Anita Soos and Ken Lovell
Jun. 18—Sept. 20, 2013.
Artists' Reception: Tues., Sept. 10, 5-7 p.m.

Press release from the Arts Council of Greater New Haven

The Arts Council of Greater New Haven presents an exhibition of works by Connecticut artists Anita Soos and Ken Lovell at Gallery 195. The exhibition will be on display during bank hours from June 18 to Sept. 20, 2013. An artists’ reception is scheduled for Tues., Sept. 10, from 5—7 p.m. The public is invited to attend and meet the artists at this closing reception.

Curated by Debbie Hesse, The Arts Council's director of artistic services & programs, the exhibit pairs the artists because both create abstract rhythms through the use of color, texture and pattern.

"While Anita Soos creates painterly prints that are atmospheric and reference the landscape, Ken Lovell, a digital painter, programs random elements from computer generated templates," Hesse said. "Both artists explore the balance of chance and choice, as dictated by the processes and materials inherent in their respective mediums."

Anita Soos graduated from Endicott College in 1968 and is the owner of Anita Soos Design, Inc., a Connecticut-based design company specializing in mail order, product development, greeting card design and advertising for a select group of clients.

Artwork by Anita Soos

In her artistic pursuits, Soos’ primary medium is paint, but also uses pastel, printmaking, drawing and mixed media. In her artist's statement, she says that she has created bodies of work based on the observations of water and photographic studies for the past 25 years.

"I am continually struck by the notion that the chaos in nature is perfectly ordered. The quality of light, the movement of the water, the time of day, low tide, high tide, wind, calm, sun, rain, clouds, storm. These all converge into a single moment that is singular, never to be repeated," Soos says..
Lovell received his MFA in painting from Yale University in 1992 and currently works at the institution as the technical director of the Digital Media Center for the Arts.

"My working method involves both digital means and traditional fine art concerns," Lovell explains in his artist’s statement. "Random elements and research material are programmatically combined using a digital collage technique of my creation. With these computer-generated templates as a starting point an image evolves, serially, with printed matter being altered by subjective physical performance. This mechanism of production allows elements of chance (the voice of the medium) to co-exist with painterly choices.".

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).

Thursday night opening at Yale Medical Group's Art Place

Yale Medical Group's Art Place
800 Howard Rd., New Haven, (203) 737-5276
Exhibition XVI
May, 2010—Feb., 2011.
Opening Night Reception: Thurs., May 13, 5—7 p.m.

Press release

Art Place, a nonprofit arts organization founded and supported by The Yale Medical Group is very pleased to announce Exhibition XVI, a group show of "artwork that heals," featuring new work by 6 regional artists. The exhibition will be on display throughout the five floors of the Yale Physician's Building at 800 Howard Street, through February 2011. Highlights include: new landscape paintings by Joan Levy, photographs and constructions by Kevin van Aelst, mandalas and clay sculptures by Melody Lane, color field paintings by David Morico, large charcoal drawings by Anita Soos, and an installation of travel photography by Eddie Torres in the International Gallery. To celebrate Art Place’s ten-year anniversary curators Terry Dagradi, Rosemary DeLucco-Alpert and Sarah Fritchey have organized a Retrospective of Work from the Permanent Collection, to honor those who have generously donated their work over the years. The retrospective will be on display in the North Wing of the fifth floor.

There will be an Opening Night Reception for Exhibition XVI on Thurs., May 13, from 5-7 p.m.

Joan Levy makes paintings and pastel drawings of mountain ranges, glens, bluffs, and forests in a style she calls Mystical Expressionism. She finds endless inspiration in her lush organic surroundings, and believes that Nature is a pulse that unifies the human body, mind and spirit with the Earth. She explains her role as the artist as one of deliverance and translation. For Levy, the artist is responsible for perceiving the senses of the physical world, and finding a way to record their structural and spatial dynamics into a tangible realm, where the viewer can access these ideas and feelings.

Kevin van Aelst photographs common materials and household scenes, which he imbeds with unusual artifacts of everyday life. His gestalt images explore identity and existence. In Exhibition XVI, he presents a series of "Finger Print" photographs that document various manifestations of a solitary prints left behind—in the crinkled folds of a Typewriter paper, in the unwound tape of a music cassette on a wooden floor, in the grains of a Sweet and Low packet on a Diner table, in a bird's-eye view of a Cherry Pie cooling on a Checkered Table Cloth. While the images are unconventional, the truth and accuracy of their illustration are just as valid as their traditional depictions. They are simultaneously pictures of Thumbprints and Typewriters, Tapes, Fake Sugar, and Cherry Pies. For van Aelst, his work is about creating order where we expect to find randomness. His pieces hint at the notion that the reliable minutiae all around us are capable of communicating much larger ideas.

Melody Lane works in clay and glass to make sculptures that evoke themes of ancient cultures. She follows a complicated thousand-year-old process that involves reduction firing, painting in terra sigilata, burnishing, smoking, carbon wash, and waxing. The final result yields objects with a distinct, hand-made feel, whose core elements (earth and fire) are emphasized in the design. In Exhibition XVI, Lane presents a series of mandalas that seek to shed a contemporary light on ancient motifs. Mandalas, an ancient Sanskrit word meaning "circle, or center point," are historically interpreted as a symbol for God, the Universe, totality or wholeness, from which all energy and life begins; Hindus with chakras, American Indians with sand paintings, Christians with rose windows, etc. Lane's mandalas are alive in the moment, as sunlight passes through the stained glass, the colors and shadows change with the cycles of the day.

David Morico paints large-scale abstract field-color paintings. In this new series, "Glimpses," Morico builds up shapes and hues into compositions that feel like landscapes or split-second images of what we see or think we see. Morico always begins his process with simple quick sketches. After the issues of composition have been fleshed out, he applies acrylics and mixed media to his canvases—ranging from resin to molding paste to ripped canvas, that attend to the issues of mood and atmosphere. For Morico, his role as an artist is to make images that contain a certain familiar feeling that his viewers can relate to. Connection is his ultimate goal.

Anita Soos has photographed water for 20 years. For Exhibition XVI, she will present new, large charcoal drawings from her "Water Walking" series that investigate the mysterious properties of the malleable liquid—its movements, events, layers, and uncanny ability to hold light and shadow. Her depictions of water are detailed, and drawn from a birds-eye view. The water floods each, spilling over all four corners—there is no hint of environment. In black and white, the water takes on dynamic properties, temperatures and speeds. In one drawing, the water is turbid and sluggishly moves in spirals, in another the water is clear and streams reliably in one direction. The drawings make us think about the life and journey of water in relation to our own.

Eddie Torres is a documentary photographer who travels around the world to capture the emotions and stories of various people and cultures. On display in the first floor International Gallery, Torres presents a selection of color prints taken over the span of two weeks, in six different locations across Ecuador, where he recently traveled with a missionary group. The photographs document private households, public marketplaces, school playgrounds, churchyards, rural river scenes, and portraits of native Ecuadorians.

Quick notes from CWOS 2009, part 1

Artspace
City-Wide Open Studios
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
City-Wide Open Studios
Oct. 2—4, 2009

With City-Wide Open Studios taking place within the compressed time frame of one weekend, I decide to start my sojourn over at West Cove Studios in West Haven (rather than have my entire Saturday given over to Erector Square). This site is notable both for the printmaking co-op founded by Roy Smith and for its vast expanses of walls well suited to function as gallery space.

My first stop is with sculptor Jonathan Waters. Waters' expansive studio has a view of the water. Through Oct. 18, he is sharing the wall space of his studio/gallery with painter Emilia Dubicki, showing his "Samurai" series of wall sculptures—both large and small works. Several of his large sculptures occupy floor space.

The smaller of these are made of wood veneer and black paper. They have the looping, geometric presence of Russian Constructivism. Waters tells me he calls them the "Samurai" series because of the motion they suggest.

"They're of the moment. Fragile, like our fragile existence," he says, bemused. In a sense, they are gestural sculptures, unlikely to hold together once removed from the wall on which they were created. That fact doesn't concerns Waters. "The mechanics of it is probably the least interesting art of it for me." It is the use of the materials and their receptivity to the forms he wants to create that interest Waters.

"And there is a kind of physicality involved in doing it. It's almost like a drawing that is three-dimensional," says Waters. "And I'm working out ideas. They're sort of sketches. For what, I don't know."

The larger sculptures share the sense of active energy even though they are constructed from harder, heavier, more substantial materials. Using primarily cut wood boards and plywood, selectively painted black, Waters clustered them in kinetic diagonals. They reveal themselves as the viewer walk around them.

Where Waters is working with blacks and natural wood grain tones, Emilia Dubicki's oil paintings pop with throbbing color. Like Waters' sculptures, they convey a sense of motion and their compositions owe a debt to geometric abstraction (although Dubicki considers them all "nature paintings").

"I paint fast. If I can't get the painting out in one shot, I want to walk away," she tells me. Referring to the painting "Miami Vice," Dubicki says, "I did walk away from this painting and came back another day." She notes that she used a palette knife and a plastic knife "to get a lot of blue on there." The use of the plastic knife is suggested by the lines in the paint left by its serrated edge. I ask about a pleasing accumulation of abstract detail in the lower left corner of the work.

"I try not to think about it too much. If it splatters and the splatter works, it stays," Dubicki says.

•••

I didn't get to meet the artist Barkev Gulessarian but a couple of his works riveted my attention. One was a large hollow sculpture, a Buddha with a dog head seated crosslegged in a robe and painted gold. It projected an odd, goofy serenity.

Gulessarian's other work that captivated me was a large "hippie painting," for lack of a better way of describing it. Painted on three large panels of plywood, it depicts a naked couple lounging toward the back of their pad with a large fetal figure in the foreground. A stereo system sits on the floor to the left. The pictorial details are rendered in simple black painted linework over large areas of poster style colors. The unpainted, exposed surfaces of the plywood are perfectly at home in the factory environment. The painting works because of the believabilty of the scene—Gulessarian's effective use of perspective and depth and the naturalistic flow of the figurative shapes. It should be scented with patchouli and outfitted with a psychedelic exploitation soundtrack.

•••

Anita Soos is showing a few large charcoal drawings in her "Water Walking" series, which she started in 2004. She tells me that she has been photographing water for 20 years.

"What I was interested in was capturing what water felt like," says Soos. "I wanted to get the feeling of what water was doing rather than seeing what water was doing. Water holds mysteries. It holds light, shadow, movements and events and layers."

She notes that one of the drawings, "Water Walking: Primary Disturbance," turns the imagery up on end. The drawing seems to pulsate. The idea of "water walking" turns water "into the event of what it does, walking across whatever surface you're looking at. I wanted it to have a more active role, a more poetic role than just saying what it was."

•••

While at West Cove I also have the opportunity to speak with artists Evie Lindemann and Barbara Marks about their works.

Lindemann, who is a professor of art therapy, is showing etchings, collage and a kind of prayer installation in the gallery space of the printmaking co-op. One series of her etchings is of different color prints of a New Age-y plate called "Mythic World," a piece she worked on while studying with the Mexican artist Gilberto Guerrero in the state of Guanajuata, located in the highlands 5 1/2 hours northwest of Mexico City. It features swirling imagery of an open hand (a reference to a serious hand injury Lindemann suffered a couple of years ago), a male figure, a large dove-like bird, fish forms and small figures that look like they are dancing or swimming. (Lindemann tells me they are actually pilgrims in a sacred Mexican church.) Explicating some of the symbolism, Lindemann tells me, "the bird is a transformational agent for me."

Barbara Marks says, "I love the idea of objective abstraction, not non-objective abstraction." What she is referring to in this case is using an iconic shape—a birthday cake—in a large series to evoke a range of emotions. It is a series on "temporality," in general. But specifically, the 75 monotypes of different birthday cakes is an homage to her husband who died at the age of 75 a couple of years ago. Marks notes that the imagery has a real effect on viewers.

"People will see the cakes and automatically start sharing stories about birthdays and the passage of time," she says.

•••

From West Cove I travel over to Erector Square, which easily absorbs the rest of the day. With a wealth of artists to visit and limited time, I don't bother with taking notes. High points include viewing Willard Lustenader's (Web) virtuoso oil paintings based on still lifes of paper cutouts; meeting and talking with Geoffrey Detrani (Web) about his layered drawings that juxtapose natural and architectural imagery; and Mary Lesser's (Web) gouache postcard paintings of scenes from her travels on the road.