Jukkala, Granwell shows opening Friday at Giampietro Gallery in New Haven

Giampietro Gallery—Works of Art
315 Peck St., New Haven, (203) 777-7760
Clint Jukkala: Off Course
Alexis Granwell: Ghost Stories
Oct. 11—Nov. 2, 2013.
Reception: Fri., Oct. 11, 5—8 p.m.

Press release from Giampietro Gallery

Fred Giampietro Gallery is pleased to present new work by artists Clint Jukkala and Alexis Granwell. The two shows will be on view from Oct. 11—Nov. 2, with an opening reception on Fri., Oct. 11, from 5—8 p.m.

Clint Jukkala’s paintings combine color, geometry, and textured surfaces to create images that hover on the edge of nameable things. Ostensibly abstract, his work evokes real world references, suggesting figures, architecture, and landscape elements. Eye-like openings and framing devices orient the viewer, making them question their own perceptions. A play between part and whole ensues as the paintings configure and reconfigure through the act of looking.

Clint Jukkala: "Oracle"

Jukkala received his BFA from the University of Washington in Seattle, and his MFA from Yale University. His work has been shown at Feature Inc., and Envoy Enterprises in New York, The deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, MA, Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Philadelphia, PA, VOLTA NY 2013, The Currier Museum, and Soil Gallery in Seattle. He lives and works in New Haven, CT.

Alexis Granwell will be presenting sculptures and monumental prints made during a summer residency at one of the only ten foot-presses in the country, at AS220 in Providence. The works in Ghost Stories depict metaphysical structures that have an ancient quality with imagery that convulsively expands, erases, and erupts.

Granwell received her BFA from Boston University, College of Fine Arts and her M.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States including the State Museum of Pennsylvania, the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, FSU Museum of Fine Arts, Art Basel, and the University of Richmond Museum. Granwell has also received many prestigious awards and honors including the Joan Mitchell Grant Nominee, the Woodmere Art Museum Maurice Freed Memorial Prize, the University of Pennsylvania Neil Welliver Award, University of the Arts Professional Development Grant, Ragdale Artist Residency, AS220 Artist in Residence, and the Europos Parkas Artist Residency.

Saturday opening for "Strange Natures" show at Institute Library in New Haven

The Institute Library
847 Chapel St., New Haven, (203) 562-5045
Strange Natures
May 18—Jun. 15, 2013.
Reception: Sat., May 18, Noon—2 p.m.

Press release from Stephen Vincent Kobasa

Strange Natures, an exhibition curated by Clint Jukkala, will be on view at the Institute Library from May 18 through Jun. 15, 2013. There will be a reception on Sat., May 18, from noon—2 p.m. The show features work by Melissa Brown, Fritz Horstman, Joseph Smolinski, Anahita Vossoughi, and the collaborative team of Johannes DeYoung and Natalie Westbrook.

Taking landscape imagery and natural forms as their subjects, these artists present images that are far from everyday and familiar. Instead, they reveal strange worlds filled with aberrant forms, odd behaviors and unusual occurrences.

Johannes DeYoung and Natalie Westbrook: "Diamond Head"

Landscape-oriented show opens Frday at Giampietro Gallery

Giampietro Gallery—Works of Art
315 Peck St., New Haven, (203) 777-7760
LOOKOUTOUTLOOK
Nov. 16—Dec. 21, 2012.
Reception: Fri., Nov. 16, 5—8 p.m.

Press release from Giampietro Gallery

Giampietro Gallery is pleased to present LOOKOUTOUTLOOK, a landscape-based exhibition curated by Christopher Joy. The show will feature the works of Gregory Amenoff, Jake Berthot, Clint Jukkala, Thomas Nozkowski, Peter Ramon, Lucy Mink, Becky Yazdan, Dushko Petrovich, Willard Lustenader, Melissa Brown and Sharon Horvath. The exhibition opens on Fri., Nov. 16, with a reception from 5 until 8 p.m. and continues through Dec. 21, 2012.

Jake Berthot: "Janlori Loop"

Gone hysterical because of the weight and stillness of an impassable mountain of mist? Someone told me that there is no escape from history and memory. When the sun shines, it just makes claustrophobia clearer. Perhaps standing on your head would help. Or better yet, superimpose your head on the landscape, so your lower jaw sits at your feet. As high-functioning gray matter approaches infinity, it reaches toward the line. Escape to Bill Gates' perfect field. Is there awkwardness in nature, or is it merely cultural phenomenom?

Tom Nozkowski, Dushko Petrovich and Gregory Amenoff draw on the landscape as content for their paintings. Works by Jake Berthot, Melissa Brown and Clint Jukkala embed emotional presence within landscape conventions. Sharon Horvath's dreamy cosmic landscapes draw from peripheral vision. Will Lustenader loses himself in atmospheric deconstructive views. Works by Peter Ramon, Lucy Mink and Becky Yazdan explore and personalize the natural landscape.

A group show of color essentialism opens Friday at Giampietro Gallery in New Haven

Giampietro Gallery—Works of Art
315 Peck St., New Haven, (203) 777-7760
Chromacosm
Feb. 3—Mar. 3, 2012.
Opening Reception: Fri., Feb. 3, 5—8 p.m.

Press Release

Giampietro Gallery is pleased to present Chromacosm, a group exhibition that brings together six artists who embrace color as a primary and essential element of their work. Artists presented are: Melissa Brown, Clint Jukkala, Zachary Keeting, Joshua Marsh, Douglas Melini, and Tamara Zahaykevich. The exhibit is on view from Feb. 3 to Mar. 3, 2012.

Conjuring worlds, both abstract and representational, the artists in Chromacosm think and speak in color as much as through drawing, imagery, or material. While associations abound, color here is felt more than named. Jewel-like hues, chromatic spills, and atmospheric gradations, evoke imagined spaces made of vibrant pigments. The works in Chromacosm are not so much about color, but rather color is the DNA that brings these images and objects to life.

Melissa Brown paints alien rock and landscape forms from another world. Composed largely of hard edges and graphic shapes, the stratified layers of these strange formations reveal the spectral glow of unnatural, interior hues.

Clint Jukkala’s paintings offer portals into sensory worlds of color, geometry, and remembered experience. Ostensibly abstract, they refer to the real world, suggesting interior spaces, windows, and landscape vistas.

Zachary Keeting (see image) brushes, pours, and scrapes gestures that accumulate and collapse into complex colorful layers. Paint slides, skids, bubbles and drips, creating translucent and opaque movements of intertwined forms.

Joshua Marsh’s paintings on burlap hum with the glow of limited and precise hues. Yet these still lives of seemingly everyday objects are transformed into eerie, infrared images where boundaries blur and color traces the remnants of contours.

Douglas Melini weaves brilliant, painted designs of finely tuned colored lines. Horizontals, verticals, and diagonals accumulate into trippy, kaleidoscope plaids enclosed by hand painted wooden frames.

Tamara Zahaykevich’s intimate, sculptural gems are made of paper, foam and paint. Idiosyncratic in form and built of decidedly raw materials, her jaunty constructions radiate energy and suggest narrative possibility.

Melissa Brown is a New York based artist, Clint Jukkala and Zachary Keeting are New Haven based artists represented by Giampietro Gallery. Joshua Marsh is based in Philadelphia and is represented by Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York. Douglas Melini is based in New York. Tamara Zahaykevich is based in New York and represented by Kansas Gallery.

The icing on the cake: Clint Jukkala's paintings at Giampietro Gallery

Fred Giampietro Folk Art, Antiques and Contemporary Art
315 Peck St., New Haven, (203) 777-7760
Clint Jukkala: Even If and Especially When
Through Oct. 7, 2011.

Clint Jukkala's work, as I've known it, has always been defined by its expressive geometric abstraction. Earlier paintings often brought to mind—for me, at least—computer circuitry or networks. And yet, Jukkala's commitment to the quirkiness of the hand-painted line lent those paintings an engaging warmth that balanced their technological allusions.

Geometric abstraction and the wandering nature of the line still characterize Jukkala's paintings. But the series showing in the Giampietro Gallery evidence a fundamental evolution in Jukkala's approach, particularly in reference to texture.

The title of the show—Even If and Especially When—is taken from the title of a 1990's album by the psychedelic garage band Screaming Trees. While I would hesitate to call these paintings "psychedelic"—despite the often bold and sometimes clashing colors—their abstract depiction of portals does bring to mind Aldous Huxley's "doors of perception."

As I recall Jukkala's older works, I remember them as featuring flat fields of color. Here, Jukkala—often using both oils and acrylics—ranges from painting watery, translucent expanses of paint to thick impasto building on the surface like cake frosting.

His use of color and the materiality of the paint is further enriched by blending different hues in some areas and striating the surface in others. Jukkala's play with texture and coloration creates tension between a perceived sense of depth and, at the same time, a perceived flattening of the surface.

In paintings like "Mirage" and "Common Occurrences," it feels like we are looking through a window at, respectively, a gradient blue sky over a turbulent blue sea or a yellow sky streaked with washes over a foreground of thickly applied red, brown and orange riven with horizontal ravines. Still, these suggestions of landscape are contained within framings that resist representational interpretation. Jukkala manages a fine balancing act between kineticism and control.

Jukkala show opening tonight at Giampietro Gallery

Giampietro Gallery — Works of Art
315 Peck St., New Haven, (203) 777-7760
Clint Jukkala: Even If and Especially When
Sept. 9—Oct. 7, 2011.
Opening reception: Fri., Sept. 9, 5—8 p.m.

Press release

Fred Giampietro Gallery is pleased to present Clint Jukkala: Even If and Especially When, an exhibition of recent paintings opening September 9 and on view through October 7.

Clint Jukkala’s new paintings offer portals into sensory worlds of color, geometry, and remembered experience. Ostensibly abstract, they refer to the real world, suggesting interior spaces, windows, and landscape vistas. Through framing and reframing, the paintings unfold, creating pictures within pictures and spatial ambiguities.

Emerging from the tradition of geometric abstraction, Jukkala’s work plays with its conventions, making paintings that are at once reflective and irreverent. Rationality gives way to the realm of psychology, memory, and daily life. Structural forms are painted with a direct and wobbly hand. Hints of sky and water are squeezed between lines and rectangles, offering a possible escape from a reductive flatland.

While super-saturated color has long been the driving force in Jukkala’s work, his recent paintings introduce the element of highly textured surfaces. The play between flatness and illusion is heightened as paint alternates between thin, dyed grounds, and heavy impasto. The varied surfaces expand the sense of pictorial depth and the physicality of the paintings.

Suggesting both doubt and conviction, Even If and Especially When, evokes possibility and the yearning for future things to come. Taken from the album title of the psychedelic garage band, the Screaming Trees, Even if and Especially When, echoes the desires, contradictions and ambiguities inherent in Jukkala’s work.

Clint Jukkala (born 1971, Missoula, MT) received his BFA from the University of Washington in Seattle, and his MFA from Yale University. His work has been shown at Feature Inc., and Envoy Enterprises in New York, The deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, MA, Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Philadelphia, PA, and Soil Gallery in Seattle. He lives and works in New Haven, CT.