Reception for Cook, Saladyga shows at Kehler, Liddell Fri., Oct. 18

Kehler Liddell Gallery
873 Whalley Ave., New Haven, (203) 389-9555
Rod Cook: Masks
Gerald Saladyga: Dot Works 2000—2004
Oct. 10—Nov. 10, 2013.
Artist's Reception: Fri., Oct. 18, 6—9 p.m.

Press release from Kehler Liddell Gallery

Exhibits by Rod Cook (Masks) and Gerald Saladyga (Dot Works: 2000—2004) will be on view at Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville from Oct. 10 through Nov. 10, 2013. There will be an artist's reception on Fri., Oct. 18, from 6—9 p.m.

Masks explores how the private condition is veiled by a façade or mask when presented to the public. Cook dove into the idea that how people outwardly represent themselves speaks more to how they wish to be received, rather than as an actual translation of what they consist of inside. He removes the external interferences and instead gives his models a literal mask to create an alternative expression, for Cook, a more genuine image of whom that person is or who they wish to be. The images capture the unique and fleeting moment when wearing a mask and little else, the true self can and will expose what is underneath. From behind the shrouded security of this alternate mask, the fashioned and orchestrated façade melts away and one’s hopes, fears, and fantasies are revealed.

Photograph by Rod Cook

Dot Works 2000—2004, artist Jerry Saladyga conjures the early American Luminist painters’ depictions of light the American landscape and seascape. Taking their initial representations and isolating the concept within a contemporary minimalist framework, his technique is to layer closely positioned dots of latex house paint with an eye dropper onto canvas, paper or wood and then to sand down to an equal depth. This creates a unique effect, evoking the simulation of particles of bright light, hazy light, gray light and night light. Saladyga developed this technique over four years and in the process realized the dots could be used to represent other images of the cosmos. The paintings evolved into fractured and symbolic depictions of land, sky, water and space. Aligned with the American Luminist painters who illustrated a new landscape for the first time, the process behind and the finished product of Dot Works is reminiscent of the beauty and joy of first sight and interpretation.

Painting by Gerald Saladyga

Review: Matthew Garrett photography and Gerald Saladyga paintings at Kehler Liddell (closed)

Kehler Liddell Gallery
873 Whalley Ave., New Haven, (203) 389-9555
Matthew Garrett: Recent Photographs
Gerald Saladyga: Landscapes 2008—2012
Closed

I'm catching up on some posts that I was unable to do earlier.

During the first Open Studios weekend, I also got to visit the two shows then on exhibit at Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville, Matthew Garrett's Recent Photographs and Gerald Saladyga's Landscapes 2008—2012.

Garrett was at the gallery when I stopped by and told me that he "became a night photographer because I have a job and a baby." According to Garrett, "The way to look at them is that nothing ever happens in my pictures but it looks like something might have just happened or be about to happen. And I kind of like that."

Matthew Garrett: "Swimming Pool"

Being something of a neophyte to night photography, Garrett said he could still be surprised by some of what he captures albeit not on the level of when he was shooting with a film. As an example, he pointed to "Swimming Pool," a night shot of the back of a house with a swimming pool gone to seed and overgrown with weeds. Garrett was shooting for the pool and the quality of the evening light but discovered more when he blew the image up for printing. When he enlarged the image, he saw layers of imagery on the back of the house that resemble video projections, created by a number of different nearby light sources including a traffic light.

I'm struck by "Side Yard," a seemingly prosaic street scene enriched with an atmosphere of fog and subtle lighting from streetlights, the façade lights of a storefront in the background and the glow from the windows of the house in the foreground. It could be a film still, pregnant with drama.

Gerald Saladyga: "What's Going On" detail

Jerry Saladyga's paintings issue from a wild personal vision, the result of years of evolution and experimentation. Saladyga's paintings conflate social commentary with cartoons in a punchy graphic style that revels in bold colors and a plethora of interesting textures. Images of the natural world—mountains, stars in the heavens, pine trees, silhouettes of animals, birds and fish—contend with representations of the human war on nature and humanity itself—submarines, military helicopters, jets, drones, oil derricks, tankers, the cooling towers of nuke plants, explosions and tracers of light akin to night weapons fire.

Saturday greeting of artists at Institute Library "Material Measure" show

The Institute Library
847 Chapel St., New Haven, (203) 562-5045
Material Measure: Use and Reinvention of Maps
Apr. 7—May 5, 2012.
Greeting of the Artists: Sat., Apr. 7, Noon—2 p.m.

Press release

The artists brought together in Material Measure, which is curated by Fritz Horstman, share an interest in maps. Each artist approaches the subject uniquely, employing different aspects of our cultural understanding of the cartographical form. The artists combine the factual knowledge we expect of maps with the non-empirical knowledge of a place—the feeling of a particular location—that rarely is expressed in more traditional maps.

Using a variety of materials, these artists chart and represent lived, imagined, or observed experiences of the land through their creative use of maps. The collective effect bridges forms of knowledge based in the dialectically opposed schools of idealism and materialism, presenting the option of a third way of thinking, which takes information from both views simultaneously.

The participating artists are: Leila Daw (Web), Billy Friebele (Web), Mike Iacovone (Web), Martha Lewis (Web), Larissa Nowicki (Web), Gerald Saladyga (Web), Karin Schaefer (Web) and Kevin Van Aelst (Web).

There will be a greeting of the artists on Sat., Apr. 7, from noon—2 p.m.

(Image by Leila Daw: "Ancient City in the Sky.")

City-Wide Open Studios, weekend two

Artspace
City-Wide Open Studios
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
City-Wide Open Studios
Through Oct. 30, 2011.

I couldn't get to Erector Square the first weekend because I was out of town at a family wedding. This Saturday and Sunday are the final weekend with various artists showing in the Alternative Space at the Coop Center for Creativity, 196—212 College Street in New Haven.

(Note: As of Thursday night when I am trying to post this, Blogger is giving me trouble with including images. So I'm posting it now without images and hope to add them soon.)

(UPDATE 11/2/11: Added images.)

I started off the second weekend by dropping by the studio of photographer Linda Lindroth. Lindroth had a wide array of her work spanning decades available to be viewed. But we spent our time discussing new work—large color digital images of objects like worn antique boxes, bunched-up vinyl shorts and fluorescent temporary yellow road stripes.

Lindroth shot the objects at extremely high resolution and then silhouetted them in Photoshop and blew them up to very large size. Many of the images have art historical references—Mark Rothko, Howard Hodgkins, Richard Serra.

A conical bowl made out of spun aluminum with a crackle texture surface reminded Lindroth of Richard Serra drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Serra used an oil stick, Lindroth tells me, so the surface of his drawings feature prominently.

On the facing wall, Lindroth displayed two images, one from the inside and one from the outside of an old gift box for a strand of pearls. The outside is aquamarine-colored with worn edges. The inside is the real treasure. The aquamarine coating of the splayed edges of the box is peeling off like old paint on a house, curling and flaking. The inner square is yellowed cream framed by a thick swirl of aged, dried mucilage glue—swirled and congealed, the color ranging from mustard to amber to deep caramel. Although they are flat images, they are richly tactile.


The ostensible subject of another image was the cover of a 19th-century photo album that used to hold the postcard-sized portraits one would get at a studio. The cover had been covered with red velvet and stuffed with cotton batting. But it had fell apart after 100 years. The velvet was degraded to the extent that there was only a smattering of tufts around the middle. Stray fibers were spun out from the frayed edges along with protruding cotton batting turned orange with age. With its subtle, shifting shades of red, the image suggested a painting by Rothko.

"I'm really excited about this," Lindroth told me. "When you're working on a series and it keeps reinforcing you and making you happy, you forget about all the difficulties and go with the flow."

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Constance LaPalombara was showing cityscapes, still lifes and evocative landscapes. She has an upcoming show so most of her newest works were not on display, being held in reserve for that exhibition.

One of the most recent works that she did have on display—"Evening at the Pool"—was one of the results of a resident fellowship last fall at the Heliker-Lahotan Foundation on Great Cranberry Island in Maine. LaPalombara did studies in Maine and finished the large, square painting in her New Haven studio.


She told me, "It felt good to paint something big again. I hadn't done that for a while." LaPalombara said she had been "creeping up on it" and pointed to a medium-sized painting of a cityscape on a parallel wall.

"Evening at the Pool" is a serenely meditative work, low contrast and suffused with soft, pink light. The lagoon in the foreground is studded with jetties of squat rocks. A couple of small cottages nestle amid the forested horizon line. The sky is filled with the kind of light that promises night is just around the corner. The painting is deceptive. It looks simple but is rich in painterly detail: moss on the rocks, multi-color light reflections on the water's surface.

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In his 39 Church Street studio, Gerald Saladyga was showing a range of work from minimalist geometric paintings made in the 1990's to current works in progress. Among the newest works was a suite of drawings on brown wrapping paper that Saladyga jokingly referred to as the "Wheelchair Series." Working with India ink markers, Saladyga made the drawings when he was incapacitated by injuries to his right leg and foot, now thankfully on the mend.

"I was like a kid with a crayon box—nothing more, nothing less—and your imagination kind of runs with it," Saladyga told me.

Increasingly, figurative elements have been returning to his work. His primitivist figures feature prominently both in the "Wheelchair Series" and in his new "100 Days in Eden," a series about the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Saladyga is an artist in constant, restless creative motion. His work is always evolving, going through permutations.

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I dropped by Silas Finch's studio. Finch is constantly acquiring objects that resonate with a sense of the past and offer him a platform to let his wild imagination take flight. His representative work in the main exhibition at Artspace incorporated horseshoe crab shells and, sure enough, he had more crab pieces in his studio.

His experimentation with using horseshoe crab pieces is an extension of his fascination with antiques and the past into organic parts derived from one of the oldest still existing species on the planet.

It's a challenge for Finch because the claws and molted shells are quite fragile. One idea he has is to layer the helmet-like shells, which appear either metallic or ceramic, so they look like Japanese shoulder armor.


On the same table where Finch has stacked piles of horseshoe crab shells, he has a half-dozen or so yellowed "Wanted by the FBI" flyers he picked up at a large flea market in Stratford. All the "wanted" flyers are for fugitives sought for "interstate flight"—among other crimes—and Finch envisions a work or series with that title.

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Other work I enjoyed at 39 Church; Ken Lovell's digital paintings and prints, Jo Kremer's paintings and the paintings and drawings of James Jasiorkowski.

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On Sunday I stopped by John Keefer's apartment/studio in Westville. It was a beautiful day and Keefer had paintings outside on the porch as well as lining his walls and propped against the wall on the floor. There were quite a few paintings from a new series Keefer has been working on that he termed, with a bit of a mischievous grin, his "ten-prong cock attack" paintings. Each painting was defined by the use of two colors and the design—a double set of interpenetrating fingers or, um, cocks.


Keefer told me he "wanted to make paintings really fast. I wanted them to be really simple." They are finger paintings—one color for each hand.

"Both sides are painted at the same time. I put stretches of color on each side and work towards the edges," Keefer said. He said they are "very satisfying objects to make." He doesn't have to think about the composition—he can just be in tune with the energy of it. One of the series was mounted on the wall near the entrance. Painted in opposing and complementary red and black, it had a vibrant energy with swirling trails of color.

Keefer continues to work on large paintings based on photographs and laid out on the basis of the classic grid system and has also been doing a lot of drawings. One complete work—or almost complete, Keefer isn't sure—depicts his late German Shepherd Casey standing in shallow water. Like most of Keefer's paintings, the application of paint is raw, unfussy. He uses brushes, yes, but also his fingers, the former business end of a spatula and his forehead. (He acknowledged that the latter painting instrument wasn't particularly effective.)


"It's best for me to do a couple of different things in close temporal proximity to each other," Keefer said.

•••

Over at West Cove Gallery, I spoke with sculptor Jonathan Waters. We talked about one of his sculptures, a large, free-standing work in the middle of his big studio gallery that is part of his "Portal" series. As waters originally built it, wide boards painted black framed a large, open space. The addition of two thin verticals added a powerful dynamic. There was now a visual flow occurring within the frame and the open (positive) space became a type of S-shape.


"What happens is that you get pieces that are generative for a lot of other work," Waters said. "You open up and go, 'Oh, here we go again,' and this one is in that category."

Stunning Saladyga landscapes showing in Fairfield

Art/Place Gallery
11 Unquowa Rd., Fairfield, (203) 292-8328
Gerald Saladyga: Landscapes in Transition
Florence Zolan: Back and Forth
Through Apr. 30, 2011.

Landscapes in Transition is a stunning show of recent paintings by Gerald Saladyga. This show is evidence that his work continues to evolve, becoming ever more complex and rich with symbolism, allusion and social comment.

I have to admit that my initial reaction to these developments in Saladyga's style was to be concerned that perhaps his compositions were becoming too busy. It was a reaction I kept to myself and I'm glad I did because it allowed me time to fully digest these new ideas.

As I've written before, Saladyga is influenced and inspired by star charts, maps of war zones and the view from airplanes.

These are, in fact, meta-landscapes—stylized representations of mountains, starry skies, forests, seas. But the meta part comes in with Saladyga's commentary on the literal and metaphorical wars being waged against the landscape. Oil derricks, submarines, bombers, fighter jets, nuke plants, bulldozers. Comic book-like explosions rend the sky and bulbous plumes of radioactive steam belch from reactor cooling towers.

Against this imagery are arrayed signifiers of the forces of nature in retreat: silhouettes of birds, bears, marine mammals. And, perhaps hinting at our own mad dash toward suicidal extinction, the vision of war in the painting "Everything That Rises" is flanked by silhouettes sauropod and pterodactyl dinosaurs.

The human presence, when it appears at all, is represented by cartoon faces observing the mayhem in frozen, wide-eyed, mouth agape amazement and disbelief.

All this intellectual energy and social commentary is undergirded by superb draftsmanship, complex yet readable design and Saladyga's mastery of his own approach to using latex paints.

Also on display at Art/Place are a series of prints and collages by Florence Zolan called Back and Forth. Although in a separate room from the exhibit of Saladyga's paintings, it's a complementary show. Saladyga's compositions have an almost collage-like aesthetic. A few of Zolan's collages with mixed media include maps and some of the forms in her prints resemble forms found as recurring motifs in Saladyga's paintings.

But where Saladyga's paintings are brash and apocalyptic—albeit engagingly so—Zolan's works are quieter and meditative. According to her artist statement, Zolan enjoys the play of different contrasting elements and it shows in her work.

In "Spaces," "Spaces II," "The Space Within" and "Soft Spaces"—smaller works combining print, collage and pastels—mottled print inks and softly contoured shapes abut solid color cut paper. The collage "Fan Fare" is an energetic work that appears to nod to Dada and Suprematism.

These shows are up through this Saturday.

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.



Other works in the show:

Two Gerald Saladyga (Web) works from 1997, "Monoliths (Installation)" and "Monolith (Blue)":



Larry Morelli's (Web) "The Ghost in the Machine":


Chris Joy's (Web) Untitled (acrylic on wood):

Saturday opening at A-Space Gallery in West Haven

A-Space Gallery at West Cove Studios
30 Elm St., West Haven, (203) 966-9700
Scale Factor
Through May 15, 2011.
Opening Reception: Sat., Apr. 9, 4—8 p.m.

Press release

Scale Factor, a group exhibition, is now on view at A-Space Gallery at west Cove Studios. There will be an artists' reception for the show this Saturday, from 4—8 p.m. According to artist Jonathan Waters, "We all deal with scale in our work intuitively—proportions within a work, overall size, smaller elements making up a larger piece, heroic small pieces. I had hoped to create some dialogue around the subject, sort of a stepping-off point…and deliberately kept it loose." The notion of "scale" is the common thread. Waters says the show includes some works from the nineties and more recent works made for the show.


The exhibiting artists are Cat Balco (Web), Sharon Butler (Web), Ethan Boisvert (Web), Emilia Dubicki (Web), Cham Hendon (Web), Chris Joy (Web), Larry Morelli (Web), Jerry Saladyga (Web), Jean Scott, Brian Gill Wendler (Web) and Jonathan Waters.

Open Tues.—Sun., 1—4 p.m., or by appointment: (203) 627-8030.

Artists' Talk for "The Guy Show" at Artplace in Fairfield this Sunday

Artplace Gallery
11 Unquowa Rd., Fairfield, (203) 292-8328
The Guy Show
Through Feb. 26, 2011
Artists’ Talk: Sun., Feb. 13, 3 p.m.

Press release

Artplace Gallery is pleased to announce dates for the first curated show in its new gallery space. Entitled The Guy Show the exhibit runs from February 1—26, 2011 at 11 Unquowa Rd. in Fairfield and is unique in that it will exclusively feature regional male artists from Fairfield and New Haven counties. The opening reception was held this past Saturday, Feb. 5, but there will be an artists’ talk this Sun., Feb. 13, at 3 p.m.

“We selected these ten artists for their professionalism, clarity of vision as well as their ability to move beyond limits set by traditional art,” says Gerald Saladyga, who is curating and organizing the exhibit. Saladyga is a member of ArtPlace and has curated exhibits on religious art, art and AIDS and redefining “landscape” in art. He notes that The Guy Show is not about “male issues” but about the direction male artists are now moving in.

“We chose five painters, three sculptors and two photographers who demonstrate a wide range of work as well as age and visibility—some are beginning their careers and several are already established,” he says.

Most of the artists featured are New Haven-based with two from Norwalk and one from New Fairfield. The painters include Chris Durante, a member of Norwalk Community College Art Department; Christopher Joy (Web) and Zachary Keeting (Web), co-founders of “Gorky’s Granddaughter,” an artist video interview site; Felandus Thames (Web), a painter and silk-screen printmaker who was recently represented by the Jack Tilton Gallery at Art/Basel/Miami 2010; and Jonathan Waters (Web)whose work has been exhibited at Art in General in NYC and locally at the Ivoryton and Madison Sculpture Miles.


Photographers Keith Johnson (see image above) and Jeremy Keats Saladyga have also been included in important exhibitions: Johnson in three Ground/Cover exhibits in Arizona, Washington and Wyoming and Keats Saladyga at The Michael Foley Gallery, NYC and the Museum of The City of New York.

Joseph Saccio (Web), a largely self-taught sculptor, received the “Best in Show” award at Silvermine’s Art of the Northeast USA exhibit in 2010, while Silas Finch (Web, see image below), a young New-Haven based sculptor, will see his work featured in the up-coming indie film by Stephen Dest, My Brother Jack.


Finally, Joseph Fucigna (Web), also a member of Norwalk Community College, held a recent one-man exhibit of his constructions at the Sculpture Barn in New Fairfield, CT.

“This show presents cutting-edge art not usually represented in Fairfield,” says Saladyga. “Visitors to the show will see art that is not usually exhibited in a private gallery.”

Saccio and Saladyga at Kehler Liddell

Kehler Liddell Gallery
873 Whalley Ave., New Haven, (203) 389-9555
Joseph Saccio & Gerald Saladyga: Site Unseen
Through Dec. 5, 2010

The exhibition airing of Joseph Saccio and Gerald Saladyga at Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville ends tomorrow. It is a fine show of new (Saccio) and old (Saladyga) work by two artists with shared interest in incorporating metaphysical themes into their art.

For me, the paintings of Gerald Saladyga came as the biggest surprise. Dating back to the early 1990's but not shown until now, they are geometric and austere. As with his present works—which I have written about several times in Connecticut Art Scene—they are painted with latex house paints and modeling paste.


Saladyga has told me the quiet understatement of these paintings was a personal reaction to his paintings of the 1980's. The 1980's paintings, figurative and expressionist in nature, offered visceral revulsion to the violence of American foreign policy at the time, particularly in Central America. Saladyga told me that he ended up recoiling from his own representations of violence; these works addressed his concerns in ways more symbolic and spiritual.

I've written about Joseph Saccio's work before also. Saccio employs organic and inorganic materials to plumb themes of death and rebirth. In several of the works here, Saccio engages with the book form. In some cases this is overt. With "Do Not Forget the Burning Books," a cyliner of ruffled pages with singed edges is wedged between segments of a tar-blackened telephone pole. The book form is an interesting choice for Saccio because his works invite reading and interpretation. They are freighted with metaphor, dreamlike.

Whether this was Saccio's intention or not, "Do Not Forget the Burning Books" invokes two different forms of communication: written (books) and oral/verbal (telephone pole). To riff on that some more, we see the written word trapped within the two segments of the telephone pole as if verbal, technologically facilitated communication is squeezing out the written literary form. Of course, there is another association here—that trees have a second life as the paper that makes up the pages of a book.


Three works in the show were created in memory of a friend of Saccio's who dies in the 1970's. "Elegy for Clint: Homage to Motherwell" and "Requiem for Clint: A Thousand Cuts" are wall-mounted sculptures that also allude to the book form.

Saccio/Saladyga show reception Sunday at Kehler Liddell Gallery

Kehler Liddell Gallery
873 Whalley Ave., New Haven, (203) 389-9555
Joseph Saccio & Gerald Saladyga: Site Unseen
Nov. 4—Dec. 5, 2010
Opening reception: Sun., Nov. 7, 3—6 p.m., with Artist Talk at 3 p.m.

Press release

Kehler Liddell Gallery is pleased to present Site Unseen, a two-person exhibition of sculpture by Joseph Saccio and painting by Gerald Saladyga. This will be Saccioʼs second show at the gallery, and Saladygaʼs debut.

Joseph Saccio is a sculptor who resuscitates life from discarded objects, both organic and inorganic. For this show, trees are the conceptual medium at large and Saccio announces it with vigor in the form of a 15-foot tall circular tempietto (Italian for small temple). With alternating slabs of hallow cedar wood and coils of industrial fencing, “Tempietto” speaks to the inherent ambition and mysticism of nature. This is the story of a tree that exploded itself to become something different, possibly bigger, and half manmade. The interior provides a small space for one person to rest and reflect on fantasies, salvations, and other sites unseen.

Natureʼs inheritance is further pondered in a series of wall-mounted works, which Saccio crafted as memorials to a lost friend. “Requiem for Clint A Thousand Cuts” reads from left to right like a heavy musical scale with oak cross-sections for notes. The composition, honors the life of the oak tree: making accessible the intricate growth rings and vascular rays that circle the innermost heart wood.

Saccioʼs Book Series speaks to our everyday reliance on wood for communication, entertainment, and language. “Leaves of Grass” is a large, open book overgrown with a fern-like moss, the “Book of Catastrophys” is a rotting heap of gossipy magazine page, and a telephone pole sculpture has a book for a belly. Here, pragmatism meets imagination in challenging ways.

Gerald Saladyga is a non-traditional landscape painter who is unafraid of pioneering a 21st century aesthetic. For Saladyga, the romanticism of 19th century landscape painters is out of touch with our reality, which burgeons unpretty things like suburban sprawl, pollution, and human injustice. Thus, his landscapes read more like complex GPS maps and diagrams of cosmic universes than the traditional plein air variety.

For his debut show, Saladyga presents a series of minimal paintings done in a strict palette of black, gray, and red. He uses a mixture of latex house paint and modeling paste in order to achieve a thick, viscous surface. Many of the new works contain Tau crosses, cruciforms, alluding to political violence and the sado-masochistic ritual religious belief during the Age of Exploration. The medieval symbol of the Tau Cross appears in a large triptych that physically dominates the show. A dark green border frames the work, and two small squares rest below, windows to a deep abyss.

As the central theme, medieval religion applies to “The Hours,” as well, a series of 16 works on paper that Saladyga created to reference a popular Christian devotional book used by monks, who also famously illustrated the manuscripts. The series, made up of formulaic compositions of vertical stripes, suggest routine, ritual movements, and the passing of light. The notion of a highly governed and glorified system is at play.

Saladyga painted the works in Site Unseen in the early 1990ʼs, at a time when he wanted to move away from the gore of figuration and expressionism, but still respond to the political climate of the time: El Salvador, Nicaragua and Vietnam. These works represent a conscious effort to change style and content, but not meaning, with a new wave of creativity.

CWOS 2010 final weekend miscellaneous images

I just wanted to post images of the work of a few more artists with whom I visited this past Saturday.

Work by Kim Mikenis ("Werewolf Visits Martha's Vineyard"):

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A sculpture with toy soldiers from Margaret Roleke's "Weapons of Mass Destruction":

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An anamorphic mural designed and painted by students of the Cooperative Arts High School's visual arts after school program. The design was inspired by the anamorphic work of Felice Varini:

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A detail from one work by Suzan Shutan:


A window installation by Shutan:


An outside view of Shutan's window installation with enthusiastic visitor juxtaposing a diagonal:

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A recent painting by Gerald Saladyga:


A recent drawing by Saladyga that harkens back to work he was doing in the 1980's:

"Red Alert" members' show opens at Arts Council of Greater New Haven this evening

Sumner McKnight Crosby Jr. Gallery
70 Audubon St., 2nd floor, New Haven, (203) 772-2788
Red Alert
July 15—Sept. 24, 2010
Artists’ Reception: Thurs., July 15, 5—7 p.m.

Press release

The Arts Council of Greater New Haven presents Red Alert, the organization’s seventh annual members show, in the Sumner McKnight Crosby Jr. Gallery, 70 Audubon St., 2nd floor, New Haven. This exhibition of works in a variety of media will be on display from Fri., July 16 through Fri., Sept. 24, 2010. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m.—5 p.m. The gallery will close at 3 p.m. on Fridays during July and August. An artists’ reception is scheduled for Thurs., July 15, from 5—7 p.m.

In a departure from previous members shows, the Arts Council has introduced a theme—Red Alert—that can be interpreted by participating member artists on multiple levels.

The color red can evoke power, danger, luck, love, and countless other associations. “Red Alert” can represent a warning or signal and can be interpreted literally or metaphorically. (Image is "What's Goin On" by Gerald Saladyga.)

Silvermine September exhibits open Sunday

Silvermine Guild Art Center
1037 Silvermine Rd., New Canaan, (203) 966-9700
September Exhibits at Silvermine
Through Oct. 1, 2009
Opening Reception: Sun., Sept. 13, 4—6 p.m.

Press release

The fall exhibits at the Silvermine Guild Arts Center, located in New Canaan, CT brings a range of works that will spark interest for all art lovers and collectors. Opening Sept. 6 and running through Oct. 1, the show will feature new works by Silvermine Guild Artist members Gerald Saladyga, Jeanine Esposito, Nash Hyon and Director's Choice with Janice Mauro and Joanne Pagano. All are welcomed to the opening reception on Sunday Sept. 13 from 4—6 p.m.

The Director's Choice exhibit The Tidal Decade is a collaborative effort by artists Janice Mauro and Joanne Pagano. Through the construction of artifacts for an imaginary society future's past, the artist duo creates a world that draws us into a place outside of time. A place which hauntingly reveals the possibilities that lie on the edge of present day man's misuse of science and technology. In the remote mountaintop caves the ancestors of this imaginary society not only have endured the ending of humanoid civilization but created art that just may be a testament to their ordeal. The Tidal Decade exhibition opens in collaboration with the Williamsburg Art Gallery Association, at Art 101 located in Brooklyn, New York, opening on Sept. 11.

Janice Mauro, from Redding, teaches figurative sculpture at the Silvermine School of Art in Connecticut and the Art School at Old Church in New Jersey. Her award winning sculpture has been exhibited in New York at The National Sculpture Society, Lever House, and the Inter Church Center, as well as at City Without Walls and the Meadowlands Center for the Arts both in New Jersey. Mauro's museum exhibits include the National Academy of Design Annual Exhibition in New York, the Paterson Museum, NJ, and in Connecticut at the Discovery Museum, the Mattatuck Museum, and the New Britain Museum of American Art. Ms. Mauro is a sculptor member of the National Sculpture Society and member of the Silvermine Guild of Artists.

Joanne Pagano is an artist, writer, and performer residing in Sunnyside, New York. She has designed and collaborated on numerous sets for the long-running Alternative New Years Day Spoken Word/Performance Extravaganza. As a member of The No Chance Ensemble, a troupe of writer/performers that she also directs, she has brought multimedia interpretations to such venues as St. Marks's Poetry Project, Dixon Place, The Bowery Poetry Club, and The Knitting Factory. Joanne Pagano Weber exhibits at Art 101 in Brooklyn, NY.

In his new works Landscapes After the Battle, Gerald Saladyga's investigative intensity brings together a variety of scientific and political source material to create multi-layered "landscape" paintings that astound the viewer with their bold colors and spurs contemplation of the tragic results of man's devices. For this New Haven artist, "representing landscape is a very important part of my work. But I see landscape painting not as a romantic representation of the past, but as an ongoing inspiration of an ever-changing environment challenged by urban sprawl, pollution, industrialization, victimization and conflict." His approach is different in that this artist prefers the fantasy underlying the reality to bring the viewer in with color, form and texture and then let him go with a sense of unease that there is something wrong and it's just below the surface.

Jeanine Esposito is a sculptor and installation artist who creates conceptual works using an unusual combination of paper pulps, textiles and found materials. She has had several solo shows and her work has been chosen for over 25 juried shows throughout the Northeast, and has won several awards. Her new one-person show, Daily Shower, explores the fragmentation of how life is actually lived. According to the artist, who lives in Westport, "No matter what events, joyful or catastrophic, or what situations or states of mind we are in, all of it is lived in one day increments." Through conceptual installations, the works in this exhibit takes every day discarded and overlooked materials and transforms them into meditative compositions exploring this fragmentation. The works reflect upon the emotional and psychological nuances of everyday life.

Working primarily with encaustics in her exhibit Convergence, Wilton artist Nash Hyon explores the connection between man, nature, beauty, art and science, and above all, what it means to be human. The meticulous process of melting, layering and scraping give Hyon's pieces an almost archaeological feel with depth and substance, a sense of history, and how even the sharpest remembered experiences gradually fade with the passage of time. She combines the raw materials of an artist—paint, paper, graphite—with a passion for every aspect of human culture, mixing concepts in science and medicine with striking symbolic imagery, thereby transforming them into timeless, emotionally evocative works of art.

Sunday opening at Gallery of Contemporary Art at Sacred Heart University

The Gallery of Contemporary Art at Sacred Heart University
5151 Park Ave., Fairfield, (203) 365-7650
The Elements: Earth
Jan. 25—Mar. 5, 2009.
Opening reception: Sun., Jan. 25, 1—3:30 p.m.
Artist's talk to follow.

Press release

The fourth exhibit in our series about The Elements focuses on Earth. The pre-Socratic philosopher, Empedocles (c. 492—432 B.C.), noted the world's division into four naturally occurring Elements—"earth, sea, air and the fiery aether of the heavenly bodies"—were the basis of all matter. For centuries, these elements continued to be the foundation for our decoding of the world.

There will be an opening reception for this show this Sun., Jan. 25, from 1—3:30 p.m.

It could be argued that the first "earth works" were very early man's attempt to mark and control his environment, places such as Stonehenge and ancient dolmens. In the 1960s numerous artists created large-scale earth works, born in reaction to the commercialization of art, that could only be totally experienced from the sky.

Two variants of earth works in this exhibit, Andy Goldsworthy's "Fresh, thin leaves / wrapped around rotted trunk / held with water /Lennox, Massachusetts / 13 May 2005" and Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "Reichstag" (1996) are works that are best known by their documentation, since no trace is left after their completion.

Goldsworthy uses natural materials, many times from the site of creation (such as leaves, ice and stone), to make work, intending that it will be ephemeral and have a life-cycle of creation, stasis and ultimately decay. In this case, little remains of the intense green leaves that once made a quiet and stunning statement deep in the woods.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the husband and wife team, draw attention to the land and or human constructs upon it by draping impossibly large areas in fabric for up to three weeks, after which all of the materials are recycled. The temporarily vacant 100-year-old Reichstag was draped in a silvery reflective material that waved and swayed in the wind. It took 24 years to obtain permission and execute the project.

Human relocation across vast distances, whether by choice or displacement, has increased over the last century and become almost commonplace. Apo Torosyan makes his art and films as a reflection of his immigrant experiences. As a child in Turkey, he witnessed the 1955 pogrom and the destruction of the old Constantinople. "Earth" (2008) is gently mounded soil. When questioned about the use of "dirt" for this work, he responded that "earth" is part of all of us, reminding us of the concept of ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Niki Ketchman's "Landscape 2" (2006) is a collaged and painted globe tenuously tethered from the ceiling to a small half-globe shape with a plastic tree.

The Black Estate, an artists' collaborative composed of Noah McDonald and Scott Pagano, combines the centuries old tradition of beautiful ink wash drawings and contemporary animation. "Fall" (2007) is enclosed in a beautifully crafted wooden box with an ocular lens, from which one individually experiences the swirling, falling leaves in a circular, folding format.

"Parrita in Process" (July 2001), by Michele Brody, is also a reflection of time and landscape, depicting the life cycle of a palm plantation in Costa Rica. Palm oil is used in soaps (Palmolive), as non-hydrogenated cooking fat and its demand has risen recently as a biofuel. Some environmental groups claim that the increased demand for palm oil biofuel is damaging to the planet because its production results in the destruction of peat bogs and deforestation.

Stephanie Lempert's "Spectacle Island Park" (2008), a photograph of a reclaimed landfill site, is overlaid with the comments of those who participated in the reclamation process and its long tumultuous history. These "secret messages" encoded over the pristine landscape add another dimension to it's wild beauty.

In a departure from actual landscapes, three of the artists, Kim Keever, Eva Lee and Gerald Saladyga manufacture landscapes as part of their work.

Keever creates majestic, sweeping landscapes in a 100-gallon fish tank filled with water. These elaborately staged artificial productions of plaster and plastic rocks, trees, and fluid clouds of almost lurid colors flowing through the water, are carefully lit and photographed, with no attempt to hide the process or make these appear "real". They are post-Hudson River school works; empty, surreal, eerie landscapes that reflect the fact that humans are drawn to the sublime and beautiful but not necessarily committed to ensuring its survival. It is implicit that these substitute landscape vistas in a fish tank may, someday, be all we have left.

The earth's inhabitants have an interior emotional landscape. Lee has been working with neuroscientist Dr. James Cohan of the University of Virginia to create 3D animations of EEG readings of twelve people during five emotional states (anger, joy, fear, sadness and disgust). Multiple views of each subject's emotion are viewed simultaneously. As the work unfolds, in jewel-like colors, it resembles a slow-motion journey through the rising of a mountain-like topography and its disintegration.

A landscape painter of the cosmos, Saladyga imagines the earth seen from space in multiple views upon a canvas with a starlit sky behind them. Saladyga's "Apocalypse" (2008), is inspired by global positioning and geographical photographs. Abstract and glowing curvilinear lines, layered many times over with sparkling dots of color, indicate glowing roaches that have survived a nuclear holocaust. This fanciful, luscious work includes a fiery mountain range with mountain climbing schematics that are the only reference to man's existence.

Also looking down at the earth, Anthony Falcetta's "#P121228" (2008) is an abstract, lushly painted landscape, a bird's eye view of a flowing river and the banks that contain it.

David Meisel has long photographed a reality that we are aware of but have never really contemplated. His abstract images, taken from the air and recording the loss of waterways, led to his aerial photographs of where that water flowed—Los Angeles. The "Oblivion Series" shows us an immense and overpopulated tangled mess of miles of urban density. "Oblivion 9n" (2004), with its reversal of black and white, reminds us of x-rays that reveal something that is hidden, the monstrous effect of development, exquisitely documented, forbiddingly beautiful.

In a reversal, Margaret McCarthy's romantic photograph "The Crystal Cave" from the "Portals Series" is taken from inside a cave to depict the rays of the sun streaming into the opening.

Jane Sutherland's masterful eye for detail in her pastel "Loggie's Greenhouse" (2002) shows us a close up view of the lush plantings created within the glass walls of a climate-controlled space. Plants growing in their earthenware pots extend the growing season or possibly suggesting it may be environmentally necessary to grow our plants indoors.
Margaret Tsirantonakis' "Ancient Vase Echoes in the Landscape" (2004), a woodblock and monotype, depicts the classical shape of a container made of clay, suspended between the mountains and sea of her native Crete.

Most of Barbara Rothenberg's works contain a reference to nature's life cycles, such as roots, seeds and plant forms. Her rich and textured oil and collage work, "Up From Earth # 2" is comprised of manipulated images of mushrooms, the amazing fungus that seems to grow overnight.

Implicit in any representation of life forms is its transformation and regeneration. One can only hope that the creativity that is evident in these works will be reflected in our efforts to sustain our blue planet.

East Neighborhoods: Short takes

City-Wide Open Studios
50 Orange St., New Haven, (203) 772-2709
East Neighborhoods: Short takes
Oct. 22, 2007.

I will take any opportunity I have to write about the work of Gerald Saladyga. I visited his studio at 39 Church Street on the second day of the neighborhoods weekend. As usual, I was dazzled by his paintings.

Every year his work just gets better and better. He is extending his signature style, adding complexity to his compositions and exploring a richness of color and texture that is stunning.

As I wrote last year, Saladyga views his seemingly abstract paintings as landscapes. He told me that most of the new works he was showing his studios are "landscapes after the battle." In the wake of devastation, life after the battle, he noted, can be "just as bad as the battle."

When I replied that his paintings were so beautiful, he responded that "devastation can be beautiful." It wasn't a nihilistic statement. Gesturing out his window, he said that the ruins of the old Macy's building—in the process of being demolished across the street—were striking when viewed at sunset.

One work that particularly impressed me was the large painting "Postcards After the Apocalypse." As with most of his paintings, there were areas in the image where he had created textures that looked like detailed Renaissance engravings revisited as abstraction.

"I put down the yellow and then put a light wash of black paint on it, very thin. I've learned how to manipulate it with crumpled paper," Saladyga told me.

"Postcards After the Apocalypse" also incorporated an old icon he used to use in his works: a silhouette of a bomb. As he continues to enrich his visual language, Saladyga isn't averse to rummaging through his past work for useful material.

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Stephen Grossman has a studio on the same floor as Saladyga. Over the past couple of years, Grossman has been painting objects and their shadows. He started with an amaryllis flower, shining a halogen lamp on it and then painting the shadows. For the Artspace show 101 Dresses, he used the same approach on a doll's dress. Painting with gouache, Grossman captured not just the primary shadow but the secondary halos surrounding it.

Invited by Saladyga to be part of the show Environmental Visions: Beauty and Fragility at Haskins Laboratories, Grossman was interested in painting "another life form that's not vegetation." He had been thinking about the idea of fish as food. And while he is Jewish, it brought to mind the Christian parable of the loaves and fishes, and the symbolism of fish as representing "man's ability to feed himself."

"Fish is an interesting icon of nature and human use of nature to fulfill our needs," Grossman told me.

In painting plants, he had been intrigued by their little interior spaces where light gets trapped and reflected. With the fish he was painting, he had the flesh removed to expose some of the skeleton. The dead fish was suspended by a wire and had one light on it.

"I use a pretty intense halogen lamp so it's really lit. I freeze the fish so it doesn't smell and stays rigid. With the bright light on it, they drip. The light through the water drips will affect the picture," said Grossman.

The first fish picture was a vertical image, just the fish hanging, head up. But Grossman wanted to do a horizontal painting. The eviscerated fish in "Fish Out of Water #3," the oil painting Grossman was showing at his studio, was trailed by a gathering of circles. Given the context, I read them as bubbles.

"I would rather you read it as though the orange surface is cut away and the green [of the bubbles] is behind it," said Grossman.

There were several portrait images of a woman displayed, in various stages of completion. They are something of an elegy to Grossman's mother, who died last year.

"My father, after she died, was obsessively scanning in old photographs and sending them to us," Grossman told me. Many of these were images taken of his mother before he was born.

One of the paintings was based on a small yearbook picture of his mother. It was blown up to 8x10 by his father and then to 24x30 by Grossman, fostering pixel anomalies that become part of the visual statement. Grossman gets his blow-up printed and then traces it onto the painting surface using graphite transfer paper. He creates his own version of paint-by-numbers to depict the gradations in the painting. The monochromatic paintings are partially about the way the digitized images are broken down (a metaphor for memory as channeled through pixels).

•••

In the new paintings in Michael Mancari's 39 Church Street studio, there are layers of stenciled imagery and free painting. It is hard to tell where some areas are foreground imagery or background. They resonate as abstractions, but like the work of Gerald Saladyga, they are—for Mancari—landscapes. Specifically, cityscapes.

"I think of them as excavations. I excavate layers and each layer is a layer back into history, something that's manmade and natural," Mancari told me.

Mancari had initially started out creating and cutting hand-drawn stencils. But he quickly "said the hell with that. I was spending three hours drawing a stencil." He now uses Adobe Illustrator software to design the stencils and a vinyl graphic cutter to cut them.

He is exploring the interpenetration of the natural and the manmade, the imposition of the geometric and manufactured on the chaotic and violent, yet beautiful, realm of nature. But nature also pushes back. As Mancari said to me, "Another thing that goes into it is decadence. Time exists and it takes [the manmade world] apart slowly."

Of these paintings, Mancari said, "They are topographical or, almost in the sense of Asian ink wash drawings, like a floating world. They are a different kind of space."