Soon to be a memory: "Multi-focus Memoryscapes" at Seton Art Gallery

Seton Art Gallery at the University of New Haven
Doods Hall, University of New Haven, 300 Boston Post Rd., West Haven, (203) 931-6065
Multi-focus Memoryscapes
Through Mar. 28, 2013.

Multi-focus Memoryscapes, which closes tomorrow, is a three-artist show—painter William McCarthy, painter/mixed media artist Graham D. Honaker II and photographer Hank Paper (objectivity alert: this writer's employer)—hung to exploit the complementarity of the varying imagery. And the variations are substantial—comprising Paper's perceptive and witty street photography, McCarthy's austere and spiritual landscapes and Honaker's unique mélange of collage, painting and assemblage.

One wall serves as a perfect example of how slyly this show was put together by curator Laura Marsh. Facing the entrance, the wall displays, left to right, a McCarthy painting ("These Dreams"), a Honaker mixed media work ("The stewardess") and Paper's photograph "Terminal."

Multi-focus Memoryscapes: from left to right, "These Dreams" by William McCarthy, "The Stewardess" by Graham D. Honaker II and "Terminal" by Hank Paper

The three works could barely be more different. But—Honaker's "The Stewardess" acts as the fulcrum, the hinge connecting the three works. Like all Honaker's pieces, "The Stewardess" is dense with imagery—old magazine photos, advertisements and product packaging are layered in a clear epoxy resin with abstract drips and smears of paint and his hand-cut repeated stencil image of a stewardess. As a composition—despite the fact that it employs representational imagery—it is an abstraction, defying the viewer to create narrative meaning out of the panoply of juxtapositions. It contains multitudes. Do its disparate images relate to each other in a coherent way? At least formally, they do. It is exciting to look at.

Compared to Honaker's "The Stewardess," McCarthy's "These Dreams" and Paper's "Terminal" are quiet. But there is a subliminal sense to their side-by-side display. Splashes of teal and orange paint in "The Stewardess" are answered by the presence of similar pigments in McCarthy's misty, mysterious landscape. That teal is also hinted at in the shadow in the corner of a wall abutting a window in "Terminal." And, of course, a stewardess—or flight attendant, in contemporary parlance—could be found prowling the corridors of an airport terminal.

Each of these works in their own way shows off the strengths of the individual artists. McCarthy's paintings are works of imagination rather than depictions of specific locations. They appear to be as much about the pleasures of working with paint and color as they an idealization of nature. Detail is as important to McCarthy as it is to Honaker. But for McCarthy, that attention to detail manifests itself in a completely different way—in layering colors, in the textures afforded by varying brush strokes.

Paper is a street photographer of uncanny perception, his antennae always up to serendipitous moments, some wry, some poignant. In "Terminal," the viewer see five jets in formation, presumably part of an air show, zooming past the floor-to-ceiling windows. But this evocation of unfettered motion and speed is counterbalanced by the appearance on the right of the frame of a wheelchair with its occupant's legs and clasped hands visible. Another photograph, "Where Are You?", was shot in a restaurant. A chic young blonde woman, sitting alone at a table for two, clasps her pink cell phone to her ear. On the wall behind her is a print of a Roy Lichtenstein comic strip-inspired painting of a similar blonde woman on the phone, the word balloon reading, "I don't know what to say." Paper has apparently never meta set-up he didn't recognize, camera in hand. Then there is the subtle social critique of the diorama scene in "Miss America Museum." A cutout of a young African-American girl in a red turtleneck and blue overalls clasps her hands together in delight as she surveys an array of Miss America dolls, games and photos while a crown is placed on her head. But all the images of Miss America are white.

Memory being the thematic hook of this show, it's notable that the concept is applicable to each artist's work in different ways. McCarthy's landscapes are works of memory and imagination, conjuring a sense of place out of his recollection of light, scenery and paint. Paper's photograph's capture moments in memory but do so in a way that invites deeper consideration and contemplation. The imagery in Honaker's works is treated much the same way memories are in dreams—as material to be reshuffled and re-contextualized, to be made strange and fantastic. Perhaps, like memories in dreams, these three artists' works shouldn't fit together. But they do.

"Multi-focus Memoryscapes" show opens at UNH Thursday evening

Seton Art Gallery at the University of New Haven
Doods Hall, University of New Haven, 300 Boston Post Rd., West Haven, (203) 931-6065
Multi-focus Memoryscapes
Mar. 7—28, 2013.
Reception: Thurs., Mar. 7, 6—8 p.m.

Press release from Seton Art Gallery

The 3rd century Greek saying, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, is a phrase that not only discusses subjective attraction but can also be applied to artist intuition when choosing a subject. Whether it is a composition, juxtaposition of imagery, or imagining of an idyllic landscape, all three artists in Multi-focus Memoryscapes approach their work with a sense of intrigue and irony.

Memory, much like a dream, is never sharply in focus or detail but always suggestive, says William McCarthy.

A memoryscape is not an exact representation of a factual world, rather it is an impression or evocation of things remembered. Many of Graham Honaker's, Hank Paper's, and William McCarthy's memoryscapes invoke nostalgia while some share a subtle humor with the viewer. There are multiple themes that run throughout the exhibition including commentaries on popular advertising and culture, the longing for an imagined or once visited landscape, and a return to former values or ways of living.

From moments of quiet reflection with William McCarthy's soft-focus, dream-like landscapes, all of which are in fact painted from memory; to the urban-scape collage paintings of Graham Honaker II that—like layers of dreams rising up—combine disparate iconography from the past with abstract figurative work that evoke memories of a certain time and place and emotion, to Hank Paper's photographs of moments in time that showcase the off-kilter beauty of everyday life, turning the real into the surreal, "We offer a palate of projections that will hopefully move the viewer to a place deeper within him-or-herself," says Hank Paper.

In passing through the exhibition, the varied styles and approaches of each artist coalesce via color, references to culture and society, and the feeling of timelessness and weightlessness.

Originally from New Mexico, Graham D. Honaker II lives and works in Hamden, Connecticut. He received his BFA from Eastern New Mexico University. Influenced by Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Street Art, his paintings comment on contemporary society with subjects ranging from potentially harmful political structures to the simple poetics of everyday life. Also influenced by Existentialism, which emphasizes the act of creating, Honaker exercises his subconscious through auto-painting. He is currently represented by Eidos, LLC.

William McCarthy is originally from Columbus Ohio and works in a basement studio in Hamden, Connecticut. From memory, he paints variations of the Connecticut landscape, along with images of Cape Ann salt marshes and the flat countryside of Ohio. These landscapes coupled with an abstract sensibility are reappearing themes and devises that allow him to create the illusion of atmospheric perspective. His solo exhibition venues include The Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, CT, Kehler Liddell Gallery in New Haven, CT, Middlesex Community College, Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, Weir Farm Trust, Wilton, CT, Muse Gallery in Columbus, OH, and Trudy LaBelle Fine Arts, in Naples, FL.

Hank Paper documents contemporary culture and society in the streets of North America, The United Kingdom, Western Europe, the Middle East, and Cuba. He turns the quotidian into the quintessential, the real into the surreal, and the actual into a dream. His many solo exhibition venues have included The African American Museum in Philadelphia; Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel; the High Point Historical Museum in North Carolina; The Jewish Museum of New Jersey; the Morgenthal-Frederics Gallery, the Tamarkin Leica Gallery, and The Harlem School of the Arts in New York. He has also exhibited extensively in New Haven, where he is a member of the Kehler Liddell Gallery.

CWOS Alternative Space weekend

Artspace
City-Wide Open Studios
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
City-Wide Open Studios 2012
Through Oct. 21, 2012.
Weekend 3 Report: Sunday

Finally getting to wrap up my coverage of this year's "Crystal Anniversary" City-Wide Open Studios. (I missed the middle weekend, focusing on artists in Erector Square, because I was laid up with a cold.)

It was a trip to wander through the former New Haven Register building, getting a little lost in the maze of hallways and in the presence of the mammoth—and now silent—presses. There were too many artists for me to comment on more than a few who grabbed my attention. My silence on so many of them should not be construed as critical judgment.

•••

It was New Canaan artist Camille Eskell's first time participating in City-Wide Open Studios. Her sculptures of the female torso were attention-grabbers and I stopped to chat with her about her work. She said her work "is all about emotional states of being. It's been the core of my work for 20-something years."

"Tattooed Lady: Coming Up Roses" was especially striking, seeing as how the softly curved nude female form—emblazoned with a floral tattoo drape—was rent from collarbone to lower abdomen with a gaping wound studded with yellowing teeth.

Camille Eskell: "Tattooed Lady: Coming Up Roses"

It is powerful sculptural imagery, the beauty of the female form and the decorative roses—Eskell says she uses "a lot of florals and botanicals to represent irrepressible life"—juxtaposed with the torn opening lined with teeth. The sculpture was cast in aqua resin and fiberglas from her original wax sculpture. The "sub-subtext" of the work, according to Eskell, was her sister's struggle at the time with terminal cancer. Eskell said that her sister's battle with cancer wasn't consciously in her mind as she made the work. It was only afterward that she saw intimations of her sister's pain in the mutilated body.

Regarding the teeth, which Eskell told me symbolized a "gnawing anxiety," Eskell said they were leftover dentures given to her some ten years prior by a dentist she knew. Eskell says she hoards lots of outré materials: "You know when you're going to have to use something and just wait until the moment is right." She mixes media but usually tries to incorporate drawing, which she describes as her greatest strength.

•••

Graham D. Honaker II described his mixed media paintings as "Pop Art with a sentimental flourish." By the word "sentimental," Honaker means to convey affection rather than irony toward the imagery he incorporates into his works.

Honaker suspends collage, latex paint, artist-grade paint and found objects between layers of polymer emulsion epoxy. Each layer of epoxy, he told me, is equivalent to approximately 50 layers of varnish. Honaker uses old magazine imagery, consumer product ephemera and labels and his own hand-cut stencils of iconic faces past and present: 1960's model Twiggy, Black radical George Jackson, Che Guevara, Charles Manson, Al Sharpton and James Brown's mug shot, to name a few.

"My pieces were very textural. People wanted to touch them and I wanted to find a way to make the surface level so the textural surface would be denied to the viewer," Honaker told me. Was he trying to protect the surface?

"It was a little bit of both. I wanted it to be that forbidden fruit kind of thing. Your mind tells you that you can feel this object but when you go to touch it, it's smooth," Honaker explained.

Honaker says a process of evolution led him to thicker and thicker pieces as he got interested in exploring the perception of depth and the way he could play with the light and shadows he was creating in the layers. Honaker has been meshing the collage, abstract mark-making and stencil work for about four years but says it has just been during the past two years that he has added the use of epoxy as a key element in his compositions.

Graham D. Honaker II

"There's so many possibilities, so many objects I can collect and little pieces of ephemera that can be put into a painting," Honaker said. "It's blurring the edge of 3-D to 2-D and I'm really fascinated by that." Honaker's works evoke box assemblages while remaining paintings.

Honaker continues his experimentation. He told me has dabbled in installing lighting sources in his paintings. In one of the works he had on display at the Register building, Honaker implanted LED lights in the painting, which can be turned on by being plugged into a wall outlet. And there are "interactive elements" in some of the works, too. To demonstrate, Honaker took "Redwood Reliever" off the wall and tilted it so that the soy sauce in a little packet buried in the yellowed epoxy swirled around.

•••

Artist Rita Valley didn't take it personally when she was told that her location in the Register alternative space was in a cage of sorts. It was a perfect fit with her anarchic sense of humor. Valley's installation, "(Show Us the Way) Out of Our Darkness," played off the wire fencing.

The sculptural work employed about ¼-mile of electric fencing (not plugged in for this show although Valley said she might do that in the future), rope lighting, 200 feet of clothesline covered in clear tape, fluorescent light tubes, a plastic security mirror and the lights she uses in her studio to photograph art. And piled around the base of the work was snow drifts of salt (chosen over sugar because salt "has so many historic references").

Rita Valley: "(Show Us the Way) Out of Our Darkness"

Valley said "It became like a drawing." In particular, she noted, that she had artist Cy Twombly's line work in mind when stringing the electric fence wire around the steel armature built by her husband, sculptor Bob Keating.

"Streetwise America" opening reception at Kehler Liddell this Sunday

Kehler Liddell Gallery
873 Whalley Ave., New Haven, (203) 389-9555
Streetwise America: Hank Paper and Friends
Mar. 4—28, 2010
Opening Reception: Sun., Mar. 14, 3—6 p.m.
Musical Event: SKAmatics in Concert, Sun. Mar. 21, 1:30—3:30 p.m.

Press release

Kehler Liddell Gallery is pleased to present Streetwise America, a group show of photographs, paintings, collage and installation that documents contemporary America and facilitates a conscious consideration of what's happening on our streets. The exhibition features over 40 color photographs by New Haven-based artist Hank Paper, shot over the past five years. A selection of works by Peter Bosco, John Columbus, Steve DiGiovanni, Graham D. Honaker II, Robert Lisak, Maryann Ott, David Ottenstein and Suzan Shutan accompany Paper's work, offering chance similarities and juxtapositions that create new points of departure for reflection on our national identity.

Hank Paper shoots fast with a handheld Leica camera and crops with his lens in the straight, photojournalist style of New York's street photographers of the 60's and 70's: Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, and Vito Acconci. The invention of digital film in the 80's did not fundamentally change his craft. Major themes in his work are evident in the patterns and behaviors that appear in his images time and time again: sexual role modeling, aging, immigration. His subjects are the people that play out these themes: preoccupied businessmen, wild hookers, concerned parents, assimilated immigrants, museum-going elders. For Paper, the challenge is to puncture the viewer's preconceived notions of his fellow man by making works that reveal his subjects' ever-changing dimensions: the posture of a Hell's Angel walking a toy poodle or the isolation of a lonely schoolgirl at a Christmas pageant.

Paper has dedicated the past 35 years to documenting contemporary society, mining the streets of North America, The United Kingdom, Western Europe, the Middle East and Cuba in search of capturing what he describes as "that revelatory action, or gesture, or face." His work has been exhibited in museum and gallery shows around the world, including The African American Museum in Philadelphia (2006), The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel (1999), The Jewish Museum of New Jersey (2008), the High Point Historical Museum in North Carolina (2001), the Tamarkin's and the Leica Gallery in New York City (2002) and the Morgenthal-Frederics Gallery in New York City (2000). He received the Piedmont Award from the Somers Juried Photography Show for his Terminal Series in 2009 and a grant from the CT Commission on Culture and Tourism for his Ascension Series in 2006.

Together, the artists in this show hope to penetrate mass media image saturation and mitigate the pressure of electronic assault in order to fix on what is elusive and infinitely moving in the face of America today. A fully illustrated, hardbound catalogue with an introduction by Hank Paper will accompany the exhibition.

Peter Bosco's photographs come from a larger body of work titled Fading Places, which attests to the impermanence of things, both animate and inanimate. Bosco photographs many places that are no longer extant, intending to show things as they are and to render them in the most literal way possible. His work has been described as "hymns of sadness", and while they are often about loss, his works ultimately serve to sustain time, place and memory.

John M. Columbus' interest in photography began as a boy in 1960's New Jersey when his parents gave him a Polaroid/Land camera. He studied with photographer Marc Cohen, who influenced his street photography style of "seeing the unusual." Columbus, whose photo assignments have taken him throughout the U.S., the Caribbean, and Europe, currently concentrates on event and magazine photography, exhibiting his work, and drumming in the SKAmatics, a ska/jazz band that will perform in the gallery on Mar. 21.

Steve DiGiovanni blurs the line between painting and photography (see image) by incorporating digital photography in his paintings. DiGiovanni culls Internet images, old magazines and personal photographs, all of which he incorporates in his works in acrylic on canvas. Inspired by his imagination, his compositions are often free associative and improvisational, reflecting his ongoing interest in the wide range of painting's possibilities.

Graham D. Honaker II is an Abstract Expressionist whose paintings comment on contemporary society, with subjects ranging from potentially harmful political structures to the simple poetics of everyday life. Influenced by Existentialism, which emphasizes the act of creating, Honaker exercises his subconscious through "auto-painting." At the same time, his observations of the perpetually shifting world around him and his place in it are conveyed in his often-intricate and highly conceptual subject matter.

Robert Lisak is a photographer based in New Haven, who recently published a catalogue on the architecture of his city's historic churches. Lisak received his MFA from the Yale School of Art, and is currently a member of ASMP and an adjunct Professor of Photography at Sacred Heart University.

Maryann Ott is inspired by dreams, hallucinations, flights of imagination, and the mind's eye. She feels that if she could map the streets, alleys and hidden pathways of her inner life, she'd be a wiser person. Instead, she is a photographer, capturing what she can and making it hers.

David Ottenstein has been pursuing fine-art/documentary photography, exploring interiors of abandoned and decaying buildings in the northeast and the vanishing agrarian landscape of the Midwest.

Suzan Shutan is a New Media Sculptor, Installation and Video Artist straddling the worlds of two and three dimensions.

There will be an opening reception for this show on Sun., Mar. 14, from 3-6 p.m.

The following Sunday afternoon, Mar. 21, will feature a musical performance by the SKAmatics ska/jazz band from 1:30-3:30 p.m.