Saturday evening opening at Hygienic Art

Hygienic Art
83 Bank St., P.O. Box 417, New London, (860) 443-8001
Three Artists: Kevin Cooper: Glass, Megan Craig: Paint + Adam Campos: Photo
May 29—June 26, 2010
Opening reception: Sat., May 29, 7—10 p.m.

Press release

Hygienic Art presents three artists working in glass, paint and photography. Inspired by the colors of Venice, the rooftops of Brooklyn and the transient life, at Hygienic Art we see how these three artists experiment, communicate and imagine experience.

There will be an opening reception for this show on Sat., May 29, from 7—10 p.m.

Kevin Cooper: Glass

Artist statement:

For three years I have been an apprentice under Jeffery P'an at Precient Studios at the Velvet Mill in Stonington CT. In addition to learning the techniques I am now faced with the challenge of finding my voice or individual style. The work I made for this show was largely experimental of where to go next. The smaller work is inspired by my trip to Venice last year where I bought supplies and tools and inspired by the colors used by Jeffery. Tollen was created as an answer for my desire to recreate my surroundings with out having the ample techniques needed. It is a combination of chemistry and my true passion glass.

Kevin is an artist in residence at the Hygienic Art Coop, New London, CT.

Megan Craig: Paint

Statement:

Painting has always seemed to me like a brute way of talking, more like pointing. It's not gentle and it's never precise. When I paint I always end up pointing past or through what I thought I wanted to show. It's like wearing mittens to thread a needle. Sometimes I think about painting as a way of organizing experience. I think about work that is brave or truthful—paintings that make life seem more full or more urgent.

I started painting cityscapes in 1997 from the 6th floor window of my apartment in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. I had a view of Brooklyn rooftops, church steeples and the fading outline of Queens. I was trying to find some space in the city, some clarity and distance, a place of my own. Painting let me get to know New York.

My new paintings explore experimental spaces, fields of color and the cavernous holes between strokes. My work derives concretely from immersion in cityscapes and the architecture of crowded places, but these new paintings focus on feelings and forces rather than objects or images. I'm concerned with the ambiguities between the still and the moving, the concrete and the abstract. The accumulation of paint strokes generates spaces that are tensed with multiple centers of gravity, a propagation of intricacies, cities within cities. Painting has a special ability to express the forces emanating from within seemingly sedentary things—bricks, books, junk. Paint can reanimate objects and make visceral a certain sweetness, the erosive weight of time, the explosive thrust of joy, the ways things bend and buckle, rise and resist. My paintings present such forces and their pre-articulate, visceral moods: pinched, tense, shy, poised, yellow, pink, free, fast, and jubilant.

Megan lives and paints in New Haven, CT.

Adam Campos: Photo

Artist Statement:

Floaters. They're kind of creepy almost like ghosts. No, they are beautiful and free, more like clouds. I see now, no two are exactly alike so they are like snowflakes. Maybe they are simply that shapeless blob that floats in casual fashion across the corner of your eye. You blink. It's gone.

Actually, they are like all of those things. Floaters are as mysterious as a ghostly specter, while evoking as much imagination and wonder as the shape shifting form of a cloud slowly drifting across the horizon. At the same time if you do find a Floater meandering into view and you happen to blink, you will miss it and no matter what you do you will never get it back. You see, a Floater form may only exist for a fraction of a second because it is constantly shifting and mutating until about a second after it springs to life it ceases to be at all. That's right, less than a second is all you have to admire one in person.

Exhibiting Floaters in states of rising and expanding, at their peak and during their inevitable deterioration as they return to the earth from where they spawned. Observing many Floaters in various phases of their lives may be taken as representations of how transient life, the universe and everything are and how beautiful it all can be even in a period of deterioration. Even something as magnificent as a mountain range at its peak once rose from mere hills and plains and will return to hills and plains over the millennia.

Even when looking into the still image of a Floater they're so surreal that it's easy to get lost in the layers and tangle your mind in the folds as it may appear to be still moving. I usually see faces, others may see animals or flowers those with yet greater imaginations may perceive entire scenes or a story. In short, a Floater will be anything you allow it to be.

Adam Campos is 23 and lives in Bronx, NY.

Light, paint and dreams at Ely House

John Slade Ely House Center for Contemporary Art
51 Trumbull Street, New Haven, (203) 624-8055
Inviting Abstraction
Through March 1, 2009.

There is a fine painting show at The John Slade Ely House. Inviting Abstraction features the work of Willard Lustenader, Megan Craig and K. Levni Sinanoglu. It isn't a show of abstract paintings in the usual sense, although Megan Craig's work comes close. These are works that flirt with abstraction in various ways despite having one foot planted strongly in different representational traditions.

The ostensible subjects of Willard Lustenader's oil paintings are still lifes of paper cutouts on tabletops. For the most part, the pieces of paper are folded in half with each half coming to a peak like the roof of a house. There is the sense of models of little communities created by Monopoly pieces. But the real subject of Lustenader's paintings, the star—at least to my eyes—is light. In works like "Cut-outs with 1 Red and 2 Yellow," "White Cut-outs, 1 Gray" and the luminous "Cut-outs, 3 White," Lustenader immerses himself in not only the way the geometric shapes cast a multiplicity of shadows on the reflective surface. It's like he wields a prism in his paintbrush, channeling the waves to the linen surface. It is the substance of light made visible while remaining true to its quality as light. Both light and lightness.

Megan Craig's subject would appear to be blunt abstraction. Her paintings are inspired by household objects—a chair, for example—but aren't in any way representational. (Craig has previously built up a fine body of work painting cityscapes.) But as with Lustenader, the real subject is something else again: the kinetic pleasure of applying paint to surface.

There could hardly be a stronger contrast than that between Craig's approach and that of Lustenader. Where Lustenader works with the precise delineation of a trained classicist, Craig covers her panels or canvas with broad brush strokes of boldly stated color. In Lustenader's paintings, colors bleed imperceptibly into other colors based on observed principles of physics. Not so with Craig's paintings. Shape abuts shape. "Jubilee" is made up of four panels abutting each other. Each briskly applied brush stroke is 2—3 inches wide. You can see the physical energy expended in the act of painting. The paint coming off the bristles interacts with the underlying color layers to generate lines of force.

K. Levni Sinanoglu's paintings document a private metaphysical universe. Surrealism is certainly a touchstone. There is the stuff of dreams: birds in flight, strange elongated trees, ghostly figures and inscrutable architecture. Perspective is skewed, imagery is layered on imagery in the way one archaeological site may rest on top of another. Although dreamlike, there is a sense of order, suggested by the delicate use of gridwork in a way that references architectural drawings.

Ely House show open Saturday evening

John Slade Ely House Center for Contemporary Art
51 Trumbull Street, New Haven, (203) 624-8055
Inviting Abstraction
Jan. 25-Mar. 1, 2009
Opening reception: Sat., Jan. 31, 5-8 p.m.

Press release

Inviting Abstraction—a show of work by Megan Craig, Willard Lustenader and Levni Sinanoglu—opens at the John Slade Ely House in New Haven this Saturday night. The opening reception takes place from 5—8 p.m.

Thursday night opening at Hulls One Whitney: CWOS Encore 2008

Hull's One Whitney
1 Whitney Ave., New Haven, (203) 907-0320
Open Studios Encore 2008
Nov. 13, 2008—Jan. 8, 2009
Opening reception: Thurs., Nov. 13, 5—8 p.m.

Press release

Thanks to you it has been an amazing first year at Hull's One Whitney Gallery. Due to your support, we are able to present our 2nd Annual Open Studios Encore. Four days and over 100 studio visits later, we are excited to bring you this year's selections from 23 of Connecticut's most promising artists.

The featured artists are: Anna Held Audette (Web), Riley Brewster, Susan Clinard (Web), Megan Craig, Geoffrey Detrani (Web), Steven DiGiovanni, (Web, see image on right), Silas Finch, Stephan Gunn, Brian Huff (Web), Daniel Huff, Jo Kremer, Ann Lindbeck, Evie Lindeman, Barbara Marks, Andrea Miller, Larry Morelli, Morel Morton (Web), Jason Noushin (Web), Liz Pagano (Web), Lyn Bell Rose, Kathryn Sodaitis, David Taylor, Jonathon Waters and Brian Wendler.

Please join us for the opening on Thurs., Nov. 13, from 5—8 p.m. Join us for refreshments and conversation with the artists.