Artist reception at New Haven Public Library Thursday evening

New Haven Free Public Library Art Gallery
133 Elm St., New Haven
Tearing Silk: Recent Silkscreens by Miguel Trelles
Through Jul. 12, 2011.
Artist's reception: Thurs., June 16, 5:30—7:30 p.m.

Press release

Tearing Silk is an exhibition of recent silk-screens that showcase contemporary Pop interpretations of Meso-American icons. The show will also include "gestural" silk-screens depicting Afro Caribbean rhapsody, and a colorful rendition of "Bayamanaco," the Taino deity for fire. Miguel Trelles' work approaches contemporary Latino portraits as well as Pre-Columbian icons through the lingua franca of American visual pop.

Miguel Trelles is a painter with a studio presence in Manhattan's Lower East Side. His ongoing Chino-Latino painting series addresses Caribbean and Latino subjects through Chinese references. He is also an adjunct professor of Visual Arts, Modern Languages, and Comparative Literature at CUNY, where he teaches at Hunter College and Baruch College.

"Rather than merely pursuing radical innovations, I favor revolutionary archaism in painting," writes Trelles, "Personally meaningful references and amenable formats from the history of art help me to depict and to frame those intuitions about nature and humanity which I have been rendering with crayon, ink and brush since infancy. Those references are then 'telescoped' into new conceptual contexts and combinations, but always within the purview of traditional painting/printmaking methods."

Tearing Silk consciously straddles “the tremendous potential energy of difference” Europe unknowingly and willfully instilled between the four Americas. These silkscreens reflect a respectful and well-informed appropriation of Meso-American icons, Afro-Caribbean literary sources, and American Pop. They constitute yet another rough draft towards a Pan-American suma, a model that will not deny Europe but which will encompass more.

His exhibitions have been reviewed in various art publications such as Arte al Dia, Art in America, Art Nexus, and YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Art.

Trelles' work has been exhibited extensively in New York, New Haven, and San Juan. His paintings have traveled to Miami, Havana, Santo Domingo, Tegucigalpa, Lima, Rio de Janeiro, Beunos Aires, and Paris.

Thursday night opening at Artspace; 7 new solo shows

Artspace
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
Patrick Chamberlain: On Your Mark
Sarah Bliss: Journey from Longjiang
Jennifer Crupi: Beyond Words: Expressive Gestures
Ben Blanc: Worlds Apart
John O'Donnell: PG-13
Miguel Trelles: Trámite; Hsiao
Jeff Slomba: Sound Change
May 6—June 6, 2010.
On Your Mark will be on display through June 5, 2010.
Public Opening: Thurs., May 6, 6—8 p.m.

Press release

Artspace announces seven new solo exhibitions with works by Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Rhode Island based artists. Patrick Chamberlain's exhibition, On Your Mark opened on Apr. 1, 2010. The six exhibitions of Sarah Bliss, Jennifer Crupi, Ben Blanc, John O'Donnell, Miguel Trelles, and Jeff Slomba will open on Thurs., May 6, from 6—8 p.m. Common themes that emerge throughout the Artspace galleries are correlations between synthetic and natural forms, the history of labor and cultural practices, and cultural excess and technological evolution.

Gallery 1 • Patrick Chamberlain's exhibition, On Your Mark, represents the artist's first solo show. Chamberlain's abstract paintings illuminate Gallery 1 with hoppy colors and tangential lines and shapes.

Gallery 2 • Journey from Longjiang, by Sarah Bliss, utilizes the economic history of Artspace: a former furniture store, to comment on labor and transportation practices overseas. As furniture production is outsourced to Asia, US jobs are lost, and the materials that are used to transport the products are land filled or burned to create waste and highly toxic gases. Bliss's video serves as a trace of this trans-oceanic journey, and her sculptures contain a lifeless beauty, one that is both delicate and volumetric.

Gallery 3 • Beyond Words: Expressive Gestures, by Jennifer Crupi, is a group of interactive, prosthetic-like proposals for instruments of gestural expression. Each sculpture imagines and presents a different outlet for stress, excitement, and the desire to communicate through body language and self-discovery. By viewing and interacting with the work, the artist seeks to illicit the underlying reasons for our seemingly casual gestures.

Gallery 4 • Worlds Apart, by Ben Blanc, is a series of abstract sculptures that evoke natural and man-made materials as organic forms re-emerge from synthetic materials. Blanc is the founder of Ben Blanc Studio; he collects materials, explores various artistic processes, and reinterprets his design research. Blanc's work often exudes a plastic quality as objects oscillate, shift, and reach a delicate balance.

Gallery 5 • PG-13, by John O'Donnell, is an installation that appropriates various forms of popular media-plastic toys from the discount bin, blockbuster movies, magazines with pictures of food, bad air-brushed pornography, and athletes such as Michael Jordan. O'Donnell implicates a culture over-crowded with material excess, popular icons, and kitsch objects. Many of the forms that the artist chooses recount a connection to childhood in the 90s, an interest in Surrealism, and a concern for a post-industrial society obsessed with blogging, commenting, and crafting assemblages. The result is an installation of personal reference that becomes obscured and expanded upon by each viewer.

Long Wall • Trámite; Hsiao, by Miguel Trelles, is a series of paintings that take a humorous stance on the compositions of Li's Xiaojing tu, Trámite. In the artist's re-interpretation, the "demons" scroll, which constitutes an ethnic caricature of the "other" in 13th Century China, is used to describe a 21st Century Latino American population. The paintings cast a playful air on the traditional allegory and illustrate the varied complexities and stereotypes used to misrepresent a class of people.

Gallery 7 • Sound Change, by Jeff Slomba, is a series of investigations concerned with acts of selective preservation in response to the evolution of technology. The artist introduces scale, context, and gravitational shifts to de-familiarize the viewer with common archetypes of seashells, cassette tapes, speakers, and concrete blocks. The artist reveals their structural arrangements as being dynamic, layered, and malleable forms whose narrative continues to trace cultural production.