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.

Complements to the artists

Kehler Liddell Gallery
873 Whalley Ave., New Haven, (203) 389-9555
Scene/Seen: Photography by Rod Cook & Paintings by William McCarthy
Through Sept. 27, 2009

The Kehler Liddell Gallery often shows pairings of artists whose work, on first glance, seems quite different. But on closer inspection, there is often some point or points of complementarity that make these shows work. Such is the case with Scene/Seen, an exhibit of paintings by William McCarthy and photographs by Rod Cook. The imagery seems bathed in mists as though each photograph or painting is a hazily recalled memory.

McCarthy is an abstract painter masquerading as a landscape artist, or vice versa. His landscapes flow from a combination of memories, imagination and thumbnail sketches. He works his paint in layers, attentive more to the emotional detail of light and color than to pictorial detail. I've often felt there was a certain measure of darkness in McCarthy's paintings. Not in a negative way, more that his color choices tended to a light temperature suggesting the onset of evening tinged with melancholia. The previous works of his that I've seen were notable for their stands of slim, upright trees—vertical forms contrasting with the horizontal imagery of foreground, horizon and background.

But McCarthy's distinctive trees really appear in only two of these paintings. These works are different in a couple of ways: the general absence of the trees and the brightness of his colors. These are mostly views of wetlands, marshes seen in a gauzy sunlight. Even in a painting entitled "Evening Light," the sky is a roiling disturbance of pastel blue, yellow, green and gold. "Summer Wind," "All the Changes" and "Distant Thunder" trend strongly toward formalist abstraction, the notion of landscape just hinted at through an accumulation of horizontal applications of differing colors at the bottom of the canvas. Where his paintings in the past—those I'm familiar with, at least—suggested coolness, these works radiate luminous warmth.

Luminosity is also a characteristic of Rod Cook's photography. There are a lot of shadows in his prints, a mix of what he calls "botanicals" (flower, plant and fungi photos) and "moving landscapes." Despite the fact that these images are drenched in shadow, they gain their luminosity from Cook's use of platinum/palladium printing paper. Platinum/palladium prints have a warmth to them and that softness of tonal image plays well with Cook's photographic method.

With the "moving landscapes" all the shots were taken from a moving vehicle of some kind. That sense of motion imparts an almost charcoal blur to the images. In the case of the "botanicals," Cook moves in close to his subject, whether it's a mushroom, tulip or a thistle attracting a tiger swallowtail butterfly. With next to no depth of field—he's not using a macro lens—much of the image goes softly out of focus. In a photograph like "FP 57" of a tulip plant, the result looks almost like a perfectly realized graphite drawing. (Cook, who was gallery-sitting when I visited, told me that he does touch up his large contact negatives to emphasize some lines for dramatic effect.) There is an otherworldly beauty to many of these photographs. "FP 27" resembles a scene in outer space, the Big Bang or a distant nebula as photographed by the Hubble telescope.

Sunday afternoon opening at Kehler Liddell Gallery

Kehler Liddell Gallery
873 Whalley Ave., New Haven, (203) 389-9555
Scene/Seen: Photography by Rod Cook & Paintings by William McCarthy
Through Sept. 27, 2009
Artists Reception: Sun., Sept. 13, 3—6 p.m.

Press release

Scene/Seen is about the landscape observed and imagined. Rod Cook and William McCarthy are artists who throw open the notion of landscape and nature genre by evoking intimacy and recognition in their subject while balancing on the edge of other-worldly.

Rod Cook's photographs are an ethereal earthy documentation of the natural world. This exhibition features a selection of closely framed Botanicals—delicate, sensual and glowing with available light, mixed with a series of his "moving landscapes" shot from assorted vehicles in motion. All are printed in the rich tonalities of platinum palladium, sometimes appearing to have been rendered or hand tinted toward the slightly surreal.

William McCarthy paints "atmospheric landscapes". These too, are luminous and mysterious—trees against sky, field and river, subtle variations of light and atmosphere. And what would appear to be painted in the plein aire tradition is actually all comprised from memory, imagination and thumbnail sketches in a basement studio. Traditional techniques of cadmium red base, a quick sketch, and thin layers of oil color and glaze result in these imaginary landscapes, which contain an inner light and "speaks about spiritual places... an ethereal whisper of the places we see every day."

There will be an artists' reception on Sun., Sept. 13, from 3—6 p.m., featuring live music by cellist Julie Ribchinsky (5—6 p.m.) And meet the artists and join the conversation at the artists' talk on Wed., Sept. 16, at 7 p.m.