Anita Soos and Ken Lovell at Gallery 195; reception in September

Gallery 195
195 Church St., 4th floor (First Niagara Bank), New Haven, (203) 772-2788
Anita Soos and Ken Lovell
Jun. 18—Sept. 20, 2013.
Artists' Reception: Tues., Sept. 10, 5-7 p.m.

Press release from the Arts Council of Greater New Haven

The Arts Council of Greater New Haven presents an exhibition of works by Connecticut artists Anita Soos and Ken Lovell at Gallery 195. The exhibition will be on display during bank hours from June 18 to Sept. 20, 2013. An artists’ reception is scheduled for Tues., Sept. 10, from 5—7 p.m. The public is invited to attend and meet the artists at this closing reception.

Curated by Debbie Hesse, The Arts Council's director of artistic services & programs, the exhibit pairs the artists because both create abstract rhythms through the use of color, texture and pattern.

"While Anita Soos creates painterly prints that are atmospheric and reference the landscape, Ken Lovell, a digital painter, programs random elements from computer generated templates," Hesse said. "Both artists explore the balance of chance and choice, as dictated by the processes and materials inherent in their respective mediums."

Anita Soos graduated from Endicott College in 1968 and is the owner of Anita Soos Design, Inc., a Connecticut-based design company specializing in mail order, product development, greeting card design and advertising for a select group of clients.

Artwork by Anita Soos

In her artistic pursuits, Soos’ primary medium is paint, but also uses pastel, printmaking, drawing and mixed media. In her artist's statement, she says that she has created bodies of work based on the observations of water and photographic studies for the past 25 years.

"I am continually struck by the notion that the chaos in nature is perfectly ordered. The quality of light, the movement of the water, the time of day, low tide, high tide, wind, calm, sun, rain, clouds, storm. These all converge into a single moment that is singular, never to be repeated," Soos says..
Lovell received his MFA in painting from Yale University in 1992 and currently works at the institution as the technical director of the Digital Media Center for the Arts.

"My working method involves both digital means and traditional fine art concerns," Lovell explains in his artist’s statement. "Random elements and research material are programmatically combined using a digital collage technique of my creation. With these computer-generated templates as a starting point an image evolves, serially, with printed matter being altered by subjective physical performance. This mechanism of production allows elements of chance (the voice of the medium) to co-exist with painterly choices.".

Paper New England artspace (Hartford) opening reception Friday evening, May 6

Paper New England at Artspace
555 Asylum Ave., Hartford, 06103
The Digital Palette
Through May 28, 2011.
Opening reception: Fri., May 6, 6-9 p.m.

Press release

Paper New England presents The Digital Palette.

The Digital Palette presents a selection of prints created by artists who utilize digital technology in their creative process. This exhibit includes artists from a digital art community that is worldwide, yet connected with only a few keystrokes.

Just as the computer has enabled advances in virtually every technical field, it has also empowered artists to explore and visualize in ways that were unimaginable only a short time ago.

Digitally generated imagery encompasses a wide range of techniques, from digital painting created with virtual brushes, to fractal art generated by algorithmic calculations. It enables artists to mix media and techniques in unlimited ways.

As computers and software become more powerful, artists will employ an almost magical power in the virtual world. We’ve only begun to see the possibilities.

Artist include Thomas Demuth, Rich Hollant, Steven Huczek, James Knowles, Dorothy Krause, Karin Kuhlman, Bonnie Lhotka, Adam Martinakis, Cyd Miller, Kasahiko Nakamura, Alex Ruiz, Paul Selwyn, Hal Tenny, Bogdan Zwir and others.

The Digital Palette will be on view from May 2—28, 2011. An opening reception will be held on May 6, 6:—9 p.m.

Not to be myth-ed at the Hygienic

Hygienic Art Gallery
83 Bank St., P.O. Box 417, New London, (860) 443-8001
Myth Building
Through Sept. 6, 2008

Three New London-area artists—Richard Lee Martin, Elizabeth Larson and Christopher Kepple—are showing very different work in the Myth Building show at the Hygienic Art Gallery. The show closes this Saturday.

Richard Lee Martin, a New London resident who has long been active in the music and visual arts scene, is represented with visual poems. His appealing Surrealist montages are composed in Adobe Photoshop and printed direct to canvas, giving them a surface akin to painting. Martin builds his montages with a wealth of imagery drawn from his own personal photography, cultural detritus procured at thrift stores and yard sales and the treasure trove of the Library of Congress. (Martin believes that by putting the various images "in play" with other images out of their original context, his work meets "fair use" requirements.)

Martin takes iconic figures—cowboys, top-hatted plutocrats—and places them in visual fields, letting the juxtapositions spark metaphorical narratives. In one work, pictures of a baby (the daughter of a friend) hover over an image of the construction of the Library of Congress. Behind the mirrored images of the baby, hovers a planet-like sphere and a bird spreading its wings. The deep background is taken up by imagery of nebulae shot by the Hubble space telescope. Layers of symbolism parallel layers of imagery. The repository of past knowledge (the Library of Congress) awaits a newborn's curiosity. The specificity of one new life exists within the context of a vast cosmos.

In another piece, Martin counterposes an image of George Bush with a still of Allen Ginsberg and some Beat friends from the underground short film "Pull My Daisy": a symbol of Death versus, respectively, a symbol of Life. Martin's digital colors are lush, unreal, metallic. Futuristic but also earthy as in some shiny iridescent mineral.

Larson uses layering, also. But in her case, she layers drawing and painting with text and collage to deal with issues like racism, media, genocide and violence against women. "Lowercase A" is a harrowing confrontation with the experience of rape. The two-panel piece combines stark painted representations of anguished naked figures and a threatening phallic missile with a hand-written account of a rape and its aftermath and roughly collaged excerpts from a text on the psychological and emotional reactions of rape victims. The somewhat stilted nature of her figurative work just adds to the intrinsic tension of her subject matter.

Most of Christopher Kepple's pieces are abstract paintings on found and recycled surface. Kepple's works have a lot of visual energy but the compositions felt unfinished to me—that the multiplicity of marks didn't gel into a coherent whole.

Hello My Name is Gallery opening Saturday night

Hello My Name Is Gallery
838 Whalley Ave., Apt. 4, New Haven
More songs for the Broken Hearted: New paintings by Hannah Barnes and Craig Olson
Diode Therapy: New work by Paul Theriault
Sept. 6—28, 2008.
Opening reception: Sat., Sept. 6, 6:30—10 p.m.

Press release

Hello My Name is Gallery is pleased to announce two exhibitions opening on Sept. 6. In the first floor gallery Hello presents new paintings by Hannah Barnes and Craig Olson. The exhibition, titled More Songs for the Broken Hearted, presents new paintings that explore the communicative inadequacy, specificity and transcendence of language and form.

Craig Olson creates paintings that use reference points to topography, landscape painting and op art in a dizzying combination that at once attracts and repels the viewer into distant lands and strange voids. In "Border Beneath the Sun," Olson sets up an optically shifting pattern of black and white lines that barely conceals an ephemeral, ominous mist of primary reds and blues. These two conflicting zones present opposing form languages that echo the myriad contradictory ways we organize and define the way we see the world around us.

Barnes' work uses forms culled from memory and specific experiences to craft paintings that are, as Barnes' put it, "objects with lives, accumulations of being and becoming." Barnes' work springs from the sense of loss and heartache that arises from a sense of geographic displacement. In Barnes' paintings everywhere is nowhere, and nowhere is everywhere.

Upstairs, in the second floor gallery, Hello presents Diode Therapy, a new exhibition of sculptures and digital prints by Paul Theriault. Paul Theriault's work uses a variety of sources and materials to reflect the ephemerality of information and virtual space. In "Black and Light," Theriault takes a now common source of information—digital images—and reduces it to its core. The end result is a textured void of pixels that howls like an old dial-up modem.

More songs for the Broken Hearted: New paintings by Hannah Barnes and Craig Olson and Diode Therapy: New work by Paul Theriault will both be on view from Sept. 6—Sept. 28. There will be an opening reception on Sept. 6 from 6:30 to 10:30 p.m. Hello My Name is Gallery is open Mon—Sat. by appointment, and Sunday from 12—4 p.m. For directions and more information please visit Hello My Name is Gallery.

Our opening is partnered with a music event downstairs, which begins at 7 p.m. ArLoW presents a performance by Welcome, a three-piece electropop group from New Haven. Visit Welcome's Web site for more information. Also taking place that night is the world premiere performance of London-based composer Adam Delacour's (Web) piece "Game-Hate Box" for solo vocalist with DVD accompaniment. The piece will be performed by New Haven vocalist Anne Rhodes (Web). For more information about music at ArLoW, please contact Adam Kubota at adam.kubota [AT] gmail.com