Roberta Friedman show opens Sunday at City Gallery in New Haven

City Gallery
994 State St., New Haven, (203) 782-2489
Roberta Friedman: Embedded
Oct. 3—27, 2013.
Opening Reception: Sun., Oct. 6, 2—5 p.m.

Press release from City Gallery

Roberta Friedman, a member of City Gallery, 994 State Street, New Haven, CT., presents Embedded, new work of multimedia collages and encaustics, from Oct. 3—27, 2013. The opening reception is on Sun., Oct. 6, from 2—5 p.m. On Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 12 and 13, City Gallery hours will be extended to 5 p.m., as a participant in City Wide Open Studios.

Roberta Friedman: "Escape"

Friedman's watercolor and wax enhanced collages transform papers and natural elements into embedded layered paintings that explore and celebrate the wondrous unpredictability of water-based media infused with the intense colors of wax and oil based pigments. Friedman's bias remains her unending fascination with the natural layering of the landscape—its grandeur and its serenity—and her continued quest to re-imagine those layers, through textures, light and color. She has introduced both hot and cold wax techniques into her layering process.

Opening reception at Reynolds Fine Art in New Haven Friday evening

Reynolds Fine Art
96 Orange St., New Haven, (203) 498-2200
Robert Reynolds & Mary Black
Oct. 5—27, 2012.
Opening Reception: Fri., Oct. 5, 5—8 p.m.

Press release from Reynolds Fine Art

Reynolds Fine Art is pleased to present a two-person exhibition featuring Mary Black, a California native, in her debut at the gallery, along side new work by Robert Reynolds.

Mary Black's primary concerns in her approach to art making have always been directed toward process, surface, and materials. Painting exclusively in encaustic paint for over a decade, Black has mastered an often unruly medium. Encaustic paint, a material comprised of wax, pigment, and dammar resin, that is heated and fused, is very difficult to control. The artist's relationship with this hot wax, however, is fluid and intuitive. She openly embraces the challenges that occur in the creation of a wide spectrum of surfaces, from flat and transparent, to dense and scarred.

Though Black has limited control over her material—it is her intention to trust her body's response to the medium—her work is a reflection of her interest in Jungian psychology, duality, and the unconscious mind. When viewed as a group, the array of oppositions in each piece, whether it is color, texture, or light and shadow, are ultimately attracted to each other like magnets to form a solid union. Black has said of her work, "There is a very destructive aspect to my work, as it is only through the process of destruction and creation that I am able to build the layered, raw surfaces I am attracted to...It's about creating chaos, organizing chaos, giving into unplanned responses, and then letting go of my intentions."

Robert Reynolds, the gallery owner and namesake, will be exhibiting a new series of work. Deriving from a collection of sketches made over the past twenty years, Reynolds has taken a bare bones approach to painting as a method of sorting through living. These minimalistic, abstracted oils on linen are documents of fragmented memories and disjointed pieces of time. Much like cut up negatives on a light box, each canvas is a vaguely remembered still frame from the artist's past.

This opening event will coincide with the Ninth Square first Friday event Create on 9, during which Mary Black, who will have flown from California to be with us at the event, will be available in the gallery to speak about her encaustic process. Additionally, this is the opening weekend of City-Wide Open Studios. Join us on Saturday as Robert Reynolds paints outside the gallery throughout the day.

Saturday opening at City Gallery in New Haven

City Gallery
994 State St., New Haven, (203) 782-2489
Freddi Elton: Lines of Desire
June 3—27, 2010.
Opening reception: Sat., June 5, 3—6 p.m.

Press release

City Gallery will present Lines of Desire, a collection of new work by Freddi Elton, from June 3—27. Elton will be showing encaustic, silk aquatint and mixed media pieces. The opening reception will be held on Sat., June 5, from 3—6 pm. The public is invited and admission is free. There will also be a Meet the Artist on Sunday, June 27 from 12—4 pm.

The title, Lines of Desire is a landscaping term describing the preferred path when progressing from point "A" to point "B". Often designers of college greens, for example, will simply plant grass and watch to see how paths are formed by walkers before laying in any stone or pavement. In winter, we see animal tracks clearly formed in the snow, and they are never completely straight, but rather follow the landscape's vagaries in an organic way.

Elton was inspired by this concept in her current work. She has created pieces with layered, complex surfaces, and made an effort to allow lines to follow their own particular geography. Her process is slow and sometimes arduous, but the results are, when successful, surprising and satisfying.

Silvermine September exhibits open Sunday

Silvermine Guild Art Center
1037 Silvermine Rd., New Canaan, (203) 966-9700
September Exhibits at Silvermine
Through Oct. 1, 2009
Opening Reception: Sun., Sept. 13, 4—6 p.m.

Press release

The fall exhibits at the Silvermine Guild Arts Center, located in New Canaan, CT brings a range of works that will spark interest for all art lovers and collectors. Opening Sept. 6 and running through Oct. 1, the show will feature new works by Silvermine Guild Artist members Gerald Saladyga, Jeanine Esposito, Nash Hyon and Director's Choice with Janice Mauro and Joanne Pagano. All are welcomed to the opening reception on Sunday Sept. 13 from 4—6 p.m.

The Director's Choice exhibit The Tidal Decade is a collaborative effort by artists Janice Mauro and Joanne Pagano. Through the construction of artifacts for an imaginary society future's past, the artist duo creates a world that draws us into a place outside of time. A place which hauntingly reveals the possibilities that lie on the edge of present day man's misuse of science and technology. In the remote mountaintop caves the ancestors of this imaginary society not only have endured the ending of humanoid civilization but created art that just may be a testament to their ordeal. The Tidal Decade exhibition opens in collaboration with the Williamsburg Art Gallery Association, at Art 101 located in Brooklyn, New York, opening on Sept. 11.

Janice Mauro, from Redding, teaches figurative sculpture at the Silvermine School of Art in Connecticut and the Art School at Old Church in New Jersey. Her award winning sculpture has been exhibited in New York at The National Sculpture Society, Lever House, and the Inter Church Center, as well as at City Without Walls and the Meadowlands Center for the Arts both in New Jersey. Mauro's museum exhibits include the National Academy of Design Annual Exhibition in New York, the Paterson Museum, NJ, and in Connecticut at the Discovery Museum, the Mattatuck Museum, and the New Britain Museum of American Art. Ms. Mauro is a sculptor member of the National Sculpture Society and member of the Silvermine Guild of Artists.

Joanne Pagano is an artist, writer, and performer residing in Sunnyside, New York. She has designed and collaborated on numerous sets for the long-running Alternative New Years Day Spoken Word/Performance Extravaganza. As a member of The No Chance Ensemble, a troupe of writer/performers that she also directs, she has brought multimedia interpretations to such venues as St. Marks's Poetry Project, Dixon Place, The Bowery Poetry Club, and The Knitting Factory. Joanne Pagano Weber exhibits at Art 101 in Brooklyn, NY.

In his new works Landscapes After the Battle, Gerald Saladyga's investigative intensity brings together a variety of scientific and political source material to create multi-layered "landscape" paintings that astound the viewer with their bold colors and spurs contemplation of the tragic results of man's devices. For this New Haven artist, "representing landscape is a very important part of my work. But I see landscape painting not as a romantic representation of the past, but as an ongoing inspiration of an ever-changing environment challenged by urban sprawl, pollution, industrialization, victimization and conflict." His approach is different in that this artist prefers the fantasy underlying the reality to bring the viewer in with color, form and texture and then let him go with a sense of unease that there is something wrong and it's just below the surface.

Jeanine Esposito is a sculptor and installation artist who creates conceptual works using an unusual combination of paper pulps, textiles and found materials. She has had several solo shows and her work has been chosen for over 25 juried shows throughout the Northeast, and has won several awards. Her new one-person show, Daily Shower, explores the fragmentation of how life is actually lived. According to the artist, who lives in Westport, "No matter what events, joyful or catastrophic, or what situations or states of mind we are in, all of it is lived in one day increments." Through conceptual installations, the works in this exhibit takes every day discarded and overlooked materials and transforms them into meditative compositions exploring this fragmentation. The works reflect upon the emotional and psychological nuances of everyday life.

Working primarily with encaustics in her exhibit Convergence, Wilton artist Nash Hyon explores the connection between man, nature, beauty, art and science, and above all, what it means to be human. The meticulous process of melting, layering and scraping give Hyon's pieces an almost archaeological feel with depth and substance, a sense of history, and how even the sharpest remembered experiences gradually fade with the passage of time. She combines the raw materials of an artist—paint, paper, graphite—with a passion for every aspect of human culture, mixing concepts in science and medicine with striking symbolic imagery, thereby transforming them into timeless, emotionally evocative works of art.