​The current exhibit at Five Point is an encounter with the inner workings of the artist—with emotion, personal history, and instability. The three artists—Gus Mazzocca Prints in the West Gallery, Zahra Nazari Remnants in the East Gallery, and Jason Werner Hope/Hopeless in the TDP Gallery—all present the personal as public, and share the artist’s personal narrative through image. During the artist talk on October 6th, Mazzocca and Werner expanded on ideas of interior spaces, chaos, fracturing, and juxtaposition:

​Mazzocca’s work in the West Gallery span his career—from black and white prints, to mixed media and digital work. In describing his process, Mazzocca says that his latest pieces, a series of mixed media self portraits about his relationship to the body, start as a screen print, to which he adds information, such as lipstick and stickers. In this, the prints become “body alterations,” like surgery, but they also become autobiography—his son is in the medical field. This personal iconography continues in a second series of prints in the show, in which he uses his daughter’s experience in Haiti as inspiration. These prints begin as digital photos, and then are layered with silkscreen prints. This interweaving of various narrative elements and layers of media are autobiographical, yet straightforward—the colors draw you in, while the layers keep you investigating each piece to assemble a meaning.

​Werner describes his work in Hope/Hopeless as paintings that “had to happen.” We the viewer are “looking out” from amongst brambles, braches, and darkness to a place that we’re unsure about—a place that looks like a landscape, like hope. Interestingly, Werner says that rather than looking out to a hopeful place, for him, he is looking back over his shoulder at this place, and going into the chaos, rather than away. Werner says this light space within his dark compositions are there as a beacon for the viewer to hold onto amidst an overload of information. He describes wanting to create a painting that was completely dark, but failing, and instead ending up “keeping a spark alive in the darkness.” This dichotomy of light and dark creates a tension between hope, and hopelessness, between feeling like we are engulfed in the darkness, and discovering our escape.

Nazari’s work is inspired by the juxtapositions between Iran’s ancient architecture, and America’s postmodernist architecture. As an immigrant, her move to the United States has been significant in her work. Instability is also a part of her work: “I have always felt instability in my life: First, my youth in Iran, growing up with war. Now, as an Iranian immigrant in the United States, political conflicts and social constraints plague my mind and influence my art.” The idea of structure and chaos is present in her work, with fractured forms and ambiguous spaces that seem to move. 

​Be sure to see these exciting works in person this Sunday, October 15, along with a solo violin performance by Katie Hyun, playing works from Bach to Bartok. The event, “A Celebration of Music and the Visual Arts” is a collaboration event between Five Points Gallery and the Maxwell Shepherd Memorial Arts Fund Concert Series, and will begin at 4:00 PM. Ms. Hyun has appeared as soloist with the Houston Symphony orchestra, the Dallas Chamber Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra, amongst others. She has appeared with Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in New York City and was the winner of Astral's 2016 National auditions. She has recently been appointed concertmaster of Trinity Wall Street Church's "Novus New York", a resident contemporary music orchestra. This concert is open to the public and free of charge.

​Five Points Gallery’s current exhibit features the work of Robin Tost in the TDP Gallery with “DisComforters”, Jackie Branson in the East Gallery with “Habitual Demeanor”, and Adam Viens and Peter Waite in the West Gallery with “Abstraction/Representation.” Each artist is engaged in a range of materials and is concerned with a different set of questions. For Robin, the contradiction lies in the juxtaposition inherent in metal quilts—in the combination of hard metal with the traditionally soft medium of quilting. For Jackie, a similar contradiction of medium and form emerges in balls made of saws, in the contrast between hard and soft, masculine and feminine. Meanwhile, Adam juxtaposes the intellectual with the physical, the material landscape of found objects with the intellectual or philosophical, and the left brained hemisphere of mathematical equations with the right brained visual language of art. Finally, Peter Waite’s quiet, neutral interiors are at once familiar and distant, his technical facility with paint interrupted by fluorescent bands of paint that contrast with the haunting and mysterious spaces.

“Metal Quilts—Quilts for Sale”
 
Robin’s metal quilts began after bike trips through Massachusetts and Vermont. Along the route, she noticed many closed factories, which resulted in a loss of jobs and income. She also noticed the signs “Quilts for Sale,” which inspired the combination of waste material with the “feminine” art of quilting. Robin uses found colored metal from automotive pieces, signage, gutters, and other industrial scraps, cuts them by hand, and sews them together with colored wires. 

“Work with what you know and are interested in.”
 
Jackie’s work plays with the contrast between the visual and the tactile, hard and soft, masculine and feminine. Her work involves finding the feminine in the pattern of a saw blade, a traditionally “masculine” object. Robin draws on her Armenian heritage and the significance of carpet to “inspire through patterns and shapes, and to symbolize identity, domesticity, femininity and security, examining and questioning those characteristics along the way.” She uses carpet and other common materials to represent her everyday life, “in the same way certain patterns, styles and colors represent the weaver of an oriental carpet.” These objects create a movement between masculine and feminine, hard and soft. 

​“The universality of human experience.”
 
Adam Viens work uses raw materials to create metaphors that discuss psychological and philosophical questions. He combines the visual language of imagery with the symbolic language of mathematics—two ways of making sense of and quantifying the world. About his process of finding materials, Adam says that some materials inspire certain pieces when he finds them, while sometimes the work dictates what materials he uses. About his work he says, “much like the interpretation of a dream, one must first find their bearings in order for relationships, themes, and motifs to become apparent. If one attempts to greedily ascertain meaning in a glance they will be left with only the stale taste of formalism.” The layers of material become a metaphor for relationships to the surrounding world, in an attempt to transcend the mundane function of the object by transforming it into a visual language. Thus, a tension exists between the physicality of the materials, and the esoteric realm of meaning that emerges from their combining. 

​“My goal has always been to make the known, unknown and the ordinary, extraordinary.”
 
Peter Waite’s work presents the viewer with a space both familiar and yet haunting. His spaces are mysterious and quiet, and evoke both personal and social memory. He says the viewer may not have seen the specific space that he paints, but might have encountered a similar space in their life. Peter has been painting these large scale paintings for over 25 years. They are real visits to real places, and “sites of the built environment that embody public sentiment or ideological concerns.” The absence of the figure in his work is intentional: “I have intentionally omitted the figure from the representation to emphasize the viewer’s participation as witness to the moment of perceiving, then remembering, these architectural spaces.”
A seemingly contrasting or contradictory element in his paintings is the fluorescent paint, which ultimately speaks of layers of perception and experience and introduces movement into the stillness of the scene. Waite also describes fluorescent as the 21st century color, as if these paintings are a memorial to the changing spaces around us.

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The Five Points Gallery/ Hartford Art School, University of Hartford Launchpad studios are up and running! These studios are designed to provide affordable workspaces to emerging artists and recent graduates of the Hartford Art School. The sixteen artists share the studios for $65 a month for two years, granting them the time, space, and community to launch their careers as professional artists. This month, we feature six of our Launchpad artists: Amy Ozga, Keri Halloran, Krista Narciso, Molly Jacobs, Sydney Morris, and Tara Nugent. Read on to learn about their inspiration, current work and exhibitions, and plans for their time in the Launchpad.
 
In addition, on June 23, along with the opening reception of Five Points Gallery’s next exhibit, featuring the work of Adam Viens, Peter Waite, Jackie Branson, and Robin Tost, the Launchpad will host an open studio event, free and open to the public, from 6-9. Come see what these artists have been working on!
 
Check out the Launchpad on Facebook and Instagram.
 
Amy Ozga
​

Amy Ozga is a working class artist from Bristol, CT. She received her BFA from University of Hartford’s Hartford Art School in 2017. Amy currently works in a wide range of collage and printmaking techniques and has more recently been creating installations that include her prints, handmade cardboard frames, and middle class objects. Her art reflects her working class upbringing, and a tension between intellect and blue-collar ideologies by incorporating her family history, found imagery and scrap materials. Amy’s ultimate artistic goal is to create a place in the high-art realm for working class “common folk.” She wishes to dutifully represent a population that often does not have a presence in the professional art world. Amy wishes to celebrate the significance of the average, working class lifestyle and find preciousness what most call mundane.
 
The Five Points’ Launchpad Studio initiative has benefitted Amy by allowing her to continue to grow as an artist not only through providing her a physical workspace, but also supplying her with a supportive artist community. As a recent graduate, she values the opportunity to already make connections with other emerging and professional artists outside of a university setting. Amy also feels that the Historic Downtown Torrington location of her studio inspires and aligns with her current artistic vision.
 
Instagram: @amyhotpocketozga


Keri Halloran

​Keri Halloran is a recent graduate of the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford in 2017 with a BFA in Photography. The Five Points Gallery Launchpad space allows her to keep pushing herself into the fine art world. While at Hartford Art School, she exhibited in student and emerging artist exhibitions. Her current work is created with color film and digital medias, often combining them in her photography. Halloran’s work aims to show her unique notions around the ideas of sight and seeing into a cohesive series of images. Her wide range of work varies from architectural photography focusing on light to abstracted self portraits created in a lighting studio. She is currently completing two series created at HAS while brainstorming a new body of work. Her most recent exhibition was in the CT+6 group show at the West Hartford Art League.


Krista Narciso 
​

Krista Narciso is from Watertown, CT and graduated from Hartford Art School with a BFA in Printmaking in 2015. She works across the media of drawing, printmaking, and book arts. Her current work focuses on creating an immersive experience through installation, which allows her to embrace the idea of the multiple in printmaking, often assembling many prints and drawings in a space to create a single installation work.
 
Artist Statement:
 
My earliest memory is running between the rows of tomato plants in my grandfather’s garden. The plants were taller than me and the garden seemed never-ending; fleshy green leaves extended in every direction, their shadows cast on the ground below my feet. This memory becomes more vivid in time, while others fade or vanish completely.
 
There is a physical absence now where the garden once was. When I am making my work, I am present in the memory – running between the rows in the garden – again. It starts with noticing. Noticing quietly fading shadows. Noticing the crawling growth and somehow serene decay of flora. Noticing leaves cast away from a tree, no longer grounded.
 
I notice, and record. When I record, whether in drawing or in print, I create a memory of a particular place at a particular instant in time. My work gives permanence to an ephemeral moment in the face of its inherent impermanence. It allows the essence of that moment to exist in the present again as memory, despite the reality of its absence.
 
Instagram: @kristanar
Website: kristanarciso.com


Molly Jacobs

Molly grew up in Granby, Connecticut and graduated with a BFA from the Hartford Art School this past May. She currently works primarily in charcoal, pen and ink, and a variety of printmaking processes. She loves working with the human figure and other organic subjects, and finds inspiration in studying drawing, activism, and the details of her own experiences. As a new graduate, she’s searching for a more consistent direction for her work. In an effort to study her broad creative interests, she is currently working on a series of drawings about different interactions in her life in the hopes of developing a routine for recording what inspires her. Molly is very excited to settle into the Launchpad space and to be a part of the Launchpad community. She anticipates that the energy and opportunities available through the Launchpad will help her pursue her passion.
 
Instagram: @mollymollyja
Website: www.molly-jacobs.com
 
 
Sydney Morris

Sydney Morris is a fine art photographer and multimedia designer living and working in Hartford, Connecticut. Born and raised in Wethersfield, Sydney first picked up a camera at the age of 16 and never put it down. She attended the Fashion Institute of Technology for two years before transferring to University of Hartford’s Hartford Art School where she received her Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in 2015. Her medium of choice is alternative process photography or a camera-less medium. Currently, she is working on an alternative process called Chemigrams. By using resists (anything that will adhere to light sensitive photographic paper) the image will develop at different times as the resist washes away, creating a layering effect. Within this process she uses honey resists to create grids, which explore differing perspectives. 
 
Instagram: @squidneymorris 
Website: www.sydneymorrisphotography.com
 
​
Tara Nugent

Tara Nugent is a photographer from Kent, Connecticut. Between the darkroom in the basement of her childhood home and her mother's collection of photo books, Tara's fascination with the art of photography was inevitable from a young age. For as long as she can remember, Tara has used photography as an attempt to preserve and make sense of the ever fleeting world around her. The idea of what something once was, now potentially disregarded or forgotten, has led Tara to develop her main body of work: The Presence of Absence.  
 
Tara Nugent received her Associates in Liberal Arts from Northwestern Connecticut Community College in 2012. She then transferred to the University of Hartford in 2013 to study photography. She received her BFA in photography in 2016. While attending the Hartford Art School, Tara worked primarily in 4x5 black and white film her junior year, then moving on to medium format color film for her senior thesis. 
 
Upon graduating, Tara now considers herself to be a hybrid photographer, working with both medium format film and digital. She works as a freelance photographer but also works as an assistant to three different artists. Her long-term goal as an artist is to make a book of her work that conceptualizes a melancholic examination of the past, present and future. 
 
Being a Launchpad artist has benefitted Tara in many ways. Not only is she grateful to be surrounded by other inspiring artists whom she studied with at HAS, but now she has access to a printer and scanner for the first time since graduating. This has allowed Tara to be able to print her work so that she can visualize what it will eventually look like in book form. This has also given Tara the opportunity to be able to apply to various exhibitions in hopes of showing her work. To get a glimpse of Tara's vision, you can visit her website at HOME



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Located in a historic downtown building, Five Points Gallery (FPG) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit contemporary art gallery showcasing professional regional, national and international visual artists. The gallery presents exhibitions in three beautifully renovated exhibition spaces, and has earned the reputation as one of Connecticut’s outstanding contemporary art venues. 

An Interview with Pat Carrigan and Cat Balco
​
Five Points Gallery’s April exhibit featured the work of three artists: Patricia Carrigan, Cat Balco, and Eva Stengade. The show ran from March 30 through May 6, 2017. This month, Pat and Cat answer questions about their process, the role of scale in their work, how they became an artist, and the impact they want to create through their work.
 
Q: Was there a moment in time when you decided you wanted to be an artist, or was it something that you realized over a period of time?
 
Pat: I always drew; I was always good at art. When I had problems in my family, drawing was always a place I could go to. But the attitude of my family was to make a living, so I became a teacher. I fell into art because I loved doing it so much; it took over.
 
Cat: I decided to major in art in college, but then I abandoned it because I was always unhappy in the studio. But at 27 something shifted, and I decided to become an artist.
 
Q: What excites you most about making art?
 
Pat: What excites me about art is the process of painting. I like moving paint around and not knowing where it’s going—blindly trusting the process as it goes along. Color, mixing colors, mark making, drawing—those are all important. Just being able to do this.
 
Cat: Art is a place where I feel most at home, where I feel most myself. I have such a gratitude for the art process, and it deepens as I get older.
 
Q: What role does scale play in your current work?
 
Pat: I have painted really large, but right now I’m in a small studio—my garage. That does dictate how far back I can get from what I’m painting. I think about scale with the faces and heads. When you stand in front of the heads, you’re immersed in an environment. You have to look at it. The fact that they’re square, they’re even on all four sides. The reason the drawings are so small is because I’ll do a drawing a day, 15 minutes. I don’t spend too much time ruminating on them, before moving on to something else.
 
Cat: I usually work pretty large. But this current series emerged from short blocks of time in the studio. I sat down and started working. I was attracted to the beautiful color, the flat matte texture of the mark, the spontaneous, clarity of stroke. With these works, I can’t work much larger without changing materials. So I thought: why not make small paintings? I have plans to go back to the larger work, and I think this series will change how I approach that work.
 
Q: What are your primary influences for creating your current work?
 
Pat: For this body of work: storytelling, folklore, saints and symbols. Symbols, or little objects that stand in for a person. I like symbols.
 
Cat: As an abstract artist, there isn’t anything specific that influences my work—but I like to think about what my work has to do with what my mind is on at the moment of making it. So in that way they’re about my shifting consciousness—a new awareness of the world in light of the current political climate. This work began to remind me of stop signs, or caution signs.
 
Q: Are there any artists who have always inspired you?
 
Pat: My standby artists are Richard Diebenkorn, Francis Bacon, Joan Mitchell, Ann Hamilton, Marlene Dumas, and Dana Schultz. I’m also really influenced by short story writing. I read a lot. The work of Flannery O’Conner is especially inspiring to me. I had a residency at Vermont Studio Center, and the poets I met there really changed my thinking about the relationship between art and poetry.
 
Cat: So many. And I’m inspired by different artists at different times, for different reasons. I like Stephanie McMahon for the lightness and spontaneity in her paintings. And of course Richard Tuttle. I would like to have that kind of conviction in my work.
 
Q: Do you work on one piece at a time, or multiple pieces at once?
 
Pat: Multiple. They kind of evolve together.
 
Cat: I work on two at a time. This accounts for drying time, but they also begin to influence each other, and how you read them. They form a relationship, but it’s not conscious.
 
Q: Do you work in a series? How do you know when a series of work is done, and when it’s time to transition to the next body of work?
 
Pat: I do, I stretch them all ahead of time. I work on a piece for an hour at a time. I learn off of each canvas. I only spend an hour on each one because I have a tendency to overwork. There are more in the series than in the show. I hate the feeling of being between series, and that’s kind of where I am now with my work.
 
Cat: The artificial deadlines of shows or applications determine the number of pieces. I unconsciously have a number of paintings for each project. When I’m shifting to a new body of work, it’s more about experimentation, about searching versus getting ready for a show.
 
Q: Is there something you wrestle with in your artwork, or find yourself constantly coming back to or contending with?
 
Pat: How much realistic or recognizable imagery to include—what level to go to with that. My work is not realistic. It has recognizable parts, and abstract parts. It’s like when a memory comes to your head, or when something drifts into your consciousness. Some aspects are clear and some are not. I’m fighting to not give the viewer too much information, to give them the essence of the image. They can come to a painting, and decide what to take from it. I’m always wrestling with that.
 
Cat: In my forms and compositions I’m continually drawn to symmetry. It’s a more prehistoric, non-western, central form that’s fascinating to me.
 
Q: What do you hope people take away from your work?
 
Pat: To have a connection. Because the colors in my paintings are so bright, and because they’re not painted in a realistic way, my paintings are confrontations. They’re there and you have to see them. By painting them with those really bright colors, you can’t miss them; you’re drawn in and you can’t look away. It’s always fascinating to me what people get out of my work; they always get something different.
 
Cat: Joy. I want them to take away a sense of liveliness, a sense of light. A new consciousness. 

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​April 22 Launch Party
 
On April 22, Five Points Gallery’s board of directors hosted a “Launch Party” for the FPG-HAS/UofH Launchpad Program. The event was sponsored by ECI Screenprint Inc. and featured a reception in the gallery, with speeches from FPG executive director Judith McElhone, President of the Board Ed Cook, Torrington Mayor Elinor Carbone, and Hartford Art School Associate Dean Tom Bradley. The Launchpad is unlike any opportunity in the country, speakers said: offering affordable studio space, a mentorship program, a serious artist community, and a Five Points biennial exhibition opportunity.
 
Launchpad artists met and talked with guests before welcoming board members and attendees into their studios for a tour. Guests had the opportunity to see what an artist studio is all about—to ask questions, see artwork in process, and learn about how having an affordable studio space, with ample natural light, and a community of peers is essential to continuing an artistic practice. 

 
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Located in a historic downtown building, Five Points Gallery (FPG) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit contemporary art gallery showcasing professional regional, national and international visual artists. The gallery presents exhibitions in three beautifully renovated exhibition spaces, and has earned the reputation as one of Connecticut’s outstanding contemporary art venues. 
​

​Five Points Gallery’s second exhibit of the year featured artists working in abstraction, and asked the question, “What does abstraction mean in the 21st century?” Personal Territories, in the West Gallery, included works by artists Lawrence Baker, Jacob Cullers, Nancy Daubenspeck, Jeanne Heifetz, Christopher Manning, Amber Schlatter, and Amy Vensel, while the East Gallery featured Tim Prentice, and the TDP Gallery, Edith Skiba LaMonica. Looking at the connection between the works, one could find a similar exploration of media and form, themes of change, and a questioning of the relationships between objects, pieces, and our human role in the environment, whether physical or digital.
​
So what exactly is abstraction in the 21st century? A collection of fragments, of pieces searching for relation? An inner journey, a quest to discover one’s relation to the world? An expression of emotion? Or, is it purely aesthetic? Viewing this exhibition, one could argue it is perhaps all, and more.

​Lawrence Baker’s is interested in the aesthetic of combined elements. About his work, Baker says, “painting is a reflexive, mental process of synthesizing an idea; transforming the abstract into the visual realm of the concrete.”

​During the artist talk on March 10th, Cullers described painting as an “excavation of self,” and a process of “construct, deconstruct, reconstruct.” Perhaps Cullers’ reason for making work can best be summed up in the phrase “#paintordie.” 

​Nancy’s almost mathematical pieces use X and points as minimal marks to evoke an idea of containment—how the field of marks can reveal and conceal different layers. They are luminous, meditative, orderly, and intimate. 

​Jeanne’s work is her forced confrontation with something terrifying—“the universal human drive to create beauty and order and ritual in the face of our own mortality.”

​Christopher Manning’s work uses storytelling and also explores ideas of change, connection, contemplation, and aesthetics. “We exist in a state of flux. My work contemplates that balance.”

​Uncertainty. Not knowing. The ‘unknown.’ What does it mean to take a risk? Schlatter’s work contemplates the various ways change can be both something to adapt to, and something to fear. 

Vensel’s work considers relationships, timing, and the randomness of life and the backlit landscape of social media, where photos of friends’ children coexist in the same space as political posts and horrifying news stories. About her work, she says:
 
“Using concrete trowels, large knives and rubber squeegees, I swirl, drag and scrape acrylic paint in taped-off sections on the canvas. Each section progresses at a different rate and accumulates its own particular history of marks and textures. And like events in life, these parts may relate to or interrupt each other.”

​In the East Gallery, Tim Prentice’s Gone with the Wind featured kinetic sculptures that stirred in the wind created by viewers walking by, movements that cast dancing shadows on the gallery walls, shadows that almost became their own artworks, even as they were a part of the sculpture. Prentice tries to concentrate on the movement, rather than the object created. From his statement:
 
“The engineer in me wants to minimize friction to make the air visible.
The architect studies matters of scale and proportion
The sailor wants to know the strength and direction of the wind.
The artist wants to understand its changing shape. Meanwhile the child wants to play.”

In the TDP Gallery, Edith Skiba LaMonica’s Elemental Rhythms immersed the viewer in an environment inspired by her observations of the woodland pond behind her studio. She’s interested in combining realistic and abstract elements to create a sense of something that is both familiar and mysterious. She’s also interested in changes that happen in the environment, and how “wild crowding plants, water and sky entwine, confounding the real and the illusory.”
 
The current exhibit, our third of the year, features Petricia Carrigan’s Headlands in the West Gallery, Eva Stengade”s Diversity—Speed Inside in the East Gallery, and Cat Balco’s Watch Your Step! in the TDP Gallery. The exhibit opened on Friday, March 31. The artist talk is Friday, April 21, at 6 PM. 
                 
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Located in a historic downtown building, Five Points Gallery (FPG) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit contemporary art gallery showcasing professional regional, national and international visual artists. The gallery presents exhibitions in three beautifully renovated exhibition spaces, and has earned the reputation as one of Connecticut’s outstanding contemporary art venues.