December 6, 2019 - January 18, 2020
Opening Reception: December 6, 2019, 6-8:30 p.m.
Artists' Panel Discussion: Friday, January 10th, 6:30 p.m. | Moderated by: Jackie Branson
Special Event: Tom Zetterstrom Tour & Talk: Saturday, December 14th, 4:00 - 5:30 p.m.
(Click here to watch Tom Zetterstrom's artist talk)
Kindly Sponsored by:
The Seidel and Carroll Families
West Gallery:
Tom Zetterstrom | Homage to Ice and Snow: vintage silver prints from three portfolios
Coast Oak
Vintage Silver print, 1991 |
Artist Statement
Photography is a good way to learn to see and become more alert to one’s surroundings. Photographing in black and white, involves thinking in black and white, and exposing film only adds to the intensity of the experience. In this Homage to Ice and Snow, we see these seasonal elements enhancing the white layer, which helps diminish the background noise, isolate the subject, and further increase our focus. In selections from White Russia, the novelty of the December, 1973 experience is further amplified by the cold white blanket, bringing forth the delicate, if conforming, human figures. The group of Pedestrians becomes as one while that sweep of motion further affects how we perceive the subject as a uniform group. It also anticipates the work about to be conceived. Motion in still photography dominated my work for two decades, and also emerged as a way of seeing the surrounding landscape through the lens of the car-camera. I was initially coerced into action by transportation proposals for a network of Super Highways throughout Northwest Connecticut, and through my garden. I fought these with didactic color slide shows at the State Capitol and elsewhere, and once defeated, transferred this acquired way of seeing back to black and white, resulting in what has been called an “aggressively subjective” set of cinematic stills, named the Moving Point of View. Portraits of American Trees has its roots during that same time period and continues today in various exhibitions, projects and lectures. By contrast to the motion, these Trees are true “stills” from all seasons, though Winter dominates in this exhibition and functions as a mechanism to improve focus. Each tree is captured “at the moment they noticed the camera,” according to critic, Michael Brenson. The other moment in time, really an era that has largely passed in our native woodlands, is the beauty of the pre-invasive landscape which in recent decades is becoming progressively entangled, clogged and displaced by alien plants, pulling down the old order of classical succession. |
East Gallery:
Wayne Herpich | A Game
Wayne Herpich | A Game
No. 3
Oil on Un-streteched Canvas 118" x 48" |
Artist Statement
I turned to drawing lines to get away from the unwanted pressure of the chairman of the graduate program as Yale, It stood me in good stead and also pointed to sculpture. I draw all over the canvas and fill in what pleases me. I think the work would make sense as a great room divider with the painting standing on its own. The scroll dimensions are 108 in x 48 in. The black is latex enamel paint, and the colors are oil paint. |
TDP Gallery:
Terry Donsen Feder |Ways of Representation
Terry Donsen Feder |Ways of Representation
Oranges 1
Oil on Zinc, 22" x 20 |
Artist Statement
The first series - Deconstructing Kandinsky. The Kandinsky series came about because of my teaching the effects of diagonal lines in my design classes, always using Kandinsky’s Composition VIII as one example. To understand his piece better, I decided to draw it for myself, leaving out the color except the color of the background, focusing on the lines. Then I did blowups of areas of the painting, this time using color. Then I isolated the circles in the composition, using their particular colors but rounding them to the illusion of three dimensionality (buttons). Finally, given the pictographs in Kandinsky’s work as well as the the ideas he expressed in his writings, I looked for a Russian artist who was making paintings of turbulent seas, but in a more standard representational way, and found Aivazofsky, a painter whose work Kandinsky might actually have seen. These works comprise my Deconstructing Kandinsky series, which I may add to. The second series - Study of Water and Light. There are two paintings on metal, both a small glass of ice on a window sill in my studio, the glass very enlarged. Curiosity prompted me. I was interested in exploration, not illusionism. After finishing the paintings I decided to do blowups of the first study, another move closer to and enlargement of the image. The four parts were a pixillated demonstration - to me- of the visual morphology of a glass of ice and what’s around it. I will add to this series. The third series is Paul Bowles Territory Inspired by a trip fo Marrakech. Do color and ancient patterns reveal or conceal? I am always interested in levels of representation. How does size or proximity affect an image? What is abstract and what becomes abstract? What becomes stylized? What about an image of something already stylized or abstracted? How do images work? All my work considers those questions. |