Exhibiting Artists
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West, East & TDP Galleries: Figure This
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Melanie Carr
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My work is an investigation of life. In my studio practice, I am concerned and consumed with touch, geometry, interactivity, and human experience, yet driven by intuition. As an avid observer in the way angles intersect, in all things, human and inanimate, I find that the collision of forms and materials cause pause for meaning. I pay attention to the way the body, my favorite object, moves, and love the mash-up of gestural and geometrical which is where my interests lay, in the joints, how we move, touch, see, breath – and experience.
I study the world around me and represent it through abstract forms, shapes and colors that allow for a broad interpretation - one that takes thought, and imagination, on the part of the viewer. I make artwork that invites the mind to wander, and for the viewer to complete ones own meaning, especially if we keep our minds open and consider that looking is not seeing. |
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Jaclyn Conley
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All The President’s Children
In the series of paintings All The President’s Children, I have focused on images of First Ladies and Presidents embracing young children, sourced through Presidential Library Archives. These photographs are generally staged photo ops that are tied up in the political ideology of family values and national identity. I’m inherently suspicious of the images but also genuinely want to believe in this vision of hope and unity. I can imagine that they are genuine, warm moments between individuals, motherly or paternal, within a political context. With gestural and heavily loaded brushwork the image becomes fragmented and unique individuals are reduced to intertwining shapes and marks which both merge together and resist one another. Although ruminating on the unique history of the American Family, at their most basic these paintings describe the visceral weight and pressure of forms resting heavily on one another. Jaclyn Conley, 2016 |
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Wayne Herpich
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Wayne Herpich
Statement: My efforts concern form. Color and psychology can happen Bio: Born in Torrington, CT – 1944 Pratt Institute – BFA, 1967 Yale University – MFA, 1969 Exhibitions: 1975 – Yale 2006, 2007, 2013 – Wickieser Gallery 2014, 2016 - Five Points Gallery 2014, 2016 – Blackston |
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Peter Howe
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During my more than forty-year involvement in photography the vast majority of images that I’ve either taken or published have included the human body. What struck me as I looked for selections for this exhibition was not what made us different but where the similarities were. Whether we like it or not even the photograph of young guerillas in Morozan Province, El Salvador taken during that country’s brutal civil war have something in common with the disaffected youth of our own surroundings, and groups similar to the group of Bedouin men can be found in any local bar. As to the man on the cell phone nothing more need be said!
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Barbra Kraut
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The figure has always fascinated me and has been my focus in sculpture, drawing and painting. My paintings always start with a woman in gesture to another woman or to an animal, showing the complex nature of the female form and its interrelationship to others. Through exaggeration and manipulation of her body, I attempt to show the impact of her life struggles and achievements. But equally important are the interactions of shapes and their colors to express my own personal landscapes for her with which I hope the viewer will identify.
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Diane Messinger
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Surprises, learning, emotional revelation, and investigation are the core of my work. I usually start with fairly representational figures but as I work I change the figure. I may wipe out an arm or leg, add an extra hand or paint out the face. Challenging myself is an important aspect of the process. I like going to unknown places. I use the figure to explore relationships and the scope of human emotion. With this latest body of work most of my tools are large: brushes, cans of paint and paper. I like how physical this is. The formal approach is important in the process for me: judging shape, color and line.
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Rod Oneglia
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I earned my degree in Art History from Middlebury College and studied as a graduate student at The University of Florence, Italy where I concentrated in pre-Renaissance and Renaissance art. While there, I developed a deep affinity, a reverence actually, for the "non-finito" (incomplete) works of Michelangelo (The Unfinished Slaves, The Florentine Pieta, etc).
Though I began sculpting in ceramic and in marble, I now work exclusively in the lost wax process and cast in bronze. My work focuses on a broken or unfinished state of the human figure, as if the sculptures have been lost or buried for centuries and recently discovered. Broken limbs and the abstraction of the bodies are meant to suggest that the works have been subjected to the vicissitudes of time, decay by the elements and the damages caused by unearthing. The use of contra-pose is nonetheless meant to convey a latent sense of power. |
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Tracy Ostmann Haschke
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Moved by the rewards and challenges that characterize my own experience as an urban mother, and informed by my observations of how other individuals and families navigate the contours of city life, my work depicts people engaging in the daily activities of contemporary existence—barbequing, washing the laundry, playing in the back yard, cooking, messy rooms, night-time soothing. At times I find these simple moments surprisingly gratifying, and each painting is a “snapshot” that documents one such fragment of time. Considered together, however, the series is intended to bloom into a narrative of our modern family experience. Every piece presents contemplation on these timeless activities—a consideration of how they are undertaken today, and of how they were undertaken by the women artisans of my heritage. I build the surface of each work with layers of paint and glazes, and use the play of color, pattern, and drawing in a way that suggests the story that lies within, while deliberately leaving room for the viewer’s imagination.
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Antonella Piemontese
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My work generates from experiences in my personal life and from my relationship to contemporary society. Materials such as fabric and cord contain fascinating textures. The objects in my installations are made of these materials. I work with a variety of fabrics and choose to take minimal action in altering the innate qualities of the fabric. Depending on my concept, I will fabricate new objects or use readily available ones. I am intrigued by items originally meant for a particular purpose such as fabric swatches, bed sheets and butchers twine, and the inherent messages they hold for the audience. My hand sewn objects explore texture and tactile; shape and size; precision and proportion. Clothing, animals and toys inspire me. The concept of mother and offspring is a recurring theme throughout my work. Offspring #1-9 (2015) consists of nine individual works that are installed separately or as a set. In each of the nine works a found stuffed doll is covered with linen fabric to partially hide and alter the shape of the doll. The hand-sewn linen covering acts as a sheath from which the doll struggles to emerge, recalling the moment of birth. Simultaneously, the linen casing evokes a garment that both conceals and exposes the doll. In their acquired awkwardness and distortion the nine dolls also display elegance and grace. She Wore One Hundred Pockets (2013) stands for memory as a random sequence of past and present concepts that can be stored and retrieved. She Wore Bandages (2012) investigates the concepts of real and imaginary; past and present; animal and human; strength and vulnerability. Both of these works use the female dress form mannequin as their underlying structure and focus on the concept of dress relative to the female body form, its size and its transformation. Within the concept of dress I investigate aspects of decay, storage, sustenance, rebirth and evolution and how these aspects relate to the transformation of the female body. |
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Jason Wallengren
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LONGING FOR MY ALTER EGO
Various Sizes 2009 to present Mixed media on secondhand envelopes with ephemera inside I collect secondhand envelopes and take them with me as I travel. I then add the little boy silo to it and place ephemera in the envelope and send it back to me at a random address. The boy silhouette represents an alter ego who observes the world as an innocent, naive and curious explorer. |
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Donald Wass
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I find that it’s sometimes easier to draw what I see than it is to paint what I imagine. I have been an abstract painter for most of my life; when it gets difficult to make the paint do what I want, I take a break by turning to figure drawing. But I use completely different approaches. When applying paint to an abstract composition, if I don’t like it, I can scrape it down and try again. When drawing the figure, I use the blind contour technique – my eyes stay on the model, not on the paper, and I use a medium that doesn’t allow me to erase. In other words, to achieve a successful drawing, I can’t make any mistakes.
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Fred Wessel |
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A two week trip that I took to Italy in 1984, had a profound and prolonged influence on my work. At that time I was involved in making a series of aquarium images. I went to Italy to view the art of the Renaissance, for it is my belief that all visual artists, especially realists, should experience and study this work firsthand. I could not have predicted the dramatic impact, both direct and indirect, that this journey of discovery would have on my ensuing work. I believe that in our search for novelty in post-modernist art making, we often lose touch with certain basics: beauty, grace, harmony and visual poetry are nowadays rarely considered important criteria in evaluating contemporary works of art.
Since the Bauhaus, the term ‘precious’ has had a negative connotation in art schools. It was a term used derisively in the 1960’s to describe work that did not adhere to the fashionably pared down kernels of conceptualism or minimalism. But after seeing the beauty, sensitivity, harmony—the ‘preciousness’—of Italian Renaissance painting—especially the early Renaissance work of artists such as Fra Angelico, Duccio and Simone Martini—I realize that, as artists, we may have abandoned too much. The ever–changing inner light that radiates from gold leaf used judiciously on the surface of a painting, and the use of pockets of rich, intense colors that illuminate the picture's surface impressed me deeply. It was ‘preciousness’ elevated to grand heights: semi–precious gems such as lapis lazuli, malachite, azurite, etc., were ground up, mixed with egg yolk and applied as paint pigments, producing dazzling, breathtaking colors! The surface of these colors forms a texture that sparkles and reflects light much like gold does, but in ways that are much more subtle than gold. I look to the early Renaissance as a source of inspiration that I can use along with contemporary content and image making. I look to the Renaissance as the artists of that time looked back to early Greek and Roman art—not as a reactionary but as one who rediscovers and reapplies important but forgotten visual stimuli. |