NEWS

The Ballinglen Arts Foundation was formed in 1992 to bring professional, established artists and younger artists of recognized ability, from Ireland and from abroad, to live and work in North County Mayo, Ireland so as to benefit both the artists and the community. Its programmes, a series of interrelated projects in the visual arts, provide a direct socioeconomic and educational benefit to the community whilst contributing substantively to the development of each individual artist's work.

Textility is an exhibition that explores the inventive ways contemporary artists employ materials, concepts, and processes associated with textiles to convey their ideas. Many artists today are producing paintings and sculptures that resemble or reference textiles, using traditional materials like paint, canvas, wood, paper and glass.  Other artists are appropriating materials and techniques traditionally associated with fiber or textile arts—cloth or thread, crochet or embroidery, for instance—and using them to convey elements like color and line. And some artists are creating work that suggests fabric or textiles to incorporate a sense of the woven, knotted or stitched. Textility, a group survey of 28 artists, will examine art that draws from and is immersed in this textile sensibility.

Textility is co-curated by Mary Birmingham, Art Center Curator, and Joanne Mattera, a New York-based artist, curator, and art blogger. “Textility” is a word the curators created to express the idea of art that has some material or conceptual quality related to textiles.  Observing what they consider a trend in contemporary art, they conceived this exhibition to pose the questions: “Who is making work with fiber and textiles or work that suggests fiber and textiles?” and “How and why are artists doing this, and why now?”

The exhibition will utilize all three Art Center galleries and will incorporate a broad range of materials and media including painting, sculpture, works on paper, and installation. A fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Birmingham and Mattera will accompany the exhibition.  Participating artists: Joell Baxter, Caroline Burton, Sharon Butler, Mary Carlson, Jennifer Cecere, Pip Culbert, Elisa D’Arrigo, Grace DeGennaro, Barbara Ellmann, Carly Glovinski, Elana Herzog, Marietta Hoferer, Nava Lubelski, Stephen Maine, Lael Marshall, Derick Melander, Sam Messenger, Sam Moyer, Lalani Nan, Aric Obrosey, Gelah Penn, Debra Ramsay, Susan Still Scott, Arlene Shechet, Susanna Starr, Leslie Wayne, Ken Weathersby and Peter Weber.

Curators: Mary Birmingham and Joanne Mattera

Opening Reception: January 13, 6:00 pm- 8:00 pm

Gallery “Walk & Talk”All are invited for a unique opportunity to discuss the Textility exhibition and artwork with the curators and artists. March 25, 2:00 pm-4:00 pm

Read more about Textility at Joanne Mattera's blog here.

The Gallery at R&F is pleased to present ‘Conversations’, an exhibition of works by eight painters and sculptors who also work on paper.  The show will run from April 2nd through May 12th, 2011.  There will be an opening reception for the artists and gallery talk on Saturday, April 2nd, from 5 to 7 p.m.  There will also be a gallery closing, on Saturday, May 14 from 2-4 pm, where the artists will be on hand to have conversations with visitors.

Co-curated by Joanne Mattera and Laura Moriarty, ‘Conversations’ is a group exhibition that looks at the work on paper of artists who are primarily known for their paintings or sculpture.  By showing these different mediums together, ‘Conversations’ presents a visual dialog between the artists’ two mediums, vis a vis materials, dimensions, proportions, palette and content; as well as a conversation among the participating artists on these same issues. 

The eight artists include Steven Alexander, Nancy Azara, Grace DeGennaro, Pam Farrell, Lorrie Fredette, George Mason, Joanne Mattera and Laura Moriarty. 
 

‘Indigo’ at Aucocisco Gallery, Portland, ME

By NICHOLAS SCHROEDER  |  March 31, 2010

If you’re going to explore the cosmos, better do it at night. In each piece shown in Grace DeGennaro’s Indigo Series, indigo pigment is layered beneath a heavy black palette, recreating the active, damp hues of a rural night sky. In this setting, DeGennaro’s celestial explorations come into focus. Using rich colors, repetitive patterns, and a limited vocabulary of shapes, these pieces seem like snapshots of carnivals light years away.



One of the most interesting features of the Indigo Series is the way it both showcases and restrains DeGennaro’s formal style. One of her signature techniques is replicating the delicate, arbitrary precision of mosaics with intricately patterned oil-based paint. Nearly all of the works in Indigo feature this method (one piece is watercolor on Arches paper), but against the black backdrop, the mosaic technique creates neither a picture nor a scene. Compared to DeGennaro’s earlier work, this show marks a starker, less representational update to last year’s “Return to the Source” exhibit at the Clark Gallery in Lincoln.



Another is the symbolic depth of the vocabulary. The Indigo Series relies heavily on floating figures of circles, diamonds, and, most notably, the vesica piscis (the vaguely football-ish shape formed by two overlapping circles), one of the cornerstone symbols of Sacred Geometry. Depending on whom you ask, the shape of the vesica piscis is the symbolic, mathematical structure embedded in any number of religious and spiritual doctrines, from Judeo-Christian creationism to quasi-Buddhist meditations on Unity to the serpentine, naturalist art found in Amazonian shamanism. It’s a pretty heavy hitter. That it appears so prominently in these paintings without pledging artistic faith to any of those movements is a credit to DeGennaro’s originality and the effectiveness of the rules of “Indigo.”



In an exhibit with so much structural uniformity, many of the standouts are pieces that constitute a break with DeGennaro’s code. In “Blueprint,” dual bulbs of vibrant fern-green vesica piscis petals are held together by three circles formed from mosaic-like black and white beads. Of all the 34-by-21-inch pieces in the series, “Blueprint” is the most intriguing, benefiting from the vaguely hallucinogenic green and simple, serial beads. While the pattern of “Blueprint” is echoed in “Mantilla,” a sister piece, the use of color in the former is unlike any other in the series.



“Creation,” the only nonsymmetrical piece in the series, is also the most reminiscent of Byzantine mosaics. Two polygon figures, brightly rendered in beads, are stacked upon the familiar three-ringed circle. With the exception of the diamond (treated by DeGennaro as a geometric derivative of the vesica piscis), the square and isosceles triangle in “Creation” are the only such figures in all of the series, and like the bold color in “Blueprint,” their deployment seems to deviate the code.



Perhaps the masterwork of the series, “Serape” is an enormous eight-by-five-foot loom articulating DeGennaro’s celestial vision. Anchored at each end by yin-yang diamond cuffs, a floating, imposing grid of beaded circles is shadowed by a constellation of thin gray and white diamonds. Like cells in a DNA double helix, no pattern of color in any of the circles is alike, each is predominantly red and blue with noisy incongruities from the entire color spectrum near the core. It is latent but persistent irregularities like these that make up much of the appeal of the Indigo series.



Read more.