On View: September 11 – October 18
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 26, 2 – 5 PM
Gallery Hours: Friday – Sunday, 12 – 5 PM
These three artists use layers of translucency and structure to make works that imply another spatial dimension. With color, gestural mark-making, reflected light and shadow, they bring observational references into abstraction. The elements that make up the images overlap, intersect, coalesce, and disperse, leading to new readings and interpretations. The works have in common an interplay between foreground and background, resulting in echoes and conversations between what is sharply defined and what is barely seen or slightly obscured. All three artists are founding members of the Brickbottom Artist Building.
Concurrent in the Side Gallery: Experiments in Print, Julia Shepley & Marsha Goldberg
Marsha Goldberg has been making paintings on translucent yupo that represent, on one level, a response to place. Here, she began with the public spaces and waterways of Venice. The imagery is rooted in observation of form, light, and color, and has evolved to become intuitive and self-referential. Her process involves tools and techniques formerly employed by graphic artists, such as a circle template and grid, and she enjoys connecting with skills once practical and now obsolete, assigning them new meaning. The slow meditative work of completing one circle at a time means hours or days are required to realize a shift in color or the completion of a shape, and the final work becomes a record of that passage of time. A sense of tension and balance results from this carefully considered set of choices.
Julia Shepley’s photographic images are captured with a digital camera from shadows cast by drawings and handmade elements. These elements are lit from behind, projecting layers of imagery onto the translucent surfaces of her shadow boxes. The resulting surface shadow images sometimes appear distinct and at other times seem to travel through deep space. Shepley’s iconography, developed through observation, research, and material process, reflects her experience of layered time, place, sensory perception, and connection, as a source of resilience.
The depth of color in the pigment print photographs and the textured surface of the cotton paper make the images appear to be a hybrid of painting, drawing, and printmaking. Adjusting the setups allows for the creation of photographic images that capture dimension and the illusion of motion through sculptural means.
Marilu Swett’s studio practice involves making sculpture and making drawings, parallel and sometimes convergent activities. Her drawings include ideas about form, but also about drawing itself, and about seeing as experience. Her work uses abstract imagery rooted in a fascination with the biological and mechanical workings of the world. The drawings are mainly linear, which, when layered on vellum or Duralar, are cut and collaged, which she increasingly experiences as acts of sculpture.
Layering the drawn forms can desirably realign and alter the forms, adding new information or overdrawing to create new allusions. She deepens the space in the drawing either through the overlay of translucent material or of layers of clear mediums, tinted with acrylic. She sometimes uses a micaceous acrylic to add color, which is visible from different angles as it reflects light.