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1. kelvy bird
The concern of Kelvy Bird’s painting
is relation, with color serving as the primary representational means.
She explores the spectrum between strong presence and shrinking invisibility;
voices of all kinds – loud, forceful, still, receptive, excited,
playful, watchful, and wise – take form in a parallel range of
hue, value, and intensity. This range, mapped as an assembly of independent
panels, combine and recombine to offer what we could call “visual
conversations.” To become active participants in these conversations,
viewers of her work transcend passivity by offering an additional voice,
or tone, of their conscious or unconscious choosing. The way a person
interacts with the work becomes as relevant to the piece as the way
two color segments join, the way the pieces rest within the room, and
the way the room, the residence, exists within its broader community.
It is only through this kind of recursive interaction that a systemic
loop of engagement will start to emerge between the artist, the work,
the participant, and the environment. And, it is within this same recursion
that inquiry may open around the relationship of neighboring, yet disparate,
parts.
2. Kate Gakenheimer
About a year ago I read a biography of the
wives of Henry V111 and was instantly taken with them. Each of the six
was so distinct from the others, in her motives, her strengths and her
personality. You could say that Katherine Howard was weak, a child and
a pawn, that Katherine of Aragon had the moral fortitude of a saint
and that Anne Boleyn was ambitious and as strong willed as a force of
nature. But they were all married to the same man and they each navigated
him and the political system of the day with greater or lesser degrees
of success.
Their court portraits were very viscerally intriguing to me; their elaborate
corsets and bonnets, rigid postures and white faces gleamed against
the dour backdrops. After doing a couple of oil paintings on wood I
wanted to further explore this contrast of light and dark and started
experimenting with glass paints. My five years of work at a stained
glass studio and our restoration of various church windows gave me experience
with glass paints and some inkling of how these portraits on glass were
originally done. Due to the different firing temperatures of different
glass paints and the necessary application of multiple layers, each
piece was fired in a kiln at least four times.
It's no mistake that history has remembered these women; that they stand
out from the hundreds of wives of English monarchs through the centuries
that are largely forgotten. And I believe it is for more than the macabre
circumstances of two of their deaths. The wives individual stories and
their collective impact on history are compelling.
3. Amy Kaufman
Amy Kaufman, a noted New England artist, is
particularly acclaimed for her painted monotypes. A native of Newton,
Massachusetts, Kaufman received her B.A. from Brandeis University—where
she learned printmaking from Michael Mazur, and her M.F.A. from University
of Pennsylvania. She continued her studies at Massachusetts College
of Art and School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Kaufman has participated
in workshops with Eric Fischl, Wolf Kahn, Larry Rivers, and Lois Tarlow.
She is a member of the Medici Society-SMFA, Boston and the Women's Caucus
for Art. She is also a Corporate Artist for the DeCordova Museum Corporate
Program. She has worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Art New
England magazine. Kaufman's art is in many collections nationwide. She
has received awards and has exhibited extensively in museums and galleries
throughout New England, Philadelphia—including the Philadelphia
Museum of Art, and New York. In Massachusetts, you can see her art at
Left Bank Gallery in Wellfleet, Depot Square Gallery in Lexington, and
Diana Levine Fine Art in Boston.
4. Joe Keinberger
Joe Keinberger grew up in Massachussetts and moved into Boston while
attending Mass art. His art has always dealt with the macabre and can
be at times darkly humorous and unsettling. Most of his work consists
of quick gestural lines in ink or pencil on top of built up textures
of acrylic and collage on masonite or paper. He currently lives in Somerville
and is a freelance illustrator artist and sign maker.
5. Kelly Anona Kerrigan
Originally from New Hampshire, Kelly Anona Kerrigan received a Bachelor
of Fine Arts in painting from Boston University with a minor in Art
History. After working for several years as a stitcher in the Boston
Ballet costume shop, she earned a Post Baccalaureate certificate from
the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she is currently
working towards a Master of Fine Arts degree with a concentration in
painting.
6. Karen Molloy
Karen Molloy's work expresses her subjective impression of living and
traveling in urban environments by using the found textures and colors,
patterns, architectural motifs and the transformation caused by the
weathering effects of time. The image fragments she uses are from photographs
she has taken within cities she has either resided or visited; many
are from Somerville, where she has lived for 18 years. Her most recent
work includes the use of color transparencies of image fragments stitched
on top of cyanotypes.
Cyanotypes, or blue prints, are made using a vintage photo-printmaking
technique that was invented in 1842 by Sir John Herschel; it predates
the invention of silver photography and was used by many early photographers.
Cyanotype is a contact printing method, which it lends itself well to
combining many kinds of images and marks in a single print on paper
or fabric.
7. Lauren O'Neal
Lauren O'Neal's work explores states of strangeness, intimacy, proximity,
and contingency. Oftentimes, she use various alternative photography
processes to create story fragments or commentary, sometimes with text,
sometimes without. O'Neal likes the beginning that a photograph can
provide, but enjoys coaxing the image off into other directions. Re-using,
reconfiguring, and recasting photographic imagery, from found images
to family snapshots, allows her to be in conversation with an earlier,
or just imagined self, and to explore the in-between quality of memory
and longing.
O'Neal is also interested in incidental spaces – what’s
behind, underneath, in-between or hard to see. What is the residue from
our built environment? Emotional spillage that seeps into the pores
of a building, only to be recognized under the cast of a certain light?
She looks upon these as sometimes humorous, sometimes ominous, and sometimes
simply there, all in a way to classify and explore elliptical, incomplete
and transitory systems of being and knowing.
Her intent is to offer a shift, so that a different type of looking
emerges: a glance, a peripheral view, where we suspend our notions of
reality and allow for ordinary strangeness to enter our field of vision.
Glance-time is both fix and flux. A glance reveals absurdity and desire,
and celebrates the necessity of contradictory thinking.
8. anna shapiro
Anna Shapiro incorporates a sensuous and surreal world-view in her drawings
and sculptures. She makes plays with gallery spaces and public spaces,
combining everyday objects with the human form and the invisible (made
visible).
Anna exhibits throughout New England. She has won numerous awards and
residencies in the Boston area. In 2003 she had work in “introduction”
at the judi rotenberg gallery , “info@blah”: organization
and overload at the Mills Gallery during Boston’s CyberArts Festival
and at the Zeitgeist gallery for “Code Orange”. This year
she is pariticpating in the PsygeoConProvFlux, a psychogeography Multimedia
event in Providence, (e)Vent, a social action Drawing event in the South
End and plans on exhibiting in the Somerville and Boston area this Fall.
You can find her drawings in the Bernard Toale Drawing Project.
9. Peg Tuitt
Peg Tuitt is a Somerville-based, documentary photographer and instructor
whose work has been exhibited widely in the greater Boston area, in
such venues as the Museum of the National Center for Afro-American Artists,
the Old South Meetinghouse, the New Bedford Public Libraries, the Artists’
Foundation Gallery, and the Brickbottom Artists’ Gallery. Most
recently her work was included in ‘15th Annual Benefit Art Auction’
at MassArt, ‘Lost Theatres’ at the Somerville Museum the
‘School of Design Faculty Show’ at the Gallery at Mount
Ida College in Newton.
Working primarily in black and white for over 10 years, her work includes
but is not limited to portraiture, social and historical documentation,
and landscape. She uses photography as a tool to advance dialogues around
social issues, as well as to provoke the viewer to re-examine the often-overlooked
ordinary, familiar and common place elements around them.
Her projects have included documentation of Boston’s elevated
Orange Line and the Old South Meetinghouse, senior citizens, artists,
and community and family traditions. Most recently, she conducted independent
research on the Art and Culture of Cuba, in affiliation with the University
of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art.
10. V Van Sant
V Van Sant's obsession for clouds is merely the fact that they exist.
The way they move and change, beyond our control, elusive, outside our
grasp, is much like life itself. Her work includes everything from small
found object boxes (after Joseph Cornell) to huge installations (indoors
and out) and somehow clouds weave their way in and out of most of it.
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