CURRENT EXHIBITIONS

June 2 - 27, 2021

Opening Reception: Friday, June 4, 6-8:30 pm

Closing Reception: Sunday, June 27, 2-4 pm

“A Long Strange Trip”
Laurie Alpert

“Under Construction”
Kathryn Geismar

“A Long Strange Trip”
Laurie Alpert

On June 2, 2021, when the exhibition opens, my life will have been changed by Covid-19 for 443 days. On March 13, 2020, I stopped going into my shared studio and began working in my home living room. For many years my studio practice had been about photographs I’d taken of seemingly mundane things I came upon to which I was visually attracted.  I would then photograph them, transform them in Photoshop and turn them into Polyester Plate Lithographs and sculptural Artists’ Books.

The origin had always been inconsequential - it was the alteration process that gave the image its new life. Because Polyester Plate Lithography is a process that uses oil-based inks I was unable to go into my cooperative printmaking studio (Full Tilt Print Studio). As a result, I began making Gelli prints at home. Because Gelli prints are done on a printing plate made of gelatin, I work with acrylic paint to image them as it’s a lot easier to clean and requires less space.

 March 13, 2020, was also a very important date for me. Not having any idea how long we would be homebound due to the virus, I decided to begin making a Concertina Book by adding a page a day. Each page has a “dash” - which is part of a print I had previously made - but decided to cut up and transform into small rectangular shapes. On March 13, 2021, “365 Days, 365 Pages” was completed. Had it not, it was unclear to me when or if it would ever be completed.

 Something that has always been important to me is that my work at any one time is somehow connected with my other works - that there is a dialogue between the pieces I create, how one piece generates an idea for the next.

That is something that clearly has changed. One day I might do a print, the next day I might begin a book. A few days later I might find myself tearing up prints that I did in the nineties and creating mixed media pieces or turning them into mixed media books or even transforming them into funky box-like sculptures.

“A Long Strange Trip” is what my practice has become in the last 15 months.

“Under Construction”
Kathryn Geismar

“I am not one and simple, but complex and many.”

 ― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Over the past year I have been drawing and painting young adults who are gender queer and identity fluid. One of these subjects is my child, others are their friends.  All have all generously trusted me to document and depict them. It has felt like an intimate conversation, at once vulnerable and guarded.

The materials I have chosen to use are a combination of the traditional (paint, graphite, canvas) and the non-traditional (Tyvek, Duralar, grommets). Figures move in and out of focus; layers of Duralar promote looking through to substrata; grommets pierce through layers at times like jewelry and at other times like windows into what lies below.  The portraits on Tyvek hang, unframed, away from the wall, held up by slim T-pins, floating free. Nothing is pinned down; they are simultaneously finished and unfinished. These Tyvek portraits are in conversation with more formal ones in oils in which I am using traditional materials to depict tradition-changers.

The titles for the portraits refer to each subject’s social media handles, names they have given themselves when appearing in the public eye.  These names, like the makeup, piercings and clothes are self-expression and also a kind of armor.  It felt important that they could name themselves in my portraits of their bodies.  

Alongside the portraits, I have made abstract collages using Tyvek as a substrate. As in the portraits, layers of painted Duralar both hide and reveal.  The collages were a personal response to the figurative imagery and continue my exploration of being at once seen and hidden. In each collage I felt that I was discovering a whole form bit by bit, trusting in the process and the materials to lead me to a final, layered design.  As a way to claim these forms as my own, they are framed but, within the frame, they hang from grommets held up by T-pins. The collages, like the portraits, are both whole and fragmentary, adorned yet unpolished.

The young adults I depicted have been dressing, painting, and piercing themselves into being. I have been painting, drawing, and layering my way into seeing. We are each finding form from the ambiguous, feeling our way.