Press Release
Full description of ARCHI+TEXTURE
Information about the artists
Example of artworks
Photos of the exhibition
new! DVD Catalog of the show
An Exhibition of Contemporary Fine Art Curated by Samantha Mae Dorfman
ARTIST’S CONTACT INFORMATION AND BRIEF BIOS:
SIMON ALDRIDGE (mixed-media)
e-mail: studio@simonaldridge.com
website: http://www.simonaldridge.com
Artist, Simon Aldridge, explores the complex relationships between people and architecture and the culturally-coded systems of behaviour which surround us.
His work pushes conventional expectations of minimalist painting and sculpture through forms that function as a hybrid of these media and are simultaneously imbued with content related to everyday street culture. His works are pristine, spray painted wall pieces that re-texture their environments, referencing the way elements of vernacular architecture and design throughout the city are adapted by skateboarders and bikers as sites of action.
Aldridge examines our primarily urban culture by blurring definitons; both our physical definitions of what painting and sculpture are, and the behavioural patterns of habitation that define our lifestyles - the rules of engagement which we choose to obey or ignore.
JENNIFER BERKLICH (monoprints)
email: j_berklich@yahoo.com
website: http://omnijenn.tripod.com
Jennifer Berklich was born in Michigan studied fine art at Kendall College of Art and Design in Michigan. Recent exhibitions include Analog/Digital at City Without Walls, curated by Samantha Dorfman. Other exhibitions include "SNAPSHOT" at the Baltimore Contemporary Museum, group shows at Atmosphere Gallery in New York, and a group exhibit curated by Nurture Art Non-Profit Inc. @ The Golding Gallery in New York. In 1998 I was a contributing artist in Red Dive's, Bessie Award winning "afterlives" at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. My work is an ongoing exploration of the ontologicalaspect of existence using whatever mediums are available.
THOMAS BYNUM
e-mail: chelon4@yahoo.com
Thomas Bynum studied stage design at Yale and the Slade School, London University. He worked at the distinguished American yacht design firm of Sparkman & Stephens before leaving to work on a portfolio of his own of a number of very large yachts. In the 90s he published Drogue Press, an imprint specializing in the post New York School of avant-garde writing known as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. His Four Poems has just been brought out in the UK by the British press Spectacular Diseases.
RONA CHANG (photography)
email: rona@grae.net
website: www.grae.net
The industrial, modern landscape that sits and sometimes hovers over our natural surroundings gives shape and context to my images. The tone of the dialogue is passive. I find immense attraction to man-made superstructures such as dams, highways, and factories. Conversely, I am also intrigued by natural landscapes and geological happenings; whether it is thin blue strings tied to trees found on a deserted shore of a Scottish loch, some weeds alongside the road, a crater in north-central Iceland, or a mysteriously empty concrete pool in a reservoir in centralTaiwan, I find myself stopping to record the interplay of elements.
I spent my first years in the industrial city of Chungli, Taiwan, with the Coca-Cola, YKK zipper, and several other snack food factories alongside the main road to town. The dam where fathers go fishing is thirty minutes from town. Moving to the United States at seven, I lived for a year within a half an hour drive from Niagara Falls. I later grew up in Queens, in close proximity to the auto junkyards next to Shea Stadium in Flushing Meadows Park. I have always lived in a mix of natural and man-made environments. Now I live in Hoboken, NJ where new construction is a constant event. My interest in landscape is that it is perpetually in a state of change. These variations and alterations create exciting lines, shapes, and forms which inspire me through the juxtapositions of softeness and hardness. My fascination with architecture, airports, and dams stem from an interest in the design or chaos of lines blending, and contrasting natural forms.
MICHAEL CHILDS (painting)
email: childsword@cs.com
website: www.michaelchilds.info
Mike Childs is a painter from Toronto Canada. He studied in Florida and Italy before moving to New York. His work has been exhibited in New York, New Jersey and Seattle, WA. I n 2000, he received the Pollock-Krasner award and presently keeps a studio in Long Island City, Queens.
PETER COE (painting)
email: zydac@ix.netcom.com
website: www.pcoe.com
Peter Coe_s paintings combine technical and organic imagery on smooth relief surfaces. The works are strongly tactile and highly technical, yet hinge on illusion. He has shown his work in both the U.S. and abroad. In 2000 he participated in the seminal Greater New York show at the PS-1 Museum in Queens. In 1996 he was the first American to participate in the Festival de la Cultura Caribeña in Santiago, Cuba. Mr. Coe is represented by the Genovese Sullivan Gallery in Boston, and Bucheon Gallery in San Francisco.
SAMANTHA MAE DORFMAN (digital art/curator)
email: AT@molekular.net
website: www.molekular.net
The point of departure for my work is photography, influenced by fine art in technique, theory, composition, and subject matter. The photographs are "slices" of reality from different parts of the world which happen to fit together to express an idea. The merging of images can be suggestive of combining various unrealized realities to create a new visual dimension. I merge intuition and imagination with perceived reality to create a new landscape, portrait, or still life wrapped in layers suggesting culture, form, and event. Computer technology facilitates the image making process. Light also plays an important part in the realization of the work. I like to use different kinds of light sources to observe the varieties of illumination and how it influences the subject matter and the composition to create "painterly" style works.
Curating is a creative process, comparing and contrasting artworks within a given theme. I like to use an educated, informed thought process with acute visual association to select the artworks. It has been important to me, as an artist, to curate and include my own works in context to my contemporaries. This may not always be the case, depending on the theme of the show. It is important for artists to feel empowered to create groups and present their works in a conducive setting within or outside of the traditionally accepted venues.
Studied fine art, curatorship, art history and theory, and computer art at School of Visual Arts in New York City.
JAMES DUSTIN (drawing)
email: dustin@mhcable.com
website: www.jamesdustin.com
James Dustin, born and raised in New Hampshire, received a BFA from the Maine College of Art, located in Portland Maine. Recent exhibits include the Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville TN. and the Herter Art Gallery at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Last summer an exhibit of paintings drawings and models from 1997-2002 was presented at the University Art Gallery, Indiana State University, Terre Haute. In 2002, paintings on paper were included in New York City's Drawing Center's 'Winter Selections Show'. Mr. Dustin is presently preparing for a one person show this summer at the Van Brunt Gallery located in Beacon, NY. Selected works included in corporate collections include: American International Group, Brooklyn Union Gas, MassPort, Scudder, Stevens, Clark, Standard & Poors and Tishman Speyer Properties. Many works have also been placed in private collections around the country.
JODY ELFF (sound art)
email: jody@elff.net
website: www.elff.net
Jody Elff is a sound artist living and working in New York City. His explorations into alternative systems for the control and manipulation of sound have led to the development of an on-going series of sonic installations and sculptures. Jody's works have been shown at PS122, Dance Theater Workshop, The Kitchen, and with the Post Media Network at Moving Image Gallery in New York City. Most recently, Jody had two pieces presented as part of the "New York, New Sounds, New Spaces" show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon, France from March through July, 2002.
FRANK GERARD GODLEWSKI (painting)
e-mail: evermonts@aol.com
Born in Montclair, New Jersey, Frank Gerard Godlewski attended The Montclair Kimberley Academy, graduated from The Cooper Union School of Architecture in New York and worked on a Doctorate of Research in Architectural Composition at the Institute of Architecture in Venice, Italy. Recently, Frank has returned to live in Montclair, where his family resides. For the past twenty three years, he has lived in Italy where he worked in the Milan architecture studio of Aldo Rossi, participated with two projects in the 1985 Venice Biennale of Architecture, has written for Casa Vogue, Elle Decor and the Fodor’s Guide to Naples and the Amalfi Coast. For the past decade he has been involved with the restoration of historical properties (the palaces villas and castles of the Antinori, the Pignatelli, the dukes of Aosta , Palazetto Pisani on the Grand Canal, a guest house for Villa Bagnolo by Paladio as well as Elton John’s ex villa in Umbria) and curated cultural programs in two Italian national landmarks. He has designed scenery and costumes for a series of traditional Greek Tragedies in the setting of Italian Archeological sites. Fluent in English, Italian and French, Frank presented a lecture "New Life for Historical Properties in Italy" at the Science Museum in Naples Italy, Italia Nostra, The Garden Club of Palermo, The Institute of Italian Culture on Park Avenue in New York, Montclair State University, and MKA. A major Italian newspaper, the Corrierre della Sera has called him an "American expert in the restoration of the dwellings of the blue-blooded."
DESCRIPTION of the WORK
The shingle style architects, one hundred years ago, were trying to invent a new form of domestic American architecture by creating an eclectic collage with all of the previously existing elements of American architecture. Colonial wooden and log shacks, neoclassical federal and temple-like Greek revival elements of the more aristocratic colonial buildings, rustic native stone constructions found in farmfields and fortresses, rough wooden balloon framed barns and silos are all in these architects repetoir of forms and images. The new industrial technology allowed them to create buildings by assembling these produced or reproduced traditional elements. Functional elements such as sash windows, doors, pocket doors, fireplaces, stairs, railings, as well as decorative elements such as columns, pediments, decorative moldings and masonry and iron work could all be available and ordered from manufacturers catalogs and composed into the design of a building.
My academic and professional experience represents a classically traditional extreme. Montclair Kimberley Academy for traditional culture, the Cooper Union School of Architecture for traditional drawing, painting and compositional techniques and then Architectural school in Venice where I lived among the original elements of classical architecture in Italy for 24 years. Professionally, I have worked on magnificent classical buildings like, Palazzo Antinori, Villa Bagnolo by Palladio as well as Castles and Palace on the Grand Canal.
Confronted with a design problem, my first gesture is to draw the site and the building using a traditional chiaro suro or grisaille technique where the building is conceived in its original and natural timeframe. Such a traditional technique results in a product which seems already strongly rooted or fixed into the past and extremely traditional and classical. My original hand made drawings then become an element for me to reproduce manipulate and compose, though the use of all of the most current technologies. I take these drawings, scan them, radex them, Photoshop them and reproduce them into new drawings, resulting in a technological revision of the traditional retoucee technique. This is how I design and compose new projects. All of the state of the art technological passages that I put my hand drawn images through, almost as an imposed afterthought, relieves my anxiety of the desire to feel that my work and myself are part of the present.
PAUL LACHENAUER (photography)
The "Route 22," series of roadscapes depicts a typical modern American commercial landscape, dominated by large-scale retail stores, high-speed traffic, parking lots and fast food restaurants in Union County, New Jersey. It is an automobile environment, where the pedestrian would be lost and out of scale. This sort of modern landscape provided an interesting subject for me as a commentary on modern culture and suburban development. The technique used to create the images is called cross processing, where color transparency film is processed in print film chemistry. This alters the color and the contrast of the resulting negatives. Currently, Paul Lachenauer works as a photographer at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. His work is in the permanent collections of The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Museum of the City of New York and The New York Public Library.
KEELY McCOOL (sculpture)
e-mail: k_mccool@hotmail.com
www.mccoolsculpture.com
www.artsymag.com
Keely McCool graduated from Montclair State University receiving a major in Fine Arts and a minor in Archeology. While attending school she received the Ann Chapman and Excellence in Sculpture Awards. In 2001, Keely received the International Sculpture Center Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award and was published in their October 2001 issue of Sculpture magazine. This year she received a fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts. McCool has exhibited in several shows in the metropolitan area, including the New Jersey State Museum and Grounds for Sculpture.
PATRICK MEAGHER (mixed-media)
email: patrick_meagher@post.harvard.edu
I’m interested in landscape, architecture and economics, our emotional relationship to space, and spatial intelligence on the ground plane as part of what generates urbanity. As Landscape Architecture is a complex field that necessarily interfaces with many other disciplines, this vital nexus of issues is also an interesting model for approaching art. My work is conscious of the perceptions of the viewer, the eliciting of personal reflection, with brief immersions in implied space aiming to awaken a sense of bodily/spatial presence. The pieces I produce play and ply at these abstract issues across various complementary media and between the works in sculpture and photography; anchored in drawing, and congealed in digital media. I develop my production primarily on computers and make these tools part of the process of the realization of the work. All of my other ideas and plans for projects are eventually organized digitally in some form or another, enabling working through concepts in a fast and mutable way.
My broader body of work currently consists of digital photo based art, machine-cut sculpture in EPS Styrofoam, and freehand drawings on paper. Styrofoam sculptures about synthetic landscape are distributed as multiple editions. My photographic based art ‘Photage’ is a photographic series of image strategies aimed at evoking a sense of urbanity in collage that is not overlapping or cut-up, but placed in communication with other images on a single plane or juxtaposed as a set of panels. Names of these strategies include ‘additive-multiplication’, ‘still-animation’, ‘subtractive-division’, ‘resonant-adjacent’, and ‘active-plane’, which refer to compositions juxtaposing planes of space, void and motions in between. A recent photo art print series ‘Nausea and Euphoria’ captures utopic and dystopic moments of modern architecture and has recently been published as an artist book published by Navado Press.
‘Nausea and Euphoria’ represents a selection of photographs of architecture, landscape and outdoor space that is grouped by its emotional potential, rather than just by its subject matter. The photos were taken in Cologne, London, Basel and other cities in Switzerland and Germany, but the architecture is both local and globally neutral in many ways. The general absence of a groundplane or recognizable street signage, further distances the images from a single localizable 'place'; an anonymity which helps focus on the 'space' aspects of the image, and the emotional qualities of the geometric volume conveyed by the angles, colors, and minimal compositions. As in Robert Irwin’s "Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees", this combines to emphasize 'feeling' the image, instead of just ‘looking’ and recognizing a subject.
For 2004 I am working on assembling a set of drawings of a fictional landscape of emotionally expressive icons made over the past decade combined into a series of three books, as well as a set of web-based animations.
CHERITH ROSE (acrylic and collage on paper/painting)
email: cherith@cherithrose.com
website: www.cherithrose.com
The majority of my work contains urban imagery and is produced with acrylic paint, collage, and a transfer process originating from photographs I take of the city, suburbia, and the occasional rural neighborhood. They often feature natural elements such as bamboo, the sky, grass or even segmented figures. My paintings have been shown in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, with such venues as Pierodi 2000, Traywick Gallery, and Hunter College's: Bertha & Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery.
CHARLOTTE SCHULZ (charcoal on paper)
email: char_schulz@yahoo.com
My impulse to make images stems from a deep desire to grapple with both the outer events of my life as well as the corresponding interior experiences. In my paintings and drawings I attempt to set down or document both the emotional and the rational workings of my consciousness and, in doing so, present before me a visual equivalent of my subjective state. I wish to catch, hold, and make a place for fleeting emotions, origins of pain, moments of insight, echoes, and transformations--to sort out the stuff of life and render a story where the small quotidian events are married with the large archetypal patterns.
Past awards and fellowships include a New York Foundation for the Arts
Artist Fellowship (2001);
Individual Artist Fellowship from the State of Florida (1996); Skowhegan
School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship (1992).
ROGER TUCKER (photography/digital art)
email: roger@thmc.com
website: www.rogertucker.com
Roger Tucker began taking photographs while attending Arts High School in Newark, New Jersey. Exhibiting and selling his first portraits of friends and relatives at a local arts and crafts show contributed to an understanding that photographic images, no matter how naïve, commanded interest and communicated to complete strangers the powerful "connection" between the artist and his subject matter. Photographic studies continued for Tucker while he attended the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. His work is included in the first volume of The Black Photographers Annual in 1973.
Tucker uses the term "Scapes" to describe the subject matter, settings and arrangement of his photographic montages and single images.The Scapes present the visual equivalent of psychological mindscapes, or tableaus, by the juxtaposition of the larger image to the related smaller images. The idea of barriers, real or imagined, is also explored through these juxtapositions. Sometimes race is the issue. Other times it's the quest to look at something differently by isolating it through enlargement.The pixilation and abstraction that results from the digital enlargement calls attention to the technical process but it also gives the viewer different ways of experiencing the image, depending on their proximity to the piece.
ROBERT WALDEN (mixed-media)
email: rjwaldenjr@netscape.net
The roads in a map reflect the topography of the land and in this way may be considered landscape drawings or paintings. Traditional landscape "paintings" with a twist or two, the "cutouts" are an attempt to create work both conceptually complex and visually stimulating. These landscape drawings/paintings are found and revealed through the process of cutting away everything except the roads. They are "rectified ready-mades." The shadows created when lit properly offer greater complexity and could be less important secondary roads or roads long forgotten and covered over. As the "cutouts" hang on the wall and droop and sag over time, they are intended to simulate the undulating flow of the earth, the result of erosion, or the passing of time. All of these cutouts are particular to a certain time and place. These found drawings function (among other things) as a visual metaphor in my search for personal and artistic identity, and they also provide a means in which to pursue that identity.
Selected group exhibitions include:
Emerge 2002, Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ; The Atlanta/New York Connection: Atlanta Artists Living in New York City, Swan Coach House Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Maps and Charts, Penrose Gallery, Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA; 1994 New Works, Gallery 100, Woodruff Arts Center, Atlanta, GA
Work included in the following collections:
Carter Presidential Center, Atlanta, GA; Trammel Crow, Dallas, TX
Education:
The Atlanta College of Art, Atlanta, GA - B.F.A., 1994 (Emphasis painting & printmaking) and The University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS History, Art & Music 1986-1992
BILL WESTHEIMER and CHARLES SCHWARTZ (photography/digital art)
BILL WESTHEIMER
email: bill@billwest.com
website: www.billwest.com/art/
CHARLES SCHWARTZ
email: cms@cs-photo.com
website: www.charlesschwartzltd.com/obscura/obscura.php
Bill Westheimer has been a photographer since the mid 1960's. HIs work has been shown in galleries around the country and is included in numerous private collections. Charles Schwartz has been involved with photography and the photographic community for over thirty years as a photographer, a collector, and as a dealer. Together they are exploring the city of New York on the upper east side of Manhattan using a Camera Obscura. These pictures reveal the city through the unique viewpoint of the camera obscura and record the images digitally. The camera Obscura's location is fixed, yet it provides an ever changing view of the city's architecture and landscape. The images use a pre-photographic technology combined with post-photographic digital capture