Featuring - Theresa Chong, William Holton, Katherine Jackson, Jaanika Peerna, Suikang Zhao
April 12 through May 23, 2008
Curated by Patricia Miranda and Patricia Spergel
FUGUE: a musical form in which a theme is first stated, then repeated and varied with accompanying contrapuntal lines. Drawing, Painting, Glass, Video. Featuring- Theresa Chong, William Holton, Katherine Jackson, Jaanika Peerna, Suikang Zhao
The five artists included in Fugue incorporate a wide variety of materials: from etched glass to video to graphite on rice paper. Are all linked by a meditative approach to their work as well as a fascination with language, text, rhythm and music. These artists create drawings, paintings, sculpture and video, using repeated marks and text as a way of delineating space while filtering the energy of their tactile and temporal experiences.
Suikang Zhao originally from China and now in NYC, creates multi-media works incorporating his passion for music, especially classical, with spoken word and images. Using languages such as English, Chinese, Hebrew, Latin and French, he explores themes of multiculturalism through overlapping lines of language, in video, paper and glass. Much like riding the subways in New York City and listening to the cacophony of different dialects; there is a wonderful energy and woven quality to the overlapping and interlocking sounds and images.
Theresa Chong, born in Korea and living in NYC, presents drawings that are also closely linked with musical experience and in particular ephemerality and a sense of repeated rhythm. Dots appear and disappear with a sense of time passing in these delicate works—much as individual musical notes flit in and out of space while listening to a piece. While fundamentally abstract, her work can evoke maps or musical notations, reflecting her past study of music. Chong is represented by Danese Gallery in NYC.
Jaanika Peerna, originally from Estonia and living in Cold Spring, NY, presents recent drawings and videos. Whether watching a drop of rain slide down (or up) a window pane or examining a pencil line drawn with graphite, Peerna’s works allows the viewer a contemplative experience. As the artist aptly describes it: “There is a breath, rhythm and tone underlying and overlooking all; something to hold onto, something to hum along with, something to get lost within, in order to come clear again and again.” A musical sensibility accompanies her works enhanced by actual music, often composed by her husband David Rothenberg, in her videos.
William Holton’s paintings vibrate and glow with a luminosity created through a buildup of repeated marks—echoing the approach of Chong, but with a very different result. Holton, originally from Knoxville, TN, and now in NYC, describes his recent pieces by saying: “The work ultimately exists on the precipice of a mysterious, liminal point of transition. The point where molecules of water as a vast collective suddenly know to fundamentally change from liquid to vapor; or when a flock of birds, swarm of bees, or network of neurons collectively begins to think as one.” The musical character of repetitive natural systems informs the complex structure in his work.
Katherine Jackson, of NYC, creates glass pieces by methodically etching tiny lines of text into panels of glass both backwards and forwards, rendering the actual words illegible, but creating a surface that hums with rhythmic pulses. The viewer is confronted with an interwoven intimate musical network, catching us dead center between our visual and verbal ways of experiencing the world. Both Jackson’s and Zhao’s work is essentially a meditation on language, and the multiple ways we “read” “hear” and “interpret” our multiple communication systems.
All of these artists’ works seem to sit on a precipice between senses, in a kind of visual, verbal and musical synesthesia. The use of translucent mediums such as glass, video, oil paint and rice paper means we are always looking “through” as well as “at.” Jackson says that “perhaps all that artists can provide are windows through which to look.” These artists offer us 5 unique and contemplative ways to see, hear and perceive.
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Helfand, Kopelowitz, Lutz
April 14- May 25, 2007
Amy Helfand, Sasha Kopelowitz and Sarah Lutz are three artists employing eerie,
vibrant organic forms in an intersection between nature, abstraction and the
body. The organic forms in each artist’s work create a strangely familiar
yet uneasy world, all in luscious rich color, seducing the eye while challenging
the mind to find a place within it. In co-mingling that which is grounded
and seemingly ordinary with things ethereal and unknown, each artist creates
richly detailed places and creatures that inhabit the biology of the imagination.
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 Undercover
Guest Curator Gia Gunthel for James Company Contemporary Art Projects
LLC
December 10, 2005 through January 6, 2006
Including works by Kristoffer Albrect, Megan Cump, Nicholas Evans-
Cato, Neil Folberg, Russ Havard, Lou Hicks, Heather Hobler-Keen, Mark
Innerst, Katherine Jackson, Gwenessa Lam, David Mann, Cynthia
Matthews, Elizabeth O'Reilly, Penti Sammallahti
Michael Thornton Smith, Roger White and James Willis
This show includes contemporary paintings, photography and works on
paper of images that evoke the hidden and obscured. At this time of
year, when the days are shorter and colder and the nights grow longer,
one begins to think about nature while asleep. Though it may seem that
the world is still and quiet, there is a different kind of energy subtly
occurring just beneath the surface. The landscape may be obscured by
ice and fog, shrouded in darkness or blanketed in snow but, as these
images suggest, there is a lot of activity under cover.
Artists Nicholas Evans-Cato and James Willis create imagery that at
once portray the city as unexpectedly soft and fragile yet vast and
impenetrable. They blur the contours of New York's hard lines by painting
architecture enveloped in fog or a blizzard. Elizabeth O'Reilly and
Lou Hicks explore the disappearance of the familiar landscape allowing
the cover of night or snow to reduce landscape to its simplest forms.
Pared down to its essence, nature is seen anew as if for the first time.
Other works convey places normally unseen by the human eye such as
the luminous, heavily layered, abstract paintings by David Mann, which
suggest the hidden worlds of supernovas and microorganisms. Neil Folberg
draws upon the ancient desert of Israel and the Sinai and reinvents
it as a romanticized celestial otherworld, glittering under a downpour
of stars.
The haunting photographs of Megan Cump "explore the geography
of the unspoken", depicting allegorical scenes using the natural
environment as her stage. Images of blinding snow and figures cloaked
in the shadows of a snow fort suggest reclusive withdrawal. This kind
of mysterious narrative can also be seen in the photographs of Pentti
Sammallahti and Cynthia Matthews. Both Sammallahti and Matthews choose
cold, icy backdrops to tell their stories. Sammallahti provides us with
a rare glimpse into the world of animals and leaves us wondering what
goes on when we're not around. Matthews on the other hand prefers the
poetry of human behavior and the quiet drama occurring amidst the cold
of winter.
Heather Hobler-Keene's drawings are visual explorations of her obsession
with magazines and beloved storybooks from her childhood. She uses the
text and imagery on a page like a map, tracing over it to create a mass
of web-like lines leaving only a faint memory of the original. Katherine
Jackson uses literal text as her inspiration, transcribing it into tiny
illegible chains that merge to form abstractions reminiscent of winter
landscapes and ancient Asian brush painting. Another artist who relentlessly
explores a single theme is Gwenessa Lam. By looking through her window,
we imagine a connection between two worlds, between the inside and outside.
Her paintings conjure up memories of weather and the seasons yet we
can never quite see what's really behind the panes of glass.
Like the transformative passage-ways that microscopes and windows provide
into other worlds, these and the other artists included in the exhibition
are giving us a glimpse into what lies beneath.
 Holton
Mandell
November 4- December 9, 2006
William Holton and Henry Mandell both use self-governing systems of
mark-making, one- with the hand, using his own fingerprints dipped in
charcoal, the other, using text fed into a computer, turned and spun
into abstraction. Their work shares a common thread, a way of understanding
the physical world through an act of creating that imitates nature.
Both artists start with a mark- a fingerprint, a text, a letter, computer
software, an eyedropper full of paint, and allow the mark to develop
a kind of mind of its own, a system which, with their collaboration,
self-repeats until it forms a completed image.
Holton, originally from Knoxville, Tennessee and now living in NYC,
spends months applying charcoal fingerprints, or dots of paint, in a
continual feedback loop of mark-making that builds upon itself. By introducing
a unit, such as a dot or a fingerprint, into an environment that has
been randomly found or created on the surface, formal elements such
as mark, color, and form become dependent upon and informed by what
already exists. A subtle intention is brought into chaos. This results
in a point of transition, in which artistic decisions are increasingly
less influential as the work unfolds its own autonomy. The work builds
to a size and depth that seems both cosmic and atomic.
Mandell, from Larchmont, NY, feeds text into highly sophisticated computer
software, transforming the letters into a kind of brush, using text
as a ready-made set of symbols. The original order and flow of the text
remains unchanged, what is being described in a literary sense, disappears
and reappears as patterns. As the overall body of work moves from recognizable
letters to topological patterns there is kind of nesting in, a dynamical
system of language dissolving into line, line into pattern, pattern
into form. These are then printed on paper in large scale, as though
the text had thrown itself into the world with abandon.
Inspired by the self-regulating patterns in nature, Holton and Mandell
create large scale drawings and prints on paper that each reflects,
through divergent technologies, the way the natural world evolves systems.
As Holton states, the work exists on the precipice of a mysterious,
liminal point of transition, the point where molecules of water as a
vast collective suddenly “know” to fundamentally change
from liquid to vapor; or when a flock of birds, swarm of bees, or network
of neurons collectively begins to “think” as one.
 Michael
Torlen is a painter and Associate Professor
of Visual Art at Purchase College, State University of New York, Purchase,
New York. He received his BFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and his
MFA from Ohio State University. Mr. Torlen was born in San Diego, California
into a Norwegian, commercial tuna fishing family. His series, Songs
for My Father, is a body of over 1,000 landscape works inspired by his
interest in the Maine coast, the sea, National Parks and the northern
romantic tradition. His most recent work, Sanger Fra Mor (Songs From
Mother) is a narrative, figurative project using commercial fishing,
oral history and autobiographic images to explore the persistence of
memory, identity and maritime history.
Mr. Torlen has been an artist-in-residence at Weir Farm, Wilton, CT.,
and at Acadia National Park in Bar Harbor, ME. His work is in the collection
of the Neuberger Museum of Art, the Newark Museum, and in many corporate
collections including IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank, J.P.Morgan & Co.,
and Deloitte & Touche.
 Lou
Hicks and Selena Trieff
November 20- December 31, 2004
Both Lou Hicks and Selina Trieff are long-established artists
of talent and stature. Both have been painting for decades, working on
large canvases in fleshy oils, sharing a robust and masculine physicality
alongside an inherent spirituality in their work. The strong influence
of abstract expressionism, its physicality and responsiveness, is filtered
through their own personal and introspective visions. Miranda Fine Arts
is honored to present the work of these two powerhouse women.
Lou Hicks, originally from Chicago and now from Greenwich
CT, began painting relatively late in life, diving into a tradition of
abstraction she seemed well rooted in from the start. Hicks has exhibited
her oil paintings around the world, from New York to Arizona, Ireland
to Japan. Her true subject matter is the surface manipulations of paint
colors and layers. These are paintings of ephemeral, disparate shapes
that often represent places that are of importance to her, places with
particular feelings, such as awe, peace and calm. The places are excuses
to create canvases that invite the viewer to wander through the often
dark, rich layers of pigment. Using subject matter fueled by place, her
work is about deep, rich, earth color and texture, inspired by the space,
color, and cultural differences found in her travels around the world.
The layering evokes an element of time- serene, calm and quiet, while
the more raw physicality of the paint keeps the viewer energetically engaged.
Selina Trieff, from New York City, has been painting and
exhibiting for over 50 years. One of the most extraordinary artists of
her generation, she was born in Brooklyn in 1934, studied at the Art Students
League in New York in 1951 with Morris Kantor, at Brooklyn College from
1951 to 1955 with Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko, and in 1955 with Hans
Hoffman. Of her early experience at Brooklyn College the artist has said,
"From Reinhardt and Rothko I learned that art is a philosophical
exploration and that art making involves a mysterious process of self-discovery."
Although she most often paints figures and animals, Trieff considers herself
an abstract artist, the painting being most importantly about composition,
form, shape and color. In their abstraction her figures possess an enigmatic
spiritual quality, enhanced by the use of rough gold halos around the
figures and in the backgrounds, creating an element of anticipation and
mystery. The strangeness of the figures and creatures grabs ones attention,
they are archetypal and iconographic figures, with a pensive theatrical
quality and an eerily playful sense of humor.
Reception is free and open to the public, and the gallery is handicapped
accessible.
Call 914.318.7178 for more information
 Mona
Dukess, William Holton, Sarah Lutz
and Francie Randolph
"Elemental"
October 16- November 13, 2004
Miranda Fine Arts announces its fall exhibit, “Elemental,”
with artists Mona Dukess, William Holton, Sarah Lutz and Francie Randolph
on view from October 16, through November 13, 2004, with an Artist Reception
on Saturday, October 16, 6-8 pm. Elemental, defined by the OED as “composed
of, produced by, or pertaining to the four elements, earth, air, fire,
or water, or to any one of them,” describes both the imagery and
the working process of these four artists. Each examines and reexamines
nature from a scientific, artistic and conceptual perspective; creating
abstract, resonant imagery that is re-informed by a continual re-interpretation
of natural forms.
Mona Dukess, of Larchmont, NY, has for many years distilled
botanical images into essential forms – the flower form examined
objectively, flattened, dissected and reconstructed in conceptual ways.
With a post -modern approach, she uses scanner and computer, often scanning
actual plant forms as well as her own drawings, then transfers images
into handmade paper pulp of organic plant materials in a technique similar
to that of creating watermarks. As if these papers were archeological
finds, or pages taken from ancient books, the pieces are small, delicately
brittle and often translucent, installed without the barriers of glass
or frames, conveying a sense of delicacy and strength, beauty and survival.
William Holton, originally from Knoxville, Tennessee and
now a resident of New York City, is interested in self-regulating systems
in nature and how they can be applied, through art, to human experience
and perception. In his paintings he introduces a consistent unit or mark,
such as a dot or fingerprint, into an environment that has been randomly
found or created on the surface of the work. Formal elements such as line,
color and form are introduced, dependent on and informed by what already
exists. A subtle intention is brought into chaos. This results in a feedback
loop of mark-making that builds upon itself, until the work envelops itself
in its own autonomy, finally existing on the precipice of a mysterious
infinite point of transition.
Sarah Lutz, from NYC, is a painter who, while rooted in
an abstract tradition, makes clear references to the natural world.
The images depicted, while not recognizable per se, are believable
as objects and exist naturally within their environment. Imaginary,
organic life forms exist within a world that often makes reference to
the hard-edged reality of the man-made world. Her latest series,
Suspended Gravities, refers directly to one of the many dichotomies
present in the work. Lutz is interested in co-mingling that which
is grounded and seemingly ordinary with things ethereal and unknown. A
painterly tension exists in these paintings because they are at once familiar
and unexpected.
Francie Randolph, from Truro, MA, unites photography, digital
technology and traditional painting. Her recent work is about reflection
and metamorphosis, about looking into the depths, specifically deep into
the sea. Photographing, cropping, duplicating, mirroring and layering
images, she visually produces an endless variety of new organisms. A common
burr becomes a crawling anemone, a thistle transforms into a coral reef.
She then combines the photography with traditional painting and glazing
techniques. All the work is technologically altered- nature manipulated
and viewed through a liquid lens. Although it is water, which sustains
life on the most basic level, its depths are also the most enigmatic,
home to both wondrous new life forms and to monstrous unknown danger.
It is these depths, within the ocean, our world around us, and within
ourselves, that she explores. Reception is free and open to the public,
and the gallery is handicapped accessible.
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Fernando
Martinez
"Seen and Unseen"
Paintings and Sculpture
April 17 - May 19. 2004
Argentinean-born Westchester NY artist Fernando Martinez is best
known for his hand-made furniture, whimsical creations that are both functional
and utterly fantastic. Exploring the aesthetic aspects of utilitarian
objects whose context or placement has been changed offers a lyrical quality
that makes his furniture playfully unique, creating a sense of a forgotten
purpose, a past tense, a found object whose original use is archaic yet
visually compelling.Less known is Martinez’s fine art; where he
pushes his concepts to a more minimal and formalist end. His furniture-like
sculpture, works on paper and plaster “paintings” imply a
function yet never disclose that function’s full face. His breaking
down of the boundaries between form and function expand the notion of
the utilitarian as a purely visual language. His architectural objects
seem to have lost some mysterious original purpose, existing in a state
between the clear and unclear, the functional and the non-functional.
In Martinez’s view, the language of elemental form is an ancient
form of visual communication, one that recognizes the reverential import
of an ancient language of awe and innocence.
Martinez’s plaster works are minimal wall pieces, embedded rope
and wood in the rough gypsum becoming metaphors for the hidden life within
all things. He explores the decay and aging of materials, as though the
embedded materials are being slowly revealed by the erosion of time peeling
back the layers. Patinas emerge that carry undefined meaning, again implying
a lost former function, and the objects become like archeological artifacts,
evocative and mysterious, communicating to us in their interior language
of shape, form, decay. Martinez explores fragmentation, the aging of materials,
and an imagined historicism that invokes a narrative once vibrant and
alive but no longer accessible to our modern minds.
Pared down to an almost literal fragment are Martinez’s drawings,
often almost miniature in scale, they again evoke that unknown past, like
pieces of ancient manuscript pages revealing only a glimpse of their complete
story. An imagined history married to its worn fabric, they are gems of
obscure stories, beautiful slivers that evoke but never fully reveal.
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 Elise
Freda
"Gesture and Geometry"
Encaustic Paintings
November 8- December 20, 2003
Encaustic painting has found a resurgence with contemporary artists.
A technique dating back to the 5th century BC, encaustic is wax that has
been fused with heat. The term encaustic means literally "to burn
in." Pigment is mixed with hot melted wax and painted, quickly, onto
a hard surface, drying fast into a rich satin film, dense with color.
Contemporary artists have adapted encaustic in diverse ways, from traditional
hot methods to cold wax mediums. All lend the work a dense richness unmatched
in other mediums, and artists very often use wax in combination with other
techniques, creating a varied and exciting visual effect.
Elise Freda is no exception, having found her voice in this fast intuitive
medium. Her work is elegant, abstract and colorful, often immersing
collage elements in the dense wax. Her current exhibition, Gesture and
Geometry, at Henaine Miranda Contemporary Art Projects in Port Chester
NY, explores her intuitive relationship with the tension between geometric
organization and fluid calligraphic line, rendered in loose sensuous wax.
Says Freda, "Painting is for me the process of discovering what I
want to see. For this reason abstraction is a natural and intuitive choice.
During the process of painting I find my image. I am constantly seeking
to find a balance between tension and harmony, spontaneity and control,
empty space and active space, depth and surface."
Freda has been painting in encaustic since 1994. Wax is ideal for
building a painting with layers, as it hardens in minutes. She also uses
the wax to both reveal and conceal elements in the images; wax is perfect
for creating veils that partially obscure. It can be transparent or opaque
and everything in between, the color can be dense and powerful or sheer
and soft. This allows Freda to contrast high intense reds with diffuse
whites, hot yellows with cool blues, often incorporating a black calligraphic
line to tie into the overall structure. Her work is geometric, but the
depth of the medium allows the hard edge geometry to seem organic, fluid
and natural, merging cerebral abstraction with an ancient instinctual
medium.
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 Serdar
Arat, Edith De Chiara, William Holton,
Katherine Jackson
"Nature,
Language, Symbol; The Poetics of Drawing"
September 13-
October 18, 2003
Do we-can we- ever learn to read the world? Perhaps our literacy, for
all that it gives us, deprives us of other sensitivities,” says
Katherine Jackson, one of the artists featured in the dynamic new show
at Henaine Miranda Contemporary Art Projects this September.
Each of the four artists in the exhibit, Serdar Arat, Edith De Chiara,
William Holton and Katherine Jackson, explore a visual expression that
encounters nature, language, and symbol in a visually philosophical way.
Inventing a new way of “speaking” about the everyday world
they inhabit, each artist is a thoughtful collaborator with their muse.
All four artists interpret forms in their environment, natural to manmade,
organic to textual, and ask the viewer to reinterpret customary ways of
reading surface, context and material.
Serdar Arat, a native of Turkey and now a resident of Westchester County,
NY, constructs a massive universe from a nondescript ordinary object-
a simple air vent. Attracted to its simplicity of design and functionality,
Arat reduces the vent to an abstract symbol, a kind of ubiquitous yet
unseen vision that appears all around us. A vent can also transmit sound,
as in a telephone receiver or a speaker, both round shaped tools that
amplify our voices, our language, so we speak and hear each others thoughts
and ideas over great distances. This along with his use of deep blacks
alongside high whites gives his work a sense of rhythm and sound. The
idea of a “vent,” something that takes in and expels air,
that, in a sense- breathes, imbues it with a deeper more contemplative
dimension. Vaulting to over 8 feet in length and/or width, the large-scale
work can seem like an East/West amalgamated altarpiece. Arat has shown
his work internationally, including at Galeri Nev in Istanbul, Monique
Goldstrom in NYC, and White Columns in NYC, to name a few, and was the
recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.
Edith De Chiara, a resident of Queens, NY, “writes” her visual
language using the tools of a feminine past. Using an abstract sensibility,
she explores thread as a metaphor for line, inspired by the universal
quality of the material and the attributes of the thread- flexibility,
delicacy and tensile strength. The imagery derives from the place where
language and nature meet, incorporating aerial maps, ancient languages
and manuscripts, as well as the shapes of nature’s elements- rocks,
plants, and seedpods. Drawing or stitching a kind of visual history,
she emphasizes the continuity of history by creating her own invented
calligraphic language. De Chiara has had solo exhibitions at Lehman College
Art Gallery in Bronx, NY and Pfizer Inc in NYC, is Professor Emeritus
at Lehman College, City University of NY and her work is in the collections
of Pfizer Inc. She has published numerous articles on art therapy and
the effects of art on children with special needs.
William Holton, originally from Knoxville Tennessee and now living in
New York, applies pigment, wax and paint to paper, then repeatedly scrapes
back to reveal an image that consists of its own “written”
history. Interested in synthesizing control with lack of control, he allows
a new language to emerge out of the natural development of the material
under his hands, a way of collaborating with nature in the combination
of his organic drawn forms and his process. Inspired by the minute cellular
building blocks of nature, he obsessively reiterates organic forms in
tiny drawn shapes, only to obliterate them over and over again, a building
and shedding of layers emulating biological growth. The contemplative
organic quality of Holton’s large scale works invoke a spiritual
sensibility, as he investigates the dialogue and interdependence of his
private vision and the natural evolution of his materials. Holton received
hi MFA from University of Pennsylvania, and shown nationally including
the Hunter Museum, Chattanooga TN, Knoxville Museum of Art in Knoxville
TN, and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston Salem, NC.
He was the recipient of the Nell Welliver Award and a nominee for the
Dedalus Foundation Fellowship as well as an NEA Grant.
Katherine Jackson, from Somerville MA, uses language in the most direct
form. Using actual passages-poems, prose, song lyrics, she writes them
out in a minute obsessive hand, writing over the lines backward and forward,
moving back and forth between lines of “writing” and lines
of “drawing.” The text becomes virtually illegible, the viewer
can almost but not quite “read” the surface as it becomes
a humming series of rhythmic pulses, denying us the literal story but
by its very form creating a whole new one- catching us dead center between
our visual and verbal ways of experiencing the world. From a distance,
her tiny graphite lines on chalky white panel appear like strings of silver
pearls across the surface, whereupon closer examination we are confronted
with an interwoven intimate musical network, a new text, calling us to
enter and question our reading of literature in a visually compelling
way. Jackson received a Ph.D. in English Literature at Harvard University,
and is a Fifth Year Certificate from the School of the Museum of Fine
Arts in Boston MA. She is represented by OH+T Gallery in Boston MA and
Zero Station Gallery, South Portland ME.
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Igor
Gálvez and Julio Valdez
"The Magic
of Myth"
Contemporary
Paintings and Works on Paper
June 5-July
14, 2003
Igor Gálvez, from Mexico, alongside with New York artist Julio Valdez,
explore some of the myths in human life.
Igor Gálvez, artist born in Mexico City, who has shown his work in more
than 20 exhibits in Mexico and the United States, prefers the human form,
but is not interested in painting what is seen, but in the feeling that
is drawn out by the subject. Through his gray, distorted figures,
Gálvez tries to get people to see what they normally would not. "I
want to see the other side of something, where ugly can be pretty,"
said the 30 year old artist who also works as a freelance illustrator.
Gálvez is a 1993 recipient of the Carrillo Gil Contemporary Museum of
Art Award for Young Artists and was honored in 1995 and 1998 with a scholarship
from the National Arts and Culture Institute in Mexico City. Gálvez, received
his MFA at the National University of Mexico.
Julio Valdez is a New York City-based painter, printmaker and mixed media
artist whose work has been exhibited internationally. He has received
numerous prestigious international awards, including an Artist-in-Residence
Fellowship at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City; the Silver Palette
for Painting at the XXXeme Festival International de la Peinture,
Cagnes-sur-Mer, France; and the Grand Prize at the XVIII National Biennial
in the Dominican Republic. He was a Full Time Instructor at Altos de Chavon,
the Parsons School of Design affiliate in the Dominican Republic. In
New York City, he has been an Instructor in Printmaking at the Extended
Studies Department in Cooper Union, and has conducted numerous workshops
and presentations at The Museum for African Art, The Morgan Library, The
Bronx Museum and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Since 1996, he has been
a Teaching Artist for The Studio in a School Association, Inc.
Julio Valdez was invited in 2002 by the New York City Metropolitan Transit
Authority (MTA), to create a mixed media work for its Fine Art Poster
Program with the theme "The MTA Network". Julio Valdez was awarded
a $7,000 fellowship in the category of Printmaking/Drawing by The New
York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) for 2003.
Igor Gálvez and Julio Valdez both with a sense of magic expressionism
and fantastic realism explore the multicultural myths present in the human
being.
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Sergio
Gutman, Barbara Korman, Susan Manspeizer
"Returning
to Form"
Contemporary
Sculpture
April 5-May
24, 2003
Henaine Fine Arts and Miranda Fine Arts of Port Chester NY join forces
as Henaine/Miranda Contemporary Art for a new exhibition of contemporary
sculpture. Constructivist Mexican sculptor Sergio Gutman will be featured
alongside New York artists Barbara Korman and Susan Manspeizer, expanding
the concepts of constructivist abstract sculpture.
Gutman, born in Mexico city to first generation Lithuanian and Ukrainian
immigrants, ventures into geometric abstraction, which distinguishes him
from the Mexican tradition of muralist masters, as does his quest to integrate
his deep spiritual convictions into a formal abstract use of line and
color. His medium is wood; his paintings and wall reliefs are austere
and earthy, incorporating found objects, furniture parts and scrap wood.
He often integrates a faucet, knob handle, saw, or keyhole as perfect
forms in themselves rather than as objects of meaning. He also carves
Hebrew letters into his work, "for their visual presence, and for
their plastic function," but also for their symbolic meaning, a way
for him to explore his cultural and religious heritage. His work is minimal
and meditative, reminiscent of walls discovered in abandoned houses, warm,
slightly mysterious, revealing glimpses of the internal structure and
meaning behind a physical façade. Gutman has shown from Mexico City to
Barcelona to New York.
Korman, a Bronx, NY artist, creates sculptures that are personal landscapes,
informed by nature. Her work grows out of a desire to capture some part
of her response to the juxtaposition of textures and forms, and the intimacy
and vastness of space. The wood wall reliefs seem to unfold as water amongst
sky, rock, land and plants interpreted in flattened geometric planes,
as rock pushed up from a great force below. Her work in bronze celebrates
the geology and evolution of the earth, the flow, compression, emergence
and erosion of matter, seeming to marry rough-hewn rock forms with ideas
of standing trees, debris, and fallen branches. Korman is a 2002 recipient
of the Council of American Artists Societies Award and the Yosemite Renaissance
XVII Award for Sculpture.
Manspeizer, from Pound Ridge NY, expresses human emotion through the
abstract concept of the gesture of a line in space. Bringing the concept
of line from the linear gesture of drawing or paint stroke out into three-dimensional
space, her thinking leads one to feel the sensation of a painted stroke
in space. Painted wood and metal are the vehicle, cutting, painting and
manipulating the wood into a painted line that soars into the space around
you, using saturated and intense color to emphasize both form and emotion.
As though you are watching a painter or even a waltz in action, her sculptures
are bird-like, human-like, seeming to fly and move in space in a whirling
forceful dance. Manspeizer was the recipient of the 2001 Amelia Peabody
Sculpture Award, and in 2002 had a solo exhibition at the Midland center
for the Arts Museum in Michigan.
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UnfoldingObject
"UnfoldingObject:
Critical Selections.1"
January
11 thru February 1, 2003
Miranda Fine Arts and Henaine Fine Art combine forces with unfoldingobject
for an exciting exhibition spanning both galleries, drawing from the school
of unfoldingobject's monthly critique sessions. Featuring Lindsay Aromin,
Cynthia Atwood, Lucinda Bliss, Laura Grunwerg, William Holton, Keri Leary,
Susan Newbold, Cynthia Newman, Nancy Ruben, Greg Sclight, Sylvie Tiecher,
Karen Vogel, Saya Woolfalk. Includes contemporary drawing, painting, photography,
collage, sculpture, digital imaging and mixed media.
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Michael
Torlen
"Landscape
& Memory"
Prints &
Paintings
November 23-December
21, 2002
Purchase college professor Michael Torlen joins with Purchase Alum Patricia
Miranda, owner and Gallery Director of Miranda Fine Arts, for a unique
collaboration of Purchase talent. Torlen's prints combine the traditional
printmaking techniques of monoprint and plate lithography with up to date
digital imaging for an effect that is both multi-layered and direct. A
2001 Weir farm fellow, Torlen's painterly landscapes, inspired by his
Nordic heritage, balance the tensions between abstraction and representation.
Ed Smith
The Small Work; Sculptures and Prints
March 16- May 4, 2002
Miranda Fine Arts, in Port Chester, NY, is privileged to announce an
exhibition of sculptor Ed Smith's new work. The Small Work; Sculptures
and Prints, includes a suite of small prints and sculptures which continue
Smith's inimitable forging ahead in the tradition of artists like-Goya,
Rodin, Guston. Always heroic, Smith takes on the great issues of life-
love and war, the yearning of humanity, birth and death, the horror and
the beauty. Edward Albee calls his work "unearthings, excavations
of the mind…shards and remains which tell us two stories, one which
we can clearly read and the other-the resonance!- which we can but dimly
envision." Smith's raw abstractions are soulful, mournful, yet with
a childlike idealistic quality. His plaster sculptures are sensual, full
of hope amongst horror. The delicate 3" x 4" etchings are reminiscent
of Rembrandt meeting Bosch, tiny gems of history and glory. Smith's work
is always compelling, always provocative.
William Tucker says about Smith,
"To search for belief in an age of irony and indecision is a lonely
and unfashionable pursuit." In our cynical time, Smith holds to his
steadfast conviction in the human story as a mythological one, an Odyssey
in the midst of MTV and Celebrity Week. After September 11, this doesn't
seem like such a lonely or fruitless path. This exhibition is a reflection
on recent events, as well as being a meditation on human nature, its grief
and cruelty alongside its hope and redemption.
Smith's work is museum collections
around the world, including the British Museum, Yale University, Albright
Knox Museum, Royal Museum of Fine Art in Antwerp to name a few. He teaches
at Bard College in NY and The New York Studio School, and lives in Chatham,
NY. |
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Porcelain is a material usually thought of as delicate, fragile and transparent. Considered the primary clay from which all other clays are derived, it comes from the earth as pure white, strong and durable. It attracted me because of these qualities rather than its transparency. Working on a large scale has presented problems that have been a challenge to solve. I have chosen to work with this clay because it has allowed me to explore issues in the landscape without necessarily making literal interpretations. it can be minimal and sometimes surreal in its starkness
