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Exhibition
1/7/2025
Darker Days
Jan 11 - Feb 9, 2025
Cora Cohen
Vincent Como
Judith Fleishman
Vivian Springford
Ken Weathersby
There is beauty to be found in darkness, but often it eludes us. And even when we find it, we can struggle to define its qualities and bring them to light. Darker Days presents the work of five artists reflecting upon the mysterious and transformative essence of darkness, as well as its unsettling effect.
Like countless artists throughout history, Ken Weathersby has explored the transitory nature of existence by creating paintings of human skulls.
His recent series includes dozens, among them The Cloud, in which Weathersby references the Baroque genre of Vanitas with a meticulous and surprisingly economical technique.
Hours: Saturday, Sunday 12-6
Appointment required, even during regular hours.
DM, call or email.
Abaton Project Room
11 Broadway, Suite 965
(917) 227-6357
abatonprojectroom@protonmail.com
1/7/2025
Darker Days
Jan 11 - Feb 9, 2025
Cora Cohen
Vincent Como
Judith Fleishman
Vivian Springford
Ken Weathersby
There is beauty to be found in darkness, but often it eludes us. And even when we find it, we can struggle to define its qualities and bring them to light. Darker Days presents the work of five artists reflecting upon the mysterious and transformative essence of darkness, as well as its unsettling effect.
Like countless artists throughout history, Ken Weathersby has explored the transitory nature of existence by creating paintings of human skulls.
His recent series includes dozens, among them The Cloud, in which Weathersby references the Baroque genre of Vanitas with a meticulous and surprisingly economical technique.
Hours: Saturday, Sunday 12-6
Appointment required, even during regular hours.
DM, call or email.
Abaton Project Room
11 Broadway, Suite 965
(917) 227-6357
abatonprojectroom@protonmail.com
Exhibition
12/13/2024
Pierogi 30: a group exhibition
Exhibition Dates: 21 Nov–21 Dec, 2024
Closing reception event with live music:
6-8pm, Thursday Dec 19
Location: 394 Broadway 3rd Flr NYC
"Pierogi is proud to present our Thirtieth Anniversary Exhibition, opening November 21, 2024. We would like to thank and celebrate everyone who made Pierogi what it is by presenting works by many of the artists who have participated in exhibitions over the last thirty years. It will be an eclectic and expanding group of work by eighty+ artists. We will also present images from past exhibitions and projects on monitors throughout the gallery.
Pierogi opened in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on North 9th Street in September 1994. Williamsburg doesn’t look the same as it did thirty years ago but it was around that time and before (in the mid-to-late 1980s) that visual artists flooded into Brooklyn and created multiple communities and an international destination for savvy art viewers. Pierogi’s reputation for a unique unconventional approach is grounded in this context. Over time Williamsburg’s example fostered numerous artist communities throughout Brooklyn and Queens which continue to expand."
Including work by—
John Phillip Abbott • Meredith Allen • Justin Amrhein • Reed Anderson • Karen Arm • Olive Ayhens • Michael Ballou • Ron Baron • Gregory Barsamian • Lothar Baumgarten • Louise Belcourt • John Berens • Jean Blackburn • Matthew Blackwell • Lee Boroson • Nadja Bournonville • Nina Bovasso • Katherine Bradford • David Brody • Phong Bui • Tom Burckhardt • Beth Campbell • Scott Campbell • Steven Charles • Amanda Church • Dawn Clements • Brian Conley • Kevin Cooley • Stephanie Costello • Caroline Cox • Hugo Crosthwaite • Daniel Davidson • Dan Devine • Brian Dewan • Nicole Eisenman • James Esber • Jane Fine • Amanda Finn • Tony Fitzpatrick • Matt Freedman • Peter Garfield • Rico Gatson • Kate Gilmore • Elliott Green • Stacy Greene • Donald Groscost • Willy Hartland • Douglas Henderson • Jonathan Herder • Linda Herritt • Elana Herzog • Peter Hildebrand • Jen Hitchings • Chan Kok Hooi • Sharon Horvath • James Hyde • Patrick Jacobs • Yun-Fei Ji • Kim Jones • Stephen Kaltenbach • Dana Kane • Sermin Kardestuncer • Darina Karpov • Lisa Kereszi • Kim Kimball • Wendy Klemperer • David Kramer • Larry Krone • William Pope.L • William Lamson • Robert Lazzarini • Yoon Lee • Maria Levitsky • Mark Lombardi • Ati Maier • Matt Marello • Karen Margolis • Chris Martin • Bob Marty • Alicia McCarthy • Sean Mellyn • Shari Mendelson • Ryan Mrozowski • Johan Nobell • Nicky Nodjoumi • John O’Connor • Andrew Ohanesian • David Opdyke • Roxy Paine • Marilla Palmer • Gary Panter • Bruce Pearson • Joyce Pensato • Shannon Plumb • William Powhida • Susan Rabinowitz • Mark Reynolds • Carol Saft • Katia Santibanez • David Scher • Jonathan Schipper • David Shapiro • Ward Shelley • James Siena • Amy Sillman • Adam Simon • Guy Richards Smit • Bob & Roberta Smith • Michael Smith • Robert Smithson • Tim Spelios • Lisa Stefanelli • Cathy Stone • Greg Stone • John Stoney • Tavares Strachan • Kurt Strahm • Lynn Talbot • Jude Tallichet • Kate Teale • Christophe Thompson • Fred Tomaselli • Jim Torok • Sarah Walker • Ken Weathersby • Lawrence Weiner • Martin Wilner • Mika Yokobori • Charles Yuen • Daniel Zeller • Mary Ziegler"
***
12/13/2024
Pierogi 30: a group exhibition
Exhibition Dates: 21 Nov–21 Dec, 2024
Closing reception event with live music:
6-8pm, Thursday Dec 19
Location: 394 Broadway 3rd Flr NYC
"Pierogi is proud to present our Thirtieth Anniversary Exhibition, opening November 21, 2024. We would like to thank and celebrate everyone who made Pierogi what it is by presenting works by many of the artists who have participated in exhibitions over the last thirty years. It will be an eclectic and expanding group of work by eighty+ artists. We will also present images from past exhibitions and projects on monitors throughout the gallery.
Pierogi opened in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on North 9th Street in September 1994. Williamsburg doesn’t look the same as it did thirty years ago but it was around that time and before (in the mid-to-late 1980s) that visual artists flooded into Brooklyn and created multiple communities and an international destination for savvy art viewers. Pierogi’s reputation for a unique unconventional approach is grounded in this context. Over time Williamsburg’s example fostered numerous artist communities throughout Brooklyn and Queens which continue to expand."
Including work by—
John Phillip Abbott • Meredith Allen • Justin Amrhein • Reed Anderson • Karen Arm • Olive Ayhens • Michael Ballou • Ron Baron • Gregory Barsamian • Lothar Baumgarten • Louise Belcourt • John Berens • Jean Blackburn • Matthew Blackwell • Lee Boroson • Nadja Bournonville • Nina Bovasso • Katherine Bradford • David Brody • Phong Bui • Tom Burckhardt • Beth Campbell • Scott Campbell • Steven Charles • Amanda Church • Dawn Clements • Brian Conley • Kevin Cooley • Stephanie Costello • Caroline Cox • Hugo Crosthwaite • Daniel Davidson • Dan Devine • Brian Dewan • Nicole Eisenman • James Esber • Jane Fine • Amanda Finn • Tony Fitzpatrick • Matt Freedman • Peter Garfield • Rico Gatson • Kate Gilmore • Elliott Green • Stacy Greene • Donald Groscost • Willy Hartland • Douglas Henderson • Jonathan Herder • Linda Herritt • Elana Herzog • Peter Hildebrand • Jen Hitchings • Chan Kok Hooi • Sharon Horvath • James Hyde • Patrick Jacobs • Yun-Fei Ji • Kim Jones • Stephen Kaltenbach • Dana Kane • Sermin Kardestuncer • Darina Karpov • Lisa Kereszi • Kim Kimball • Wendy Klemperer • David Kramer • Larry Krone • William Pope.L • William Lamson • Robert Lazzarini • Yoon Lee • Maria Levitsky • Mark Lombardi • Ati Maier • Matt Marello • Karen Margolis • Chris Martin • Bob Marty • Alicia McCarthy • Sean Mellyn • Shari Mendelson • Ryan Mrozowski • Johan Nobell • Nicky Nodjoumi • John O’Connor • Andrew Ohanesian • David Opdyke • Roxy Paine • Marilla Palmer • Gary Panter • Bruce Pearson • Joyce Pensato • Shannon Plumb • William Powhida • Susan Rabinowitz • Mark Reynolds • Carol Saft • Katia Santibanez • David Scher • Jonathan Schipper • David Shapiro • Ward Shelley • James Siena • Amy Sillman • Adam Simon • Guy Richards Smit • Bob & Roberta Smith • Michael Smith • Robert Smithson • Tim Spelios • Lisa Stefanelli • Cathy Stone • Greg Stone • John Stoney • Tavares Strachan • Kurt Strahm • Lynn Talbot • Jude Tallichet • Kate Teale • Christophe Thompson • Fred Tomaselli • Jim Torok • Sarah Walker • Ken Weathersby • Lawrence Weiner • Martin Wilner • Mika Yokobori • Charles Yuen • Daniel Zeller • Mary Ziegler"
***
Curating
11/16/2024
Anne Eastman: Careless Water
at Kent Place Gallery
November 14 – Monday, January 6, 2025
Anne Eastman’s exhibition includes layered, glass forms containing both found and hand-made images, as well as a hanging mobile and scattered sculpture created from ripped fragments of the daily newspaper, and a looping video work.
Eastman has said about the nature of her art in this show, “The fragments of the newspaper, in this case, all torn from the New York Times, leading up to, during and in the aftermath of the Pandemic of 2020 and the last election year, are strung up in a mobile, floating, wobbling, drifting in space, or alternatively, pressed between glass, obscured by the Sumi ink spilled directly on the glass. The glass pieces are double sided works, or mirrored, reflecting the verso side of the fragments of newspaper. They are chance collages, a play between incomplete images and texts from a distant, indecipherable and familiar past. A new video is presented alongside these works, overlapping recordings shot on my iPhone in 2024, a document of movements through the material and the mediated world.”
Gallery Director Ken Weathersby said of Eastman’s art, “Her works, and her arrangement of them in our gallery are beautiful. The artist has made the whole space part of her statement, even including wooden benches from our art class as sculptural supports. The fantastic inclusiveness and open-endedness of her forms seems to speak to the complicated tensions and ongoing conflicts of this moment, and how we receive understanding of those things in fragments and over time.”
Anne Yuki Eastman (b. 1973, San Francisco) is a Japanese and Irish-American artist based in Brooklyn, NY, and Nikko, Japan. Raised in Singapore and Tokyo, she holds a BA in Cultural Anthropology from Smith College and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale School of Art. Her work engages with personal archeology, complicating mediums and cultural boundaries. She has presented her work in solo exhibitions in New York, Vienna, and Zurich, and more recently exhibited at Anomaly Gallery in Tokyo, and previously in two-person and group exhibitions across the US and internationally. In 2015, Eastman founded an artist residency at Troedsson Villa in Nikko, Japan. She has also curated exhibitions in Tokyo and Nikko, most recently at Tetsuo’s Garage, an artist-run space she established in 2017.
For an appointment to view the exhibition, contact Gallery Director Ken Weathersby: weathersbyk@kentplace.org
Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ
* * *
11/16/2024
Anne Eastman: Careless Water
at Kent Place Gallery
November 14 – Monday, January 6, 2025
Anne Eastman’s exhibition includes layered, glass forms containing both found and hand-made images, as well as a hanging mobile and scattered sculpture created from ripped fragments of the daily newspaper, and a looping video work.
Eastman has said about the nature of her art in this show, “The fragments of the newspaper, in this case, all torn from the New York Times, leading up to, during and in the aftermath of the Pandemic of 2020 and the last election year, are strung up in a mobile, floating, wobbling, drifting in space, or alternatively, pressed between glass, obscured by the Sumi ink spilled directly on the glass. The glass pieces are double sided works, or mirrored, reflecting the verso side of the fragments of newspaper. They are chance collages, a play between incomplete images and texts from a distant, indecipherable and familiar past. A new video is presented alongside these works, overlapping recordings shot on my iPhone in 2024, a document of movements through the material and the mediated world.”
Gallery Director Ken Weathersby said of Eastman’s art, “Her works, and her arrangement of them in our gallery are beautiful. The artist has made the whole space part of her statement, even including wooden benches from our art class as sculptural supports. The fantastic inclusiveness and open-endedness of her forms seems to speak to the complicated tensions and ongoing conflicts of this moment, and how we receive understanding of those things in fragments and over time.”
Anne Yuki Eastman (b. 1973, San Francisco) is a Japanese and Irish-American artist based in Brooklyn, NY, and Nikko, Japan. Raised in Singapore and Tokyo, she holds a BA in Cultural Anthropology from Smith College and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale School of Art. Her work engages with personal archeology, complicating mediums and cultural boundaries. She has presented her work in solo exhibitions in New York, Vienna, and Zurich, and more recently exhibited at Anomaly Gallery in Tokyo, and previously in two-person and group exhibitions across the US and internationally. In 2015, Eastman founded an artist residency at Troedsson Villa in Nikko, Japan. She has also curated exhibitions in Tokyo and Nikko, most recently at Tetsuo’s Garage, an artist-run space she established in 2017.
For an appointment to view the exhibition, contact Gallery Director Ken Weathersby: weathersbyk@kentplace.org
Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ
* * *
Curating
9/25/2024
Image: Emi Winter “Jaguar”, Oil on canvas, 52” x 141”, 2023
Emi Winter: Two Worlds
at Kent Place Gallery
The Kent Place Gallery presents an exhibition of paintings by Emi Winter from Monday, September 16 through Friday, October 25, 2024. An opening reception with the artist will be Friday Sept. 20, 5-7pm.
This exhibition is titled “Two Worlds”. Winter’s oil paintings in this show are rooted in the physical, visible world, but also speak to other levels of experience. At monumental scale and with convincing color and handling, the images show us a jaguar stalking the landscape, mounds of stones, and other images of nature, combining directness of touch with symbols that point beyond the literal.
Gallery Director Ken Weathersby states, “I’m so happy to bring this powerful body of work to Kent Place. There is an intensity of vision in these pieces that seems connected to the complicated time we live in, as well as to how we process all of that in our dreams and emotions. These paintings also have resonance with deeper histories. One painting seems in conversation with Giovanni di Paolo’s 1398 painting ‘The Creation of the World’. Other stories we may perceive in the work reflect Winter’s connection with Oaxaca, Mexico, where she grew up.”
Winter says of her art, “Often I paint what’s right in front of me.” She adds, though, that she titled the show “Two Worlds” because it seems straightforward, and yet leaves an openness for interpretation by those who view it.
Emi Winter was born in Oaxaca, Mexico in 1973. She holds an MFA with Honors from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, and a BA in Visual Arts from Oberlin College. Her work has been seen in numerous solo exhibitions at galleries in New York, Oaxaca, Mexico, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dusseldorf, Germany, and Basel, Switzerland, and has been awarded prestigious fellowships and residencies. She currently lives in New Jersey and Oaxaca, Mexico.
For an appointment to view the exhibition, contact Gallery Director Ken Weathersby: weathersbyk@kentplace.org
Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ
# # #
9/25/2024
Image: Emi Winter “Jaguar”, Oil on canvas, 52” x 141”, 2023
Emi Winter: Two Worlds
at Kent Place Gallery
The Kent Place Gallery presents an exhibition of paintings by Emi Winter from Monday, September 16 through Friday, October 25, 2024. An opening reception with the artist will be Friday Sept. 20, 5-7pm.
This exhibition is titled “Two Worlds”. Winter’s oil paintings in this show are rooted in the physical, visible world, but also speak to other levels of experience. At monumental scale and with convincing color and handling, the images show us a jaguar stalking the landscape, mounds of stones, and other images of nature, combining directness of touch with symbols that point beyond the literal.
Gallery Director Ken Weathersby states, “I’m so happy to bring this powerful body of work to Kent Place. There is an intensity of vision in these pieces that seems connected to the complicated time we live in, as well as to how we process all of that in our dreams and emotions. These paintings also have resonance with deeper histories. One painting seems in conversation with Giovanni di Paolo’s 1398 painting ‘The Creation of the World’. Other stories we may perceive in the work reflect Winter’s connection with Oaxaca, Mexico, where she grew up.”
Winter says of her art, “Often I paint what’s right in front of me.” She adds, though, that she titled the show “Two Worlds” because it seems straightforward, and yet leaves an openness for interpretation by those who view it.
Emi Winter was born in Oaxaca, Mexico in 1973. She holds an MFA with Honors from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, and a BA in Visual Arts from Oberlin College. Her work has been seen in numerous solo exhibitions at galleries in New York, Oaxaca, Mexico, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dusseldorf, Germany, and Basel, Switzerland, and has been awarded prestigious fellowships and residencies. She currently lives in New Jersey and Oaxaca, Mexico.
For an appointment to view the exhibition, contact Gallery Director Ken Weathersby: weathersbyk@kentplace.org
Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ
# # #
Exhibition
6/13/2024
Sword Thumbs
Real Tinsel Gallery
June 1-June 23, 2024
Milwaukee, WI
“Sword Thumbs” features thirteen artists whose work subverts, destabilizes, disrupts, and surprises with a deceptively simple set of oppositional forces that give rise to universes of excited possibilities.
with Chris Arabadjis, Cat Birk, Michelle Brandemuelle, Jane Fox Hipple, Rebecca Kaufman, Matthew Kluber, Paul Lee, Kris Lindskoog, Lester Monzon, Rafael Franciso Salas, Lauren Salazar, Laurel Sparks, Ken Weathersby
Curated by Kande Van De Loo
6/13/2024
Sword Thumbs
Real Tinsel Gallery
June 1-June 23, 2024
Milwaukee, WI
“Sword Thumbs” features thirteen artists whose work subverts, destabilizes, disrupts, and surprises with a deceptively simple set of oppositional forces that give rise to universes of excited possibilities.
with Chris Arabadjis, Cat Birk, Michelle Brandemuelle, Jane Fox Hipple, Rebecca Kaufman, Matthew Kluber, Paul Lee, Kris Lindskoog, Lester Monzon, Rafael Franciso Salas, Lauren Salazar, Laurel Sparks, Ken Weathersby
Curated by Kande Van De Loo
Curator Tour
5/30/2024
Saturday, June 1, 2024, at 2 pm
A special tour of The Apex Is Nothing exhibition at Pratt Manhattan Gallery.
Curators Ken Weathersby and John O'Connor will provide an in-depth look at some of the featured works, explain their approach to grouping these artists, and delve into the theoretical underpinnings that connect the works.
The Apex Is Nothing is inspired by Alfred Jensen, whose paintings and drawings maintain a center of energy between abstract form and an array of idea structures. Jensen's thinking was shaped by his deep interest in realities outside of the strict visual concerns of painting or drawing, such as philosophy, physics, mathematics, and calendrical time. The other featured artists in the exhibition similarly draw upon diverse systems, including statistical data, language, and text, and mapped social or political matrices.
***
5/30/2024
Saturday, June 1, 2024, at 2 pm
A special tour of The Apex Is Nothing exhibition at Pratt Manhattan Gallery.
Curators Ken Weathersby and John O'Connor will provide an in-depth look at some of the featured works, explain their approach to grouping these artists, and delve into the theoretical underpinnings that connect the works.
The Apex Is Nothing is inspired by Alfred Jensen, whose paintings and drawings maintain a center of energy between abstract form and an array of idea structures. Jensen's thinking was shaped by his deep interest in realities outside of the strict visual concerns of painting or drawing, such as philosophy, physics, mathematics, and calendrical time. The other featured artists in the exhibition similarly draw upon diverse systems, including statistical data, language, and text, and mapped social or political matrices.
***
The Kalm Report - walkthrough of "The Apex Is Nothing"
5/25/2024
From James Kalm aka Loren Munk:
"The Apex is Nothing at the PRATT MANHATTAN GALLERY Curated by Ken Weathersby and John O’Connor-- James Kalm is always on the lookout for art, that strays beyond the comfortable confines of conventional figurative and commercially viable abstraction, where it enters the realm of the excentric/compulsive. “The Apex Is Nothing” has collected together some of contemporary painting’s enigmatic practitioners who have been influenced by the master system maker Alfred Jensen. Curated by John O’Connor and Ken Weathersby this show presents works by: Mel Bochner, Becky Brown, Mike Cloud, Charles Gaines, Steffani Jemison, Xylor Jane, Alfred Jensen, Ellen Lesperance, Chris Martin, John O’Connor, Bruce Pearson, Leslie Roberts, Jorinde Voigt, Melvin Way, George Widener. Although varied, many of these pieces share common structures like; the grid, number patterns, word games, weaving and text. These works seem to ride the border between academic conceptual mathematics, and obsessive outsider urgency. This program was recorded May 22, 2024."
"The Apex Is Nothing" at Pratt Manhattan Gallery (link)
5/25/2024
From James Kalm aka Loren Munk:
"The Apex is Nothing at the PRATT MANHATTAN GALLERY Curated by Ken Weathersby and John O’Connor-- James Kalm is always on the lookout for art, that strays beyond the comfortable confines of conventional figurative and commercially viable abstraction, where it enters the realm of the excentric/compulsive. “The Apex Is Nothing” has collected together some of contemporary painting’s enigmatic practitioners who have been influenced by the master system maker Alfred Jensen. Curated by John O’Connor and Ken Weathersby this show presents works by: Mel Bochner, Becky Brown, Mike Cloud, Charles Gaines, Steffani Jemison, Xylor Jane, Alfred Jensen, Ellen Lesperance, Chris Martin, John O’Connor, Bruce Pearson, Leslie Roberts, Jorinde Voigt, Melvin Way, George Widener. Although varied, many of these pieces share common structures like; the grid, number patterns, word games, weaving and text. These works seem to ride the border between academic conceptual mathematics, and obsessive outsider urgency. This program was recorded May 22, 2024."
"The Apex Is Nothing" at Pratt Manhattan Gallery (link)
Online Event
5/19/2024
view here
5/19/2024
The Brooklyn Rail
The Apex is Nothing Artists Bruce Pearson and Chris Martin and curators Ken Weathersby and John O'Connor joined Rail contributor Amanda Millet-Sorsa for a conversation. The New Social Environment #1067 Recorded on Wednesday, May 15, 2024 at 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacificview here
review
5/8/2024
"The Apex Is Nothing" at Pratt Manhattan Gallery reviewed in the New York Observer.
https://observer.com/2024/05/review-the-apex-is-nothing-new-pratt-manhattan-gallery/
5/8/2024
"The Apex Is Nothing" at Pratt Manhattan Gallery reviewed in the New York Observer.
https://observer.com/2024/05/review-the-apex-is-nothing-new-pratt-manhattan-gallery/
curating
3/20/2024
image: Alfred Jensen, "The Pythagorean Theorem", 1964, (detail)
The Apex Is Nothing
April 5 - June 8, 2024
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 4, 2024, 6-8pm
Pratt Manhattan Gallery
144 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Curated by Ken Weathersby and John O’Connor
Artists:
Mel Bochner
Becky Brown
Mike Cloud
Charles Gaines
Steffani Jemison
Xylor Jane
Alfred Jensen
Ellen Lesperance
Chris Martin
John O’Connor
Bruce Pearson
Leslie Roberts
Jorinde Voigt
Melvin Way
George Widener
Exhibition Statement
Alfred Jensen created works of art whose conception was subject to extra-aesthetic imperatives, even to the point of forcing “un-aesthetic” decisions.
This show exhibits essentially abstract works by a range of artists whose visual power is likewise catalyzed by the incursion or absorption of factors beyond the picture plane. The center of energy in Jensen’s paintings and drawings sits on a boundary between abstract form and an array of idea structures. His intensely visual production isn’t representational in any conventional way, yet seems forcefully shaped by realities outside the strict visual concerns of painting or drawing (concerns like philosophy, numbering systems, mathematical and scientific ideas).
For other artists in this show such areas include statistical data, language and text, mapped social or political matrices, or a pointedly tactile reality that contests composed visual relations. This artwork can embody an abstraction that seems formed, or even excitingly deformed and pushed into unexpected shapes, by collision with the “extra-aesthetic”. In viewing such work, we feel the tension of our desire to pull what we see into an aesthetic framework, to recuperate what might seem like surprising choices and unusual structures back into a pictorial focus, to reconcile their obvious (if inscrutable) logic with the more familiar logic we expect to order the parts of a picture.
Ideas invested in art in this strange way can seem to present an invitation to solve a puzzle, to grasp superimposed patterns, or to finally resolve odd symmetries. Yet, this process of thoughtful looking more likely leads not to an answer, but to a space. Not to a something, but rather to a more valuable nothing.
--Ken Weathersby
3/20/2024
image: Alfred Jensen, "The Pythagorean Theorem", 1964, (detail)
The Apex Is Nothing
April 5 - June 8, 2024
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 4, 2024, 6-8pm
Pratt Manhattan Gallery
144 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Curated by Ken Weathersby and John O’Connor
Artists:
Mel Bochner
Becky Brown
Mike Cloud
Charles Gaines
Steffani Jemison
Xylor Jane
Alfred Jensen
Ellen Lesperance
Chris Martin
John O’Connor
Bruce Pearson
Leslie Roberts
Jorinde Voigt
Melvin Way
George Widener
Exhibition Statement
Alfred Jensen created works of art whose conception was subject to extra-aesthetic imperatives, even to the point of forcing “un-aesthetic” decisions.
This show exhibits essentially abstract works by a range of artists whose visual power is likewise catalyzed by the incursion or absorption of factors beyond the picture plane. The center of energy in Jensen’s paintings and drawings sits on a boundary between abstract form and an array of idea structures. His intensely visual production isn’t representational in any conventional way, yet seems forcefully shaped by realities outside the strict visual concerns of painting or drawing (concerns like philosophy, numbering systems, mathematical and scientific ideas).
For other artists in this show such areas include statistical data, language and text, mapped social or political matrices, or a pointedly tactile reality that contests composed visual relations. This artwork can embody an abstraction that seems formed, or even excitingly deformed and pushed into unexpected shapes, by collision with the “extra-aesthetic”. In viewing such work, we feel the tension of our desire to pull what we see into an aesthetic framework, to recuperate what might seem like surprising choices and unusual structures back into a pictorial focus, to reconcile their obvious (if inscrutable) logic with the more familiar logic we expect to order the parts of a picture.
Ideas invested in art in this strange way can seem to present an invitation to solve a puzzle, to grasp superimposed patterns, or to finally resolve odd symmetries. Yet, this process of thoughtful looking more likely leads not to an answer, but to a space. Not to a something, but rather to a more valuable nothing.
--Ken Weathersby
Exhibition
2/29/2024
My painting “205 (CHP)” will be part of the group show
Borderline: Mapping Narratives
with Pierogi Gallery in collaboration with L’Space
L’Space,
524 W 19th St., NYC
Opening reception Feb 29, 2024, 6-8pm
On view through April 13
***
2/29/2024
My painting “205 (CHP)” will be part of the group show
Borderline: Mapping Narratives
with Pierogi Gallery in collaboration with L’Space
L’Space,
524 W 19th St., NYC
Opening reception Feb 29, 2024, 6-8pm
On view through April 13
***
Exhibition
12/21/2023
Ken Weathersby : Dream Objects
at 57w57 Arts
Opening January 7, 2024
I bring my lunch to my studio, and after I eat, I work with the crumpled wrappings, boxes, and empty bottles, sometimes using a little tape. The process is unrationalized and spontaneous. It happens over and over, at a certain time of day, the way dreaming happens every night. I photograph the result. The paper, plastic and glass are discarded or recycled. The dream object is the photograph.
57w57 Arts
501 5th Ave. Suite 701,
New York, NY 10017
***
12/21/2023
Ken Weathersby : Dream Objects
at 57w57 Arts
Opening January 7, 2024
I bring my lunch to my studio, and after I eat, I work with the crumpled wrappings, boxes, and empty bottles, sometimes using a little tape. The process is unrationalized and spontaneous. It happens over and over, at a certain time of day, the way dreaming happens every night. I photograph the result. The paper, plastic and glass are discarded or recycled. The dream object is the photograph.
57w57 Arts
501 5th Ave. Suite 701,
New York, NY 10017
***
Exhibition
12/20/2023
12/20/2023
Ken Weathersby: Remember Forget
at Window Unit
through Jan. 21, 2024
12 Vose Ave., South Orange, NJ
***
***
curating
11/29/2023
“Preparing the Girl” Mary Simpson at Kent Place Gallery
Kent Place Gallery will present the solo exhibition Preparing the Girl by artist Mary Simpson from November 30 –December 20, 2023. There will be a reception for the artist from 5–7 pm on Thursday, November 30.
At the Metropolitan Museum’s Gustave Courbet retrospective in 2008, Mary Simpson saw an artwork that stopped her in her tracks. The painting, unfinished but dated to the 1850s, depicts a room filled with young women surrounding an adolescent girl slumped in a chair.
In the 1920s the painting was purchased by Smith College with the title Preparing the Bride. Five decades later, however, art historians uncovered a letter in which Courbet used the title Preparing the Girl for Her Wake. Smith College X-rayed the painting and concluded that, indeed, the central figure was originally painted naked with her head slumped forward. Only later did Courbet add the white dress and reposition the head.
Although some art historians dispute the new title (most prominently Linda Nochlin), Simpson’s own research corroborates that the painting’s original subject was the ritual preparation of a corpse. But what has made the painting stick with her for fifteen years is neither the corpse nor the bride. It’s the difficulty in distinguishing between the two.
Images of young women are too often idealized as sex objects or property or, in the context of true-crime podcasts and Law & Order: SVU, fetishized as gruesome victims. The duality of this painting shows the art historical legacy of this phenomenon and speaks to how it continues to resonate.
A full scale, high-resolution reproduction of Courbet’s painting covers the back wall of the gallery. On the surrounding walls, a suite of abstract paintings by Simpson grapple with messages that Courbet’s work seems to send. These oil paintings on wood panels contain expressive, gestural marks that contest and play against their internal geometries and their outer frames.
Gallery Director Ken Weathersby says about this exhibition, “This is a show that is both conceptually meaningful and full of visual poetry. Simpson locates an intense and poignant area for thought in her response to the Courbet work. Her interest in creating this show for us was especially energized by her understanding of the context Kent Place School and the identities of the students who will see the show and live with the exhibition.”
Simpson says, “I would love to have a conversation with interested students about the painting, the mystery within its legacy, a bit about Courbet and his critical significance to the transition of French romanticism to realism, and about how often women in classical paintings are either depicted as beautiful, like bridal subjects, or inert, either dead or sleeping. I’m also interested in the fact that all fourteen girls in this painting are adolescents, the same age as the group of students I would meet with.”
Mary Simpson has exhibited widely, with solo and two-person shows in New York and across the U.S., as well as internationally. She holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University, was part of the Whitney Independent Study Program, and is the recipient of many awards and residencies. She has taught visual art at Columbia University, Cooper Union, and George Washington University, among others. She was born in Anchorage, Alaska.
Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ. Gallery hours are school days, Monday – Friday, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm. Visitors please check in at the CFI Main Entrance reception desk.
For an appointment to visit with the Gallery Director, email weathersbyk@kentplace.org
For more information call (908) 273-0900, or visit www.kentplace.org.
# # #
11/29/2023
“Preparing the Girl” Mary Simpson at Kent Place Gallery
Kent Place Gallery will present the solo exhibition Preparing the Girl by artist Mary Simpson from November 30 –December 20, 2023. There will be a reception for the artist from 5–7 pm on Thursday, November 30.
At the Metropolitan Museum’s Gustave Courbet retrospective in 2008, Mary Simpson saw an artwork that stopped her in her tracks. The painting, unfinished but dated to the 1850s, depicts a room filled with young women surrounding an adolescent girl slumped in a chair.
In the 1920s the painting was purchased by Smith College with the title Preparing the Bride. Five decades later, however, art historians uncovered a letter in which Courbet used the title Preparing the Girl for Her Wake. Smith College X-rayed the painting and concluded that, indeed, the central figure was originally painted naked with her head slumped forward. Only later did Courbet add the white dress and reposition the head.
Although some art historians dispute the new title (most prominently Linda Nochlin), Simpson’s own research corroborates that the painting’s original subject was the ritual preparation of a corpse. But what has made the painting stick with her for fifteen years is neither the corpse nor the bride. It’s the difficulty in distinguishing between the two.
Images of young women are too often idealized as sex objects or property or, in the context of true-crime podcasts and Law & Order: SVU, fetishized as gruesome victims. The duality of this painting shows the art historical legacy of this phenomenon and speaks to how it continues to resonate.
A full scale, high-resolution reproduction of Courbet’s painting covers the back wall of the gallery. On the surrounding walls, a suite of abstract paintings by Simpson grapple with messages that Courbet’s work seems to send. These oil paintings on wood panels contain expressive, gestural marks that contest and play against their internal geometries and their outer frames.
Gallery Director Ken Weathersby says about this exhibition, “This is a show that is both conceptually meaningful and full of visual poetry. Simpson locates an intense and poignant area for thought in her response to the Courbet work. Her interest in creating this show for us was especially energized by her understanding of the context Kent Place School and the identities of the students who will see the show and live with the exhibition.”
Simpson says, “I would love to have a conversation with interested students about the painting, the mystery within its legacy, a bit about Courbet and his critical significance to the transition of French romanticism to realism, and about how often women in classical paintings are either depicted as beautiful, like bridal subjects, or inert, either dead or sleeping. I’m also interested in the fact that all fourteen girls in this painting are adolescents, the same age as the group of students I would meet with.”
Mary Simpson has exhibited widely, with solo and two-person shows in New York and across the U.S., as well as internationally. She holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University, was part of the Whitney Independent Study Program, and is the recipient of many awards and residencies. She has taught visual art at Columbia University, Cooper Union, and George Washington University, among others. She was born in Anchorage, Alaska.
Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ. Gallery hours are school days, Monday – Friday, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm. Visitors please check in at the CFI Main Entrance reception desk.
For an appointment to visit with the Gallery Director, email weathersbyk@kentplace.org
For more information call (908) 273-0900, or visit www.kentplace.org.
# # #
Exhibition
11/24/2023
Alphabet Soup
curated by E.E. Ikeler
Featuring works by Raque Ford, Rebecca Watson Horn, Lauren Anaïs Hussey, Blake O’Brien, Alyse, Ronayne, Sarah Tortora and Ken Weathersby
Saturday, November 11 - Sunday, December 10, 2023
Opening Reception: Friday, November 10 6-8pm
In the works here, text functions across a range of legibility. In Raque Ford’s drawing “Friendship Vanity”, a collage of words overlap and reveal each other through the negative space between letters. Like particles in the big bang, each letterform seems to be expanding outward and away from the word that it originates from. Her piece “honey flower” is a long ball chain stringing together various plexiglass letters and shapes; unrelated to each other or to the piece’s title.
In the three untitled works by Rebecca Watson Horn I see the letter forms as collapsing the distinction between mark-making and handwriting. The letters remain upright while landing somewhere between cursive and block lettering, and the wide tooth of the burlap surface forces a kind of scumbling effecteven in the letters with the most clarity.
Blake O’Brien’s pieces play not only with various languages, but also with the design of different letter forms that he borrows and manipulates from historical sources. His piece “Herma (Courage!)” repeats the word “courage” in various languages and typefaces, and encapsulates as its centerpiece: a painted book by the same name. The floating question marks in his teardrop-shaped “Untitled” remind me of the image recently captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, showing the actively forming starsHerbig-Haro 46/47 that form the uncanny appearance of a question mark in outer space.
Alyse Ronayne often samples typography from a range of sources; including activist graphic design and cowbrands used by female cattle ranchers. Although “Untitled (light fuschia)” doesn’t technically include any text, the pink lines and curves function as deconstructed symbols derived from and inspired by these sources.
In another example of works without actual language, Lauren Anaïs Hussey’s paintings appear at first to include scribbled text and accidental inkblots. In fact, this layer of marks comes from the artist’s drawing practice, where she connects dots and splotches with lines. In a studio visit she described the process as creating constellations–another invocation of the stars.
Speaking of the cosmos, the title of Sarah Tortora’s piece is “NGC 224”, which is the technical name for the Andromeda Galaxy. The letters A-N-D-R-O-M-E-D-A are made in glazed ceramic and stacked from front to back, teetering on a steel rod that supports them. It speaks to the artist’s longstanding interest in mythology and how language names and shapes history.
Rounding out the show are paintings from two bodies of work by
Ken Weathersby: starting with three from his “Crossouts” series from 2022. These understated works seem at first to show handwriting underneath a layer of scribbles that function as a frantic act of erasure (in fact–the under layer is also scribbles). These are paired with “305”, from Weathersby’s “Dream Paintings” series. A brown and white flower pattern is rendered with Weathersby’s characteristic sensitivity, only to be interrupted by a cut-out in the shape of an inverted V, reminiscent of “black triangle” UFOs, famously spotted above Phoenix in 19976. Inset in this shape is a handwritten recollection of one of the artist’s dreams. Although Weatherby’s dream doesn’t include any failed attempts to read or write, it seems fitting to include a work that directly references the subconscious.
--EE Ikeler
11/24/2023
Alphabet Soup
curated by E.E. Ikeler
Featuring works by Raque Ford, Rebecca Watson Horn, Lauren Anaïs Hussey, Blake O’Brien, Alyse, Ronayne, Sarah Tortora and Ken Weathersby
Saturday, November 11 - Sunday, December 10, 2023
Opening Reception: Friday, November 10 6-8pm
In the works here, text functions across a range of legibility. In Raque Ford’s drawing “Friendship Vanity”, a collage of words overlap and reveal each other through the negative space between letters. Like particles in the big bang, each letterform seems to be expanding outward and away from the word that it originates from. Her piece “honey flower” is a long ball chain stringing together various plexiglass letters and shapes; unrelated to each other or to the piece’s title.
In the three untitled works by Rebecca Watson Horn I see the letter forms as collapsing the distinction between mark-making and handwriting. The letters remain upright while landing somewhere between cursive and block lettering, and the wide tooth of the burlap surface forces a kind of scumbling effecteven in the letters with the most clarity.
Blake O’Brien’s pieces play not only with various languages, but also with the design of different letter forms that he borrows and manipulates from historical sources. His piece “Herma (Courage!)” repeats the word “courage” in various languages and typefaces, and encapsulates as its centerpiece: a painted book by the same name. The floating question marks in his teardrop-shaped “Untitled” remind me of the image recently captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, showing the actively forming starsHerbig-Haro 46/47 that form the uncanny appearance of a question mark in outer space.
Alyse Ronayne often samples typography from a range of sources; including activist graphic design and cowbrands used by female cattle ranchers. Although “Untitled (light fuschia)” doesn’t technically include any text, the pink lines and curves function as deconstructed symbols derived from and inspired by these sources.
In another example of works without actual language, Lauren Anaïs Hussey’s paintings appear at first to include scribbled text and accidental inkblots. In fact, this layer of marks comes from the artist’s drawing practice, where she connects dots and splotches with lines. In a studio visit she described the process as creating constellations–another invocation of the stars.
Speaking of the cosmos, the title of Sarah Tortora’s piece is “NGC 224”, which is the technical name for the Andromeda Galaxy. The letters A-N-D-R-O-M-E-D-A are made in glazed ceramic and stacked from front to back, teetering on a steel rod that supports them. It speaks to the artist’s longstanding interest in mythology and how language names and shapes history.
Rounding out the show are paintings from two bodies of work by
Ken Weathersby: starting with three from his “Crossouts” series from 2022. These understated works seem at first to show handwriting underneath a layer of scribbles that function as a frantic act of erasure (in fact–the under layer is also scribbles). These are paired with “305”, from Weathersby’s “Dream Paintings” series. A brown and white flower pattern is rendered with Weathersby’s characteristic sensitivity, only to be interrupted by a cut-out in the shape of an inverted V, reminiscent of “black triangle” UFOs, famously spotted above Phoenix in 19976. Inset in this shape is a handwritten recollection of one of the artist’s dreams. Although Weatherby’s dream doesn’t include any failed attempts to read or write, it seems fitting to include a work that directly references the subconscious.
--EE Ikeler
Curating
10/11/2023
USM 2023 National Juried Painting Exhibition, Visiting Artist Lecture
Mon, 10/09/2023 by: Caroline Neese
The Museum of Art in The University of Southern Mississippi’s (USM) School of Performing and Visual Arts presents the 2023 National Juried Painting Exhibition on Oct. 9-Nov. 3. The exhibition’s juror, USM alumnus Ken Weathersby, will hold a public lecture on Thursday, November 2, at 5:30 p.m., in the Gonzales Auditorium, Liberal Arts Building Room 108, with a reception and awards ceremony to follow in the Gallery of Art and Design, located in the George Hurst Building on the Hattiesburg campus. Free and open to the public.
The 2023 National Juried Painting Exhibition is a biennial exhibition that began in 2017 to showcase the best contemporary works by artists across the country. This year’s exhibition features 41 contemporary artworks by artists from 22 states, including five Mississippi artists. Featured works include an array of artistic styles and approaches to painting, from portraits and landscapes to abstract works and mixed-media constructions. The exhibition and events were made possible in part by the generous support from Partners for the Arts.
USM alumnus Ken Weathersby returns to his alma mater to serve as judge of the National Juried Painting Exhibition and deliver a public lecture.
“I’m happy that I’m reconnecting in this way to my alma mater, and that I can contribute to what is a great bi-annual event for the Museum of Art,” said Weathersby.
Weathersby earned his BFA from Southern Miss and has an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He was born in Gulfport, Miss., and has lived in the New York City area since 1990.
“As I jury this exhibition and come back to visit Southern Miss, I’m especially looking forward to seeing Professor Jim Meade, who was important to me in my life as both an artist and a teacher of art,” said Weathersby. “I want to give my support and encouragement to this program which was foundational to my path in life.”
Weathersby's return to Southern Miss as a visiting artist is especially important to him as he was deeply influenced as a student when professional artists would visit and lecture.
Of his time as an art student at Southern Miss, Weathersby says, “I was able to meet inspiring artists, as when painters like Hiram Williams and Thornton Willis visited Southern Miss, spoke to us students, and exhibited their work. In drawing, painting, and design classes, I learned substantial approaches to visual language—ways of thinking about how shapes, colors, textures, and the other elements can be organized to create expression. All those things are still with me when I’m in the studio.”
Weathersby has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, with notable solo shows at Minus Space (Brooklyn), Pierogi Gallery (New York), One River Gallery (Englewood, NJ), and NIAD Art Center Gallery (Richmond, CA). His work has been included in many group exhibitions as well. He has received numerous awards and residencies, including the Individual Artist Painting Fellowship by the Mid-Atlantic Arts Council/NJSCA (in 2008 and 2016). His work has been reviewed in The Washington Post, Hyperallergic, the Huffington Post, Brooklyn Magazine, the New American Paintings blog, Two Coats of Paint, Painter’s Bread, and elsewhere.
Two Coats of Paint, said of his work, “Weathersby seems to be reminding the viewer that abstract paintings may seem formalist, or, to some viewers, simply decorative, but they are in fact part of a larger timeline rooted in history, politics, and philosophy. With wit and charm, he fuses his interests in Modern graphic design, art history, and ancient sculpture. Weathersby makes erudition seem easy.”
The artists featured in the National Juried Painting Exhibition include: Soulaf Abas, Sally Binard, Rachel Borgman, Sarah Cecil, Ruth Chase, Robyn Cooper, Christian Duran, Symmes Gardner, Sue Graef, Mary Hardy, Amber Hart, Gregory Hennen, Joseph Holsapple, Jee Hwang, John James, James Kane, Lindsay Keeling, Rosette Knipp, Jonathan Langfield, Ted Larson, Aaron Lubrick, John Markowitz, Andrew Martin, Matthew McHugh, Matthew Mogle, Dawn Inglis Montgomery, Ricardo Moody, Benjamin Murphy, Cathy Osman, Kate Hooray Osmond, Whitson Ramsey, Lorna Ritz, Martina Sciolino, David Smith, Jane Cornish, Smith, Jason Stout, Traci Stover, Jennifer Sugarman, Tim Ulrich, Jacqueline Valenzuela, Stephen Wozniak.
Of special note, this year’s show includes works by 5 Mississippi artists: Mary Hardy, James Kane, Ricardo Moody, Martina Sciolino, and Traci Stover.
The exhibition strives to showcase the work of a multitude of artists and artistic styles.
“We need to see what other people are doing and thinking,” said Weathersby. “In this show I’ve selected what I think are the strongest pieces across many different styles and subjects of painting. There are some common threads, but I was struck by how diverse the submitted work was. That in itself is a statement about culture at the present moment."
The closing reception for the exhibition will be held on November 2 at 7 p.m. in the Gallery of Art and Design. The gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday.
10/11/2023
USM 2023 National Juried Painting Exhibition, Visiting Artist Lecture
Mon, 10/09/2023 by: Caroline Neese
The Museum of Art in The University of Southern Mississippi’s (USM) School of Performing and Visual Arts presents the 2023 National Juried Painting Exhibition on Oct. 9-Nov. 3. The exhibition’s juror, USM alumnus Ken Weathersby, will hold a public lecture on Thursday, November 2, at 5:30 p.m., in the Gonzales Auditorium, Liberal Arts Building Room 108, with a reception and awards ceremony to follow in the Gallery of Art and Design, located in the George Hurst Building on the Hattiesburg campus. Free and open to the public.
The 2023 National Juried Painting Exhibition is a biennial exhibition that began in 2017 to showcase the best contemporary works by artists across the country. This year’s exhibition features 41 contemporary artworks by artists from 22 states, including five Mississippi artists. Featured works include an array of artistic styles and approaches to painting, from portraits and landscapes to abstract works and mixed-media constructions. The exhibition and events were made possible in part by the generous support from Partners for the Arts.
USM alumnus Ken Weathersby returns to his alma mater to serve as judge of the National Juried Painting Exhibition and deliver a public lecture.
“I’m happy that I’m reconnecting in this way to my alma mater, and that I can contribute to what is a great bi-annual event for the Museum of Art,” said Weathersby.
Weathersby earned his BFA from Southern Miss and has an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He was born in Gulfport, Miss., and has lived in the New York City area since 1990.
“As I jury this exhibition and come back to visit Southern Miss, I’m especially looking forward to seeing Professor Jim Meade, who was important to me in my life as both an artist and a teacher of art,” said Weathersby. “I want to give my support and encouragement to this program which was foundational to my path in life.”
Weathersby's return to Southern Miss as a visiting artist is especially important to him as he was deeply influenced as a student when professional artists would visit and lecture.
Of his time as an art student at Southern Miss, Weathersby says, “I was able to meet inspiring artists, as when painters like Hiram Williams and Thornton Willis visited Southern Miss, spoke to us students, and exhibited their work. In drawing, painting, and design classes, I learned substantial approaches to visual language—ways of thinking about how shapes, colors, textures, and the other elements can be organized to create expression. All those things are still with me when I’m in the studio.”
Weathersby has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, with notable solo shows at Minus Space (Brooklyn), Pierogi Gallery (New York), One River Gallery (Englewood, NJ), and NIAD Art Center Gallery (Richmond, CA). His work has been included in many group exhibitions as well. He has received numerous awards and residencies, including the Individual Artist Painting Fellowship by the Mid-Atlantic Arts Council/NJSCA (in 2008 and 2016). His work has been reviewed in The Washington Post, Hyperallergic, the Huffington Post, Brooklyn Magazine, the New American Paintings blog, Two Coats of Paint, Painter’s Bread, and elsewhere.
Two Coats of Paint, said of his work, “Weathersby seems to be reminding the viewer that abstract paintings may seem formalist, or, to some viewers, simply decorative, but they are in fact part of a larger timeline rooted in history, politics, and philosophy. With wit and charm, he fuses his interests in Modern graphic design, art history, and ancient sculpture. Weathersby makes erudition seem easy.”
The artists featured in the National Juried Painting Exhibition include: Soulaf Abas, Sally Binard, Rachel Borgman, Sarah Cecil, Ruth Chase, Robyn Cooper, Christian Duran, Symmes Gardner, Sue Graef, Mary Hardy, Amber Hart, Gregory Hennen, Joseph Holsapple, Jee Hwang, John James, James Kane, Lindsay Keeling, Rosette Knipp, Jonathan Langfield, Ted Larson, Aaron Lubrick, John Markowitz, Andrew Martin, Matthew McHugh, Matthew Mogle, Dawn Inglis Montgomery, Ricardo Moody, Benjamin Murphy, Cathy Osman, Kate Hooray Osmond, Whitson Ramsey, Lorna Ritz, Martina Sciolino, David Smith, Jane Cornish, Smith, Jason Stout, Traci Stover, Jennifer Sugarman, Tim Ulrich, Jacqueline Valenzuela, Stephen Wozniak.
Of special note, this year’s show includes works by 5 Mississippi artists: Mary Hardy, James Kane, Ricardo Moody, Martina Sciolino, and Traci Stover.
The exhibition strives to showcase the work of a multitude of artists and artistic styles.
“We need to see what other people are doing and thinking,” said Weathersby. “In this show I’ve selected what I think are the strongest pieces across many different styles and subjects of painting. There are some common threads, but I was struck by how diverse the submitted work was. That in itself is a statement about culture at the present moment."
The closing reception for the exhibition will be held on November 2 at 7 p.m. in the Gallery of Art and Design. The gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday.
Curating
10/4/2023
Image: “Hearts and Bones (Walt)” (detail view), inkjet collage, oil, acrylic, linseed oil, organza, plaster, wood, 2019-2021
Blake O’Brien: “Staring into the Sun” at Kent Place Gallery
The Kent Place Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of artworks by Blake O’Brien from Friday, September15 through Friday, October 27, 2023.
In his exhibition, “Staring into the Sun”, O’Brien shares a constellation of new works, rich, shaped paintings placed in eccentric relation to each other around the gallery’s walls. The works are dense, colorful, and supported by unique, hand-made stretcher frames, often in the shape of an ellipse. These oval paintings suggest human eyes, looking back at viewers, as well as art-historical forms, like the curved images in the apse of a cathedral. Other paintings contain inserted objects, like books, and in one case, a representation of a different painting.
Gallery Director Ken Weathersby states, “O’Brien’s artworks are literate and complex, drawing upon many cultural strands and references, with buried images of figures as diverse as Samuel Beckett and Britney Spears. At the same time, they speak the silent language of objects—the soulful, mute poetry of color, texture, pattern, shape, and human touch. I’m so happy to see this unique work in our gallery space and for students to spend time with it.”
O’Brien says of his art, “I am trying to make objects that try themselves to simply have purpose, just as we humans try every day to have purpose. They look back on history and wonder what happened.”
Blake O’Brien was born in Gulfport, Mississippi in 1993. He holds a BFA in Painting from the University of Southern Mississippi, and an MFA from Indiana University. He has been awarded an Artist Fellowship Grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission, a Chapter Career Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters, and a Mary Jane McIntire Endowed Fellowship at Indiana University. He was included in New American Paintings issue #141, and Artmaze Magazine issue #20. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
10/4/2023
Image: “Hearts and Bones (Walt)” (detail view), inkjet collage, oil, acrylic, linseed oil, organza, plaster, wood, 2019-2021
Blake O’Brien: “Staring into the Sun” at Kent Place Gallery
The Kent Place Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of artworks by Blake O’Brien from Friday, September15 through Friday, October 27, 2023.
In his exhibition, “Staring into the Sun”, O’Brien shares a constellation of new works, rich, shaped paintings placed in eccentric relation to each other around the gallery’s walls. The works are dense, colorful, and supported by unique, hand-made stretcher frames, often in the shape of an ellipse. These oval paintings suggest human eyes, looking back at viewers, as well as art-historical forms, like the curved images in the apse of a cathedral. Other paintings contain inserted objects, like books, and in one case, a representation of a different painting.
Gallery Director Ken Weathersby states, “O’Brien’s artworks are literate and complex, drawing upon many cultural strands and references, with buried images of figures as diverse as Samuel Beckett and Britney Spears. At the same time, they speak the silent language of objects—the soulful, mute poetry of color, texture, pattern, shape, and human touch. I’m so happy to see this unique work in our gallery space and for students to spend time with it.”
O’Brien says of his art, “I am trying to make objects that try themselves to simply have purpose, just as we humans try every day to have purpose. They look back on history and wonder what happened.”
Blake O’Brien was born in Gulfport, Mississippi in 1993. He holds a BFA in Painting from the University of Southern Mississippi, and an MFA from Indiana University. He has been awarded an Artist Fellowship Grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission, a Chapter Career Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters, and a Mary Jane McIntire Endowed Fellowship at Indiana University. He was included in New American Paintings issue #141, and Artmaze Magazine issue #20. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Exhibition
8/25/2023
6/24/23 - 8/12/23
"Calendar" at Aferro Gallery: a carefully selected array of paintings from different bodies of work of the last three years, the figurative "Skels", "Heads" and "Class Ds", come together with the gestural "Crossouts".
***
8/25/2023
6/24/23 - 8/12/23
"Calendar" at Aferro Gallery: a carefully selected array of paintings from different bodies of work of the last three years, the figurative "Skels", "Heads" and "Class Ds", come together with the gestural "Crossouts".
***
Curating
12/1/2022
“Puno” Katrina Bello at Kent Place Gallery
Kent Place Gallery presents the solo exhibition “Puno”, by artist Katrina Bello from Friday, November 11, 2022 – Friday, January 6, 2023.
The artist grew up in the Philippines, and the title of the show, “Puno”, is the Filipino word for “tree”. It is also the word for “full”, “filled” and “complete”. Working in a variety of media, including charcoal and graphite on heavy paper, Bello examines and interprets trees and forests, sometimes looking at surfaces from inches away and sometimes stepping back to take in a larger scene. The works are large in scale (most of the drawings are 100 inches wide). A horizontally placed thirty-eight-foot-long scroll drawing is laid out on a platform in the gallery, partially still rolled up so that while much is visible, it also retains its mystery. This exhibition spans the development of her artistic practice from the year 2011 to the present.
Gallery Director Ken Weathersby said about this exhibition, “I am thrilled to see Katrina Bello’s works in Kent Place Gallery. The story or song that she coaxes from trees in her art is full of feeling as well as clear-eyed observation. In that way, they feel like a meaningful connection with the beauty of trees and forests, while also in touch with the urgent and dire reality of our current relationship with the natural world.”
Katrina Bello’s art has been shown in many solo and group exhibitions across the US and internationally, and is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including the Wurlitzer Foundation, the Millay Colony and others. Ms. Bello is also founder and facilitator of North Willow art space in Montclair, NJ. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Maryland Institute, College of Art.
12/1/2022
“Puno” Katrina Bello at Kent Place Gallery
Kent Place Gallery presents the solo exhibition “Puno”, by artist Katrina Bello from Friday, November 11, 2022 – Friday, January 6, 2023.
The artist grew up in the Philippines, and the title of the show, “Puno”, is the Filipino word for “tree”. It is also the word for “full”, “filled” and “complete”. Working in a variety of media, including charcoal and graphite on heavy paper, Bello examines and interprets trees and forests, sometimes looking at surfaces from inches away and sometimes stepping back to take in a larger scene. The works are large in scale (most of the drawings are 100 inches wide). A horizontally placed thirty-eight-foot-long scroll drawing is laid out on a platform in the gallery, partially still rolled up so that while much is visible, it also retains its mystery. This exhibition spans the development of her artistic practice from the year 2011 to the present.
Gallery Director Ken Weathersby said about this exhibition, “I am thrilled to see Katrina Bello’s works in Kent Place Gallery. The story or song that she coaxes from trees in her art is full of feeling as well as clear-eyed observation. In that way, they feel like a meaningful connection with the beauty of trees and forests, while also in touch with the urgent and dire reality of our current relationship with the natural world.”
Katrina Bello’s art has been shown in many solo and group exhibitions across the US and internationally, and is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including the Wurlitzer Foundation, the Millay Colony and others. Ms. Bello is also founder and facilitator of North Willow art space in Montclair, NJ. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Maryland Institute, College of Art.
curating
9/11/2022
image: Hilary Devaney, "Dead Horse Bay", (detail)
“Years of Night” Hilary Devaney at Kent Place Gallery
Kent Place Gallery will present the solo exhibition “Years of Night”, by artist Hilary Devaney from Thursday, September 15 – Friday, October 28, 2022. There will be a reception for the artist from 5-7 pm on Friday, September 23.
This show marks the first exhibition at Kent Place Gallery by a Kent Place graduate who is now a practicing professional artist.
Devaney’s exhibition will include a selection of paintings from the last two years. Each work embodies a condensed, layered visual and emotional statement. Images of nature and human-made environments entwine in ways that are both dream-like and reflective of the complicated realities of the present and recent past.
Devaney states that she is an artist “who works primarily in paint to make spirits visible.”, and that “using animals, gravestones, and angels as avatars for subjective experiences, the paintings provide narratives to describe unresolved emotional plots and plot holes.”
Gallery Director Ken Weathersby said about this exhibition, “It’s wonderful to be able to welcome Hilary back to Kent Place as a working artist, having taught her in advanced art courses here more than a decade ago. I am especially gratified to see the evidence of her commitment to her practice in the very powerful works she is bringing to our gallery. I visited her studio over the summer and saw both finished pieces and paintings in progress. Since then she has been using a scale model of our gallery to create just the right constellation and arrangement for this presentation. I believe seeing her art and meeting with her will be a great experience for my current students, and I can’t wait to view the exhibition myself.”
Hilary Devaney lives and works in New York City. She was born in Morristown, NJ in 1992. She graduated from Kent Place School in 2010, and received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting from Columbia University in 2022.
9/11/2022
image: Hilary Devaney, "Dead Horse Bay", (detail)
“Years of Night” Hilary Devaney at Kent Place Gallery
Kent Place Gallery will present the solo exhibition “Years of Night”, by artist Hilary Devaney from Thursday, September 15 – Friday, October 28, 2022. There will be a reception for the artist from 5-7 pm on Friday, September 23.
This show marks the first exhibition at Kent Place Gallery by a Kent Place graduate who is now a practicing professional artist.
Devaney’s exhibition will include a selection of paintings from the last two years. Each work embodies a condensed, layered visual and emotional statement. Images of nature and human-made environments entwine in ways that are both dream-like and reflective of the complicated realities of the present and recent past.
Devaney states that she is an artist “who works primarily in paint to make spirits visible.”, and that “using animals, gravestones, and angels as avatars for subjective experiences, the paintings provide narratives to describe unresolved emotional plots and plot holes.”
Gallery Director Ken Weathersby said about this exhibition, “It’s wonderful to be able to welcome Hilary back to Kent Place as a working artist, having taught her in advanced art courses here more than a decade ago. I am especially gratified to see the evidence of her commitment to her practice in the very powerful works she is bringing to our gallery. I visited her studio over the summer and saw both finished pieces and paintings in progress. Since then she has been using a scale model of our gallery to create just the right constellation and arrangement for this presentation. I believe seeing her art and meeting with her will be a great experience for my current students, and I can’t wait to view the exhibition myself.”
Hilary Devaney lives and works in New York City. She was born in Morristown, NJ in 1992. She graduated from Kent Place School in 2010, and received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting from Columbia University in 2022.
Curating
3/12/2022
Image: “untitled”, 2022, Esperanza Mayobre
(link to review at Artishock Revista)
Esperanza Mayobre: “We wish we could have stayed home”
at Kent Place Gallery
Friday, February 11 through Thursday, March 10, 2022.
Mayobre’s exhibit maps the space of the gallery with stacks of gold bricks and elegant shimmering paintings of golden grids. A photograph documenting a public ceremony sits propped against the wall, and a thin pane of glass is balanced precariously upright between two more bars of gold.
Gallery Director Ken Weathersby states, “Mayobre’s exhibition, seen as individual pieces or as a whole installation, creates beautiful and compelling effects. At the same time there are real events that underpin the images and are woven into the aesthetic experience. The artist, who grew up in Venezuela, is addressing specific history and ongoing problems in her home country. Her visual syntax of precisely painted grids and carefully stacked units relates to minimal and post-minimal art, but the poetic nature of the work is informed by a cultural narrative with a different kind of urgency.
Mayobre says in reference to her work in this show, “To explain the current reality of my home country, Venezuela, is a task that I can’t do. I honestly think while the chaos is happening, no one can…”, but she continues, “…Until not that long ago, the gold mine territory was left alone as a source of national income. The government must protect this territory, the fundamental rights of the indigenous communities that live there, and the ecological concerns of this natural reserve. Increasingly through past years, though, it has become controlled by local mafias, the military, the guerillas, drug trafficking, and transnational corporations. Gold and mineral extraction and commerce are illicit, unplanned, and irresponsible to the ecosystem.”
Esperanza Mayobre is a Brooklyn-based artist that grew up in Caracas, Venezuela. She has exhibited at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art Cornell University, the Fuller Craft Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Museo Eduardo Sivori Buenos Aires, the Queens Museum, The State University of New York Westchester Community College, La Caja Centro Cultural Chacao Caracas, the Bronx Museum, Hallwalls, MIT Cavs, BRIC, The Art Museum of the Americas Washington D.C., the Contemporary Museum of El Salvador, the Incheon Biennial Korea. She is a recipient of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, the Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Residency, the Jerome Foundation Travel Grant, the International Studio and Curatorial Program, Smack Mellon Studio Program, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been in Ar-tishock, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Creative Time Reports, Arte al Día and Art in America. She recently had a solo exhibition at Trestle Gallery.
3/12/2022
Image: “untitled”, 2022, Esperanza Mayobre
(link to review at Artishock Revista)
Esperanza Mayobre: “We wish we could have stayed home”
at Kent Place Gallery
Friday, February 11 through Thursday, March 10, 2022.
Mayobre’s exhibit maps the space of the gallery with stacks of gold bricks and elegant shimmering paintings of golden grids. A photograph documenting a public ceremony sits propped against the wall, and a thin pane of glass is balanced precariously upright between two more bars of gold.
Gallery Director Ken Weathersby states, “Mayobre’s exhibition, seen as individual pieces or as a whole installation, creates beautiful and compelling effects. At the same time there are real events that underpin the images and are woven into the aesthetic experience. The artist, who grew up in Venezuela, is addressing specific history and ongoing problems in her home country. Her visual syntax of precisely painted grids and carefully stacked units relates to minimal and post-minimal art, but the poetic nature of the work is informed by a cultural narrative with a different kind of urgency.
Mayobre says in reference to her work in this show, “To explain the current reality of my home country, Venezuela, is a task that I can’t do. I honestly think while the chaos is happening, no one can…”, but she continues, “…Until not that long ago, the gold mine territory was left alone as a source of national income. The government must protect this territory, the fundamental rights of the indigenous communities that live there, and the ecological concerns of this natural reserve. Increasingly through past years, though, it has become controlled by local mafias, the military, the guerillas, drug trafficking, and transnational corporations. Gold and mineral extraction and commerce are illicit, unplanned, and irresponsible to the ecosystem.”
Esperanza Mayobre is a Brooklyn-based artist that grew up in Caracas, Venezuela. She has exhibited at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art Cornell University, the Fuller Craft Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Museo Eduardo Sivori Buenos Aires, the Queens Museum, The State University of New York Westchester Community College, La Caja Centro Cultural Chacao Caracas, the Bronx Museum, Hallwalls, MIT Cavs, BRIC, The Art Museum of the Americas Washington D.C., the Contemporary Museum of El Salvador, the Incheon Biennial Korea. She is a recipient of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, the Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Residency, the Jerome Foundation Travel Grant, the International Studio and Curatorial Program, Smack Mellon Studio Program, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been in Ar-tishock, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Creative Time Reports, Arte al Día and Art in America. She recently had a solo exhibition at Trestle Gallery.
Exhibition
12/2/2021
12/2/2021
image: "257 (twiggy)", detail
press release--
EMBLEMATA : E.E. Ilkeler and Ken Weathersby
December 4, 2021 - January 20, 2022
Opening reception: Saturday, December 4, 2021, 5 - 8 pm
Pazo Fine Art
press release--
EMBLEMATA : E.E. Ilkeler and Ken Weathersby
December 4, 2021 - January 20, 2022
Opening reception: Saturday, December 4, 2021, 5 - 8 pm
Pazo Fine Art
4228 Howard Ave Kensington, Maryland
Pazo Fine Art is pleased to announce Emblemata, an exhibition curated by John O’Connor and Luis Pazo, featuring paintings by E.E. Ikeler and Ken Weathersby.
Pazo Fine Art is pleased to announce Emblemata, an exhibition curated by John O’Connor and Luis Pazo, featuring paintings by E.E. Ikeler and Ken Weathersby.
The works included in Emblemata explore the spaces between abstraction, ornamentation, and physical, tactile reality. The grid is a primary motif for both artists. Ikeler and Weathersby are in conversation with historical and contemporary artists who have grappled with the grid’s centrality in Western Modernism. Each artist makes sensitive, rigorous, slyly humorous paintings that maintain an equipoise between the functional materials of their supports (stretchers, panel, gesso, raw canvas, tiles, resin) and a shifting and deceptively complex matrix. Ikeler and Weathersby, through their utilization of processes such as inlay, insertion, embedding, parquetry, and mosaic, create highly original artworks that move fluidly between representation, abstraction, and pattern.
An exhibition catalog with text by John O’Connor will be published by Pazo Fine Art.
Exhibition
11/18/2021
image: Ken Weathersby, painting, 1986, coll. of USM Museum of Art
The Museum of Art in The University of Southern Mississippi’s School of Visual and Performing Arts opens an exhibit with works from the Permanent Collection, Nov. 18-Dec. 8 2021 at the Hattiesburg campus.
Works from the Permanent Collection will feature 18-20 pieces. Some featured works on display will include: a pastel drawing by abstract painter Thornton Willis, an optical art painting by New York artist and USM alumnus Ken Weathersby, a collage by French artist Max Papart (1911-1994), and a lithograph by Joan Miro (1893-1983).
11/18/2021
image: Ken Weathersby, painting, 1986, coll. of USM Museum of Art
The Museum of Art in The University of Southern Mississippi’s School of Visual and Performing Arts opens an exhibit with works from the Permanent Collection, Nov. 18-Dec. 8 2021 at the Hattiesburg campus.
Works from the Permanent Collection will feature 18-20 pieces. Some featured works on display will include: a pastel drawing by abstract painter Thornton Willis, an optical art painting by New York artist and USM alumnus Ken Weathersby, a collage by French artist Max Papart (1911-1994), and a lithograph by Joan Miro (1893-1983).
Exhibition
11/13/2020
gallery press release:
MINUS SPACE is pleased to present the solo exhibition Ken Weathersby: Dream Paintings. This is the Montclair, New Jersey-based artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery and it will present a suite of recent paintings that merge abstraction with texts transcribed from the artist’s dreams.
For two decades, Ken Weathersby has produced deeply-inquisitive abstract paintings, reliefs, and sculpture that play with and against established formal conventions and expectations. For his new Dream Paintings, he works within a structured set of aesthetic variables, including size, orientation, materials, and strategy, which according to the artist, parallels our own repetitive sleep / dream / wake circadian rhythms. Each painting in the series combines an abstract or decorative pattern with an inset window publishing a single handwritten narrative in ink on paper recounting a dream the artist recalled having. The dream texts are generally elusive, neither significant or banal, but ambiguous and possibly inert, leaving one to wonder what the dreams of the artist, or our own for that matter, might signify, if anything.
Weathersby’s recent painting entitled 293 (2018) illustrated above, for example, combines an undulating decorative pattern in blush pinks, reds, and oranges interrupted by a cut-out window at bottom right with the following scripted words in black ink on off-white paper: “A colleague recited her boring resume but shocked me when she mentioned her first job. As a child she had worked with a famous and notorious radical film collective. For her it was “point zero”. She had stood in a projection room for no pay, loading reels of film. I drew a horizontal landscape of figures on smooth, heavy paper, using colored ink. The tableau included a woman in a red dress. She appeared twice, side by side but the two images were reflections of one another – left and right reversed. I drew the angular folds of her dress using cooler and warmer reds. A pinpoint highlight, a tiny white circle surrounded by yellow, punctuated the drawing as the brightest moment and was repeated.”
About his new Dream Paintings, Weathersby states, “Dream space may be infected by conscious and mediated aspects, but still remains outside of our commodified, manipulated, externalized, online social unconscious, outside of the grasp of control.” He continues, “Dreams are just as likely banal as fantastic or revealing. Either way, I record them as free content. These narratives interrupt an unfolding series of abstract paintings that are themselves residues of the past, plus impulse, plus accident.”
For further information about Ken Weathersby, his exhibition, and available paintings, please contact the gallery. Available artworks can also be viewed on our new web site, as well as on our Artsy page: www.artsy.net/minus-space.
* * *
11/13/2020
gallery press release:
MINUS SPACE is pleased to present the solo exhibition Ken Weathersby: Dream Paintings. This is the Montclair, New Jersey-based artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery and it will present a suite of recent paintings that merge abstraction with texts transcribed from the artist’s dreams.
For two decades, Ken Weathersby has produced deeply-inquisitive abstract paintings, reliefs, and sculpture that play with and against established formal conventions and expectations. For his new Dream Paintings, he works within a structured set of aesthetic variables, including size, orientation, materials, and strategy, which according to the artist, parallels our own repetitive sleep / dream / wake circadian rhythms. Each painting in the series combines an abstract or decorative pattern with an inset window publishing a single handwritten narrative in ink on paper recounting a dream the artist recalled having. The dream texts are generally elusive, neither significant or banal, but ambiguous and possibly inert, leaving one to wonder what the dreams of the artist, or our own for that matter, might signify, if anything.
Weathersby’s recent painting entitled 293 (2018) illustrated above, for example, combines an undulating decorative pattern in blush pinks, reds, and oranges interrupted by a cut-out window at bottom right with the following scripted words in black ink on off-white paper: “A colleague recited her boring resume but shocked me when she mentioned her first job. As a child she had worked with a famous and notorious radical film collective. For her it was “point zero”. She had stood in a projection room for no pay, loading reels of film. I drew a horizontal landscape of figures on smooth, heavy paper, using colored ink. The tableau included a woman in a red dress. She appeared twice, side by side but the two images were reflections of one another – left and right reversed. I drew the angular folds of her dress using cooler and warmer reds. A pinpoint highlight, a tiny white circle surrounded by yellow, punctuated the drawing as the brightest moment and was repeated.”
About his new Dream Paintings, Weathersby states, “Dream space may be infected by conscious and mediated aspects, but still remains outside of our commodified, manipulated, externalized, online social unconscious, outside of the grasp of control.” He continues, “Dreams are just as likely banal as fantastic or revealing. Either way, I record them as free content. These narratives interrupt an unfolding series of abstract paintings that are themselves residues of the past, plus impulse, plus accident.”
For further information about Ken Weathersby, his exhibition, and available paintings, please contact the gallery. Available artworks can also be viewed on our new web site, as well as on our Artsy page: www.artsy.net/minus-space.
* * *
Curating
9/27/2019
Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Other Mexican Art at Kent Place Gallery
Kent Place Gallery presents an exhibition of Mexican art
Wednesday, September 18 – Friday, October 25, 2019
Reception Wednesday, September 18, 5-7:30 pm.
This exhibition, called “Wings to Fly: Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Other Mexican Voices” draws its title from these words by Frida Kahlo: “Feet, what do I need you for, when I have wings to fly?” The show will fill the gallery with a vibrant and varied constellation of art from different regions of Mexico. It will include works by well-known modern masters as well as contemporary artists, and some artists connected to a range of more ancient traditions. Artworks on display will include black pottery, Day of the Dead art, drawings on amate paper, visionary Huichol art, wood cuts and more.
Of particular note are a classic self-portrait by Frida Kahlo, and a piece executed using carefully cut X-ray films by Oaxacan artist Fransisco Toledo. Toledo passed away on September 6, 2019, at the age of seventy-nine. The multi-talented and influential Toledo was, according to his recent New York Times obituary, regarded by many as Mexico’s greatest living artist.
“Wings to Fly”, coincides with Kent Place School’s fall 2019 Latinx Celebration. Gallery director Ken Weathersby stated, “The peoples of the different regions of Mexico have deep artistic traditions. Through specific methods of using materials or symbols, continuities of meaning have been created over long expanses of time. In some cases, images and ideas have been brought back and rediscovered in altered contexts, blended with different traditions and given fresh meanings. Also there are independent, original discoveries—new styles and ideas emerging in a modern or contemporary context. Each piece in this show was curated exclusively from the collections of Kent Place families. We are grateful to their generosity and respect their wish to remain anonymous.”
Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ. Gallery hours are 9 am to 4 pm, Monday through Friday when school is in session. For more information, call (908) 273-0900 or visit www.kentplace.org .
9/27/2019
Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Other Mexican Art at Kent Place Gallery
Kent Place Gallery presents an exhibition of Mexican art
Wednesday, September 18 – Friday, October 25, 2019
Reception Wednesday, September 18, 5-7:30 pm.
This exhibition, called “Wings to Fly: Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Other Mexican Voices” draws its title from these words by Frida Kahlo: “Feet, what do I need you for, when I have wings to fly?” The show will fill the gallery with a vibrant and varied constellation of art from different regions of Mexico. It will include works by well-known modern masters as well as contemporary artists, and some artists connected to a range of more ancient traditions. Artworks on display will include black pottery, Day of the Dead art, drawings on amate paper, visionary Huichol art, wood cuts and more.
Of particular note are a classic self-portrait by Frida Kahlo, and a piece executed using carefully cut X-ray films by Oaxacan artist Fransisco Toledo. Toledo passed away on September 6, 2019, at the age of seventy-nine. The multi-talented and influential Toledo was, according to his recent New York Times obituary, regarded by many as Mexico’s greatest living artist.
“Wings to Fly”, coincides with Kent Place School’s fall 2019 Latinx Celebration. Gallery director Ken Weathersby stated, “The peoples of the different regions of Mexico have deep artistic traditions. Through specific methods of using materials or symbols, continuities of meaning have been created over long expanses of time. In some cases, images and ideas have been brought back and rediscovered in altered contexts, blended with different traditions and given fresh meanings. Also there are independent, original discoveries—new styles and ideas emerging in a modern or contemporary context. Each piece in this show was curated exclusively from the collections of Kent Place families. We are grateful to their generosity and respect their wish to remain anonymous.”
Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ. Gallery hours are 9 am to 4 pm, Monday through Friday when school is in session. For more information, call (908) 273-0900 or visit www.kentplace.org .
Exhibition
2/1/2019
Chalkboard Chronicles
Artyard, Frenchtown, NJ www.artyard
Feb. 27 - March 4
I'll be drawing on a chalkboard for this show, "The Chalkboard Chronicles".
I start drawing on Feb. 27. The work must be complete by end of day March 1, and will be erased on March 4.
This month-long rotating exhibit is on three large (60 x 60 inch) vintage chalkboards. Twelve artists were invited to create a work of art on the slates, using only a simple piece of white chalk. After a week the boards are erased and three more artists take their turn. The entire event will be in public view at Artyard.
2/1/2019
Chalkboard Chronicles
Artyard, Frenchtown, NJ www.artyard
Feb. 27 - March 4
I'll be drawing on a chalkboard for this show, "The Chalkboard Chronicles".
I start drawing on Feb. 27. The work must be complete by end of day March 1, and will be erased on March 4.
This month-long rotating exhibit is on three large (60 x 60 inch) vintage chalkboards. Twelve artists were invited to create a work of art on the slates, using only a simple piece of white chalk. After a week the boards are erased and three more artists take their turn. The entire event will be in public view at Artyard.
It's a re-do of a 1997 show at TZ Art gallery in NYC.
Artists in the the original version were: Spalding Gray, Christopher Brooks, Carol Diehl, Richard Hull, David Humphrey, Phillip Johnson, Drew Beattie, Daniel Davidson, Ilona Granet, Gary Komerin, Walter Martin, Paloma Muñoz, Elliott Puckette and Ray Smith
It's curated by Tom Judd, who also curated the first version.
This time around, artists will be me, Jasmine Alleger, Illia Barger, Jason Beresell, Sharon Fergeson, Andrea Keefe, Collin Keefe, Siyuan Liu, Tristin Lowe, Cindy Stockton Moore, Lisette Morel, and Casey Ruble
It's at Artyard in Frenchtown, NJ.
A screening of a new film about the 1997 show is happening there Feb. 16.
Follow the link below for details:
https://artyard.org/project/the-chalkboard-chronicles-feb-16th-march-11th/
Artists in the the original version were: Spalding Gray, Christopher Brooks, Carol Diehl, Richard Hull, David Humphrey, Phillip Johnson, Drew Beattie, Daniel Davidson, Ilona Granet, Gary Komerin, Walter Martin, Paloma Muñoz, Elliott Puckette and Ray Smith
It's curated by Tom Judd, who also curated the first version.
This time around, artists will be me, Jasmine Alleger, Illia Barger, Jason Beresell, Sharon Fergeson, Andrea Keefe, Collin Keefe, Siyuan Liu, Tristin Lowe, Cindy Stockton Moore, Lisette Morel, and Casey Ruble
It's at Artyard in Frenchtown, NJ.
A screening of a new film about the 1997 show is happening there Feb. 16.
Follow the link below for details:
https://artyard.org/project/the-chalkboard-chronicles-feb-16th-march-11th/
Exhibition
12/14/2018
First I was afraid, I was petrified...
Treasure Town
624 Myrtle Ave., NY, NY
Dec 8, 2018-Jan 8, 2019
Curated by Rosie Lopeman & Frances Chang
Gallery Hours:
Saturday & Sunday 12-5pm or by appointment 7 days a week. Please send an email to firstiwasafraidexhibition@gmail.com to schedule an appointment.
Artists:
Carlo D'Anselmi • Tirzah Brott • Frances Chang • Rosie Lopeman • Mike Naideau • Ken Weathersby
12/14/2018
First I was afraid, I was petrified...
Treasure Town
624 Myrtle Ave., NY, NY
Dec 8, 2018-Jan 8, 2019
Curated by Rosie Lopeman & Frances Chang
Gallery Hours:
Saturday & Sunday 12-5pm or by appointment 7 days a week. Please send an email to firstiwasafraidexhibition@gmail.com to schedule an appointment.
Artists:
Carlo D'Anselmi • Tirzah Brott • Frances Chang • Rosie Lopeman • Mike Naideau • Ken Weathersby
Featuring performances by:
Matt Bachman • Cornelia Barber • Frances Chang • Theo Koppel • Hannah Mitchell • Sophia Treanor • and more...
Closing Reception • Tuesday, January 8th, 6:00 PM - 10:00 PM
Performances begin promptly at 7:30 PM ////
First I was Afraid, I was Petrified… is an immersive exhibition in the basement of Treasure Town, a catacomb-like art space in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. The show weaves together the work of artists using a wide variety of media through an underlying theme of dreams, darkness and the unconscious. Each room in the basement will be dedicated to one artist’s work, creating their own distinct environment and atmosphere. At 8:30 pm, the audience will be guided through a series of performances that travels through the entirety of the basement.
Artists Carlo D'Anselmi, Tirzah Brott, Frances Chang, Rosie Lopeman, Mike Naideau, and Ken Weathersby will each be occupying a space in the basement, creating their own distinct environment and atmosphere. The labyrinthine connectivity between installations creates an enunciated yet unbroken trail of scenes, each exploring a unique stage of the emotional process of delving into the unknown parts of the self. First there is fear, then there is discovery. First there is nothing, then there is something. The meandering, snakelike exploration through this subterranean domain mimics the journey through the room-like bounds of the human psyche. Performers Cornelia Barber, Hannah Mitchell, Theo Koppel, Matt Bachmann, Sophia Treanor and Plutoness (Frances Chang) will be performing their pieces in a guided tour of the space on December 8th, and a similar event will happen at the closing on January 8th.
The interdisciplinary nature of the exhibition is a further attempt to dissolve boundaries, both internally and externally between categorical and medium-based conceptions of art and expression. Together we are attempting to begin the odyssey of articulating the inarticulable, to give form to and prioritize the personal, inner, immaterial sources of intuition and self-discovery.
# # #
Matt Bachman • Cornelia Barber • Frances Chang • Theo Koppel • Hannah Mitchell • Sophia Treanor • and more...
Closing Reception • Tuesday, January 8th, 6:00 PM - 10:00 PM
Performances begin promptly at 7:30 PM ////
First I was Afraid, I was Petrified… is an immersive exhibition in the basement of Treasure Town, a catacomb-like art space in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. The show weaves together the work of artists using a wide variety of media through an underlying theme of dreams, darkness and the unconscious. Each room in the basement will be dedicated to one artist’s work, creating their own distinct environment and atmosphere. At 8:30 pm, the audience will be guided through a series of performances that travels through the entirety of the basement.
Artists Carlo D'Anselmi, Tirzah Brott, Frances Chang, Rosie Lopeman, Mike Naideau, and Ken Weathersby will each be occupying a space in the basement, creating their own distinct environment and atmosphere. The labyrinthine connectivity between installations creates an enunciated yet unbroken trail of scenes, each exploring a unique stage of the emotional process of delving into the unknown parts of the self. First there is fear, then there is discovery. First there is nothing, then there is something. The meandering, snakelike exploration through this subterranean domain mimics the journey through the room-like bounds of the human psyche. Performers Cornelia Barber, Hannah Mitchell, Theo Koppel, Matt Bachmann, Sophia Treanor and Plutoness (Frances Chang) will be performing their pieces in a guided tour of the space on December 8th, and a similar event will happen at the closing on January 8th.
The interdisciplinary nature of the exhibition is a further attempt to dissolve boundaries, both internally and externally between categorical and medium-based conceptions of art and expression. Together we are attempting to begin the odyssey of articulating the inarticulable, to give form to and prioritize the personal, inner, immaterial sources of intuition and self-discovery.
# # #
Exhibition
10/29/2018
Inside Job
Ken Weathersby at Kent Place Gallery
Monday, October 15 through Wednesday, November 14, 2018
Reception Friday, October 19, 6-8 pm.
Weathersby is an internationally exhibited artist as well as a faculty member of Kent Place School. For this show of paintings, “Inside Job,” he has employed available content: photographs he took of his colleagues, who agreed to pose for the camera.
The paintings are abstract, presenting shapes, colors, surfaces, and patterns that vividly evoke historical precedents: medieval floor tiles, vintage textile patterns, or twentieth-century geometric paintings or monochromes. In a disjunctive turn, a photograph of a person is inset into each painting. These human images cut into the paintings and encounter the abstractions.
Weathersby has said, “The inset human image is not a portrait, but a figure that interrupts or confronts the body of the painting with its gaze or implied action.”
For the viewer, formal and imaginative connections and tensions emerge from the juxtaposition. The paintings in “Inside Job” raise issues of commensurability, which resonates deeply in this time when humanist values are under enormous strain. The paintings, challenging and playful, also open questions about the performative role of images in the work of art.
###
10/29/2018
Inside Job
Ken Weathersby at Kent Place Gallery
Monday, October 15 through Wednesday, November 14, 2018
Reception Friday, October 19, 6-8 pm.
Weathersby is an internationally exhibited artist as well as a faculty member of Kent Place School. For this show of paintings, “Inside Job,” he has employed available content: photographs he took of his colleagues, who agreed to pose for the camera.
The paintings are abstract, presenting shapes, colors, surfaces, and patterns that vividly evoke historical precedents: medieval floor tiles, vintage textile patterns, or twentieth-century geometric paintings or monochromes. In a disjunctive turn, a photograph of a person is inset into each painting. These human images cut into the paintings and encounter the abstractions.
Weathersby has said, “The inset human image is not a portrait, but a figure that interrupts or confronts the body of the painting with its gaze or implied action.”
For the viewer, formal and imaginative connections and tensions emerge from the juxtaposition. The paintings in “Inside Job” raise issues of commensurability, which resonates deeply in this time when humanist values are under enormous strain. The paintings, challenging and playful, also open questions about the performative role of images in the work of art.
###
Exhibition
10/31/2017
POINTING FINGERS
curated by Jo-El Lopez
Julie Ann Nagle - Genesis Tramaine - Ken Weathersby
November 11 – January 12 2018
Reception November 11th 4-8pm @ Gallery Aferro
77 Market Street, Newark NJ
The three solo installations that combine to make up POINTING FINGERS utilize large display windows facing Market Street. Ken Weathersby's installation will be the first exhibition of all of his free-standing paintings together. It will also include one sculpture.
10/31/2017
POINTING FINGERS
curated by Jo-El Lopez
Julie Ann Nagle - Genesis Tramaine - Ken Weathersby
November 11 – January 12 2018
Reception November 11th 4-8pm @ Gallery Aferro
77 Market Street, Newark NJ
The three solo installations that combine to make up POINTING FINGERS utilize large display windows facing Market Street. Ken Weathersby's installation will be the first exhibition of all of his free-standing paintings together. It will also include one sculpture.
Exhibition
9/16/2017
COLORMANIA
Paul Corio - Robert Otto Epstein - Ken Weathersby
at Odetta Gallery
September 8 - October 15, 2017
Opening reception: Friday September 8, 6-8 pm
Artists Talk: Sunday September 17, 3:00 pm
Bushwick Open Studios September 22-24
Odetta Gallery 229 Cook Street, Brooklyn, NY
9/16/2017
COLORMANIA
Paul Corio - Robert Otto Epstein - Ken Weathersby
at Odetta Gallery
September 8 - October 15, 2017
Opening reception: Friday September 8, 6-8 pm
Artists Talk: Sunday September 17, 3:00 pm
Bushwick Open Studios September 22-24
Odetta Gallery 229 Cook Street, Brooklyn, NY
SPRING/BREAK art show
2/27/2017
image: "230 (ncrybl)", detail
SPRING/BREAK Art Show
4 Times Square,
New York, New York
"INFINITY POOL"
room #2316
curated by Rebecca Morgan and Stephen Eakin
featuring work by Paul Bergeron, Paul Gagner, Heather Garland, Lawrence F Mesich, Bryan Rogers, Erik Schoonebeek, Ken Weathersby, and Robin Williams
TICKETS:
There is an opening on the evening of February 28th from 5-9pm . Tickets for that are $20 on springbreakartshow.com
Fair runs from March 1-6, hours are 11-6. Tickets on those days are $15 on springbreakartshow.com
2/27/2017
image: "230 (ncrybl)", detail
SPRING/BREAK Art Show
4 Times Square,
New York, New York
"INFINITY POOL"
room #2316
curated by Rebecca Morgan and Stephen Eakin
featuring work by Paul Bergeron, Paul Gagner, Heather Garland, Lawrence F Mesich, Bryan Rogers, Erik Schoonebeek, Ken Weathersby, and Robin Williams
TICKETS:
There is an opening on the evening of February 28th from 5-9pm . Tickets for that are $20 on springbreakartshow.com
Fair runs from March 1-6, hours are 11-6. Tickets on those days are $15 on springbreakartshow.com
Feature
2/16/2017
February 16, 2017
The editors of ARTnews:
Pictures at an Exhibition: KEN WEATHERSBY at MINUS SPACE
(link)
2/16/2017
February 16, 2017
The editors of ARTnews:
Pictures at an Exhibition: KEN WEATHERSBY at MINUS SPACE
(link)
Exhibition
1/2/2017
Ken Weathersby: Time After Time
January 7 – February 25, 2017
Opening: Saturday, January 7, 6-8pm
MINUS SPACE is delighted to present Ken Weathersby: Time After Time, the New York artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition will feature a suite of new reductive paintings embedded with images taken from art history books.
Ken Weathersby makes abstract paintings that play with and against the conventions of both painting and abstraction. His new paintings combine graphic geometric patterns with representational, printed images of art works cut out of discarded art history books. The images Weathersby employs often depict a sculpture of a single human or animal figure and stem primarily from the periods of ancient Greece, Rome, and medieval Europe.
Specific images are carefully selected and cropped, commonly leaving slivers of text from the originating books still visible. Weathersby then insets the images into recessed rectangular windows, which he cuts and constructs into the paintings’ surfaces. The position of the images within the paintings is carefully considered; images are either immersed into or juxtaposed against finely detailed patterns of repeating squares, circles, and triangles that are both painted in muted colors and drawn in pencil. The specific patterns Weathersby employs loosely reflect the character of the images themselves. Images fall both in and out of alignment with the patterns creating a heightened sense of solitude and timelessness.
About his new paintings, Weathersby states, “The collaged figures are both within the painting and outside of the presumed abstract visual event. They gesture and look, their directional gaze enacting something like a cinematic eye-line match. At other times they form morphological links with the abstract, painted elements while introducing things foreign to it: sculpture, photography, printing, and an earlier time.”
MINUS SPACE
16 Main Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201 (Dumbo)
USA
Wednesday - Saturday 11am - 5pm
+ by appointment
718.801.8095
info@minusspace.com
1/2/2017
Ken Weathersby: Time After Time
January 7 – February 25, 2017
Opening: Saturday, January 7, 6-8pm
MINUS SPACE is delighted to present Ken Weathersby: Time After Time, the New York artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition will feature a suite of new reductive paintings embedded with images taken from art history books.
Ken Weathersby makes abstract paintings that play with and against the conventions of both painting and abstraction. His new paintings combine graphic geometric patterns with representational, printed images of art works cut out of discarded art history books. The images Weathersby employs often depict a sculpture of a single human or animal figure and stem primarily from the periods of ancient Greece, Rome, and medieval Europe.
Specific images are carefully selected and cropped, commonly leaving slivers of text from the originating books still visible. Weathersby then insets the images into recessed rectangular windows, which he cuts and constructs into the paintings’ surfaces. The position of the images within the paintings is carefully considered; images are either immersed into or juxtaposed against finely detailed patterns of repeating squares, circles, and triangles that are both painted in muted colors and drawn in pencil. The specific patterns Weathersby employs loosely reflect the character of the images themselves. Images fall both in and out of alignment with the patterns creating a heightened sense of solitude and timelessness.
About his new paintings, Weathersby states, “The collaged figures are both within the painting and outside of the presumed abstract visual event. They gesture and look, their directional gaze enacting something like a cinematic eye-line match. At other times they form morphological links with the abstract, painted elements while introducing things foreign to it: sculpture, photography, printing, and an earlier time.”
MINUS SPACE
16 Main Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201 (Dumbo)
USA
Wednesday - Saturday 11am - 5pm
+ by appointment
718.801.8095
info@minusspace.com
Exhibition
10/21/2016
image: Ken Weathersby, "257 (twiggy)", 2016 (detail)
Honey Ramka presents Razerbilder, an exhibition featuring work by Lars van Dooren, Stephen Eakin, Kirsten Nelson, and Ken Weathersby. The exhibition opens Friday, October 21st from 6-9 PM, and runs through Sunday, November 27th.
“Human nature, essentially changeable, unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it rends everything asunder, the wall, the bonds, and its very self.”
—Franz Kafka, 'The Great Wall of China'
“All the modern things/Have always existed/They’ve just been waiting/To come out/And multiply/And take over/It’s their turn now.”
—Björk, 'The Modern Things'
Undergirded by the language of carpentry and practical building, the works in Razerbilder are shot through with complexifying interventions—floor plans dissolve; constructions are hybridized, confounded, and filigreed with idiosyncratic codes.
Whether ruins, relics, or building blocks, the works in Razerbilderevidence the uncanniness and volatility of the structures and objects that form our worlds.
Honey Ramka is an exhibition space in Bushwick, Brooklyn @ 56 Bogart Street (1st floor). The gallery is open from 1-6pm on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and by appointment.
Gallery Directors: Jesse Patrick Martin and Bryan Rogers
# # #
10/21/2016
image: Ken Weathersby, "257 (twiggy)", 2016 (detail)
Honey Ramka presents Razerbilder, an exhibition featuring work by Lars van Dooren, Stephen Eakin, Kirsten Nelson, and Ken Weathersby. The exhibition opens Friday, October 21st from 6-9 PM, and runs through Sunday, November 27th.
“Human nature, essentially changeable, unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it rends everything asunder, the wall, the bonds, and its very self.”
—Franz Kafka, 'The Great Wall of China'
“All the modern things/Have always existed/They’ve just been waiting/To come out/And multiply/And take over/It’s their turn now.”
—Björk, 'The Modern Things'
Undergirded by the language of carpentry and practical building, the works in Razerbilder are shot through with complexifying interventions—floor plans dissolve; constructions are hybridized, confounded, and filigreed with idiosyncratic codes.
Whether ruins, relics, or building blocks, the works in Razerbilderevidence the uncanniness and volatility of the structures and objects that form our worlds.
Honey Ramka is an exhibition space in Bushwick, Brooklyn @ 56 Bogart Street (1st floor). The gallery is open from 1-6pm on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and by appointment.
Gallery Directors: Jesse Patrick Martin and Bryan Rogers
# # #
Exhibition
8/27/2016
Monuments in Reverse
Saturday, September 17 at 6 PM - 10 PM
245 Varet, 245 Varet St., Brooklyn, NY
Jon Cowan, Madora Frey, Charles Goldman, Erin O'Keefe,Sarah Tortora
Ken Weathersby
Curated by Jake Cartwright
The selection of the six artists represented was intuitive but the artistic fore-bearer that emerged was Robert Smithson. The title Monuments in Reverse is interpreted from a series of mid sixties essays Smithson penned about his home state of New Jersey. Each essay is approached as a territorial expedition into the state with Smithson mining the land as a whole for raw material. It's apparent that Smithson takes particular pleasure in finding aesthetic inspiration where most would see industrial blight; a mode of thinking exemplified by "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey" (1967). He applies a rascally kind of imaginative intellect to the industrial "monuments" and likens the landscape to "ruins in reverse". He is of course known as an artist whose practice took him outside of the traditional gallery confines but his influence was first evident in the inverse development: non-traditional materials, methods, and concepts being introduced into a gallery setting. He achieved this in large part by applying this style of imaginative intellect. Smithson made a different kind of art by thinking different kinds of thoughts, an approach epitomized by his idea of "Non-Sites” which he defined as “a three dimensional picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site...It is by this dimensional metaphor that one site can represent another site which does not resemble it”.
...
Ken Weathersby's work seems to owe it's structural sensibility in part to the early collecting tradition of the Wunderkammer, or cabinet of wonders. While the Wunderkammer shared the ambition of modern museums to create a taxonomy of knowledge they differed in that these earlier archives were most often personal collections in private homes. This meant that while they expressed a sense of the world's breadth they necessarily did so from a singular viewpoint. Weathersby undertakes his own subjective cataloging by nesting printed reproductions of art historical sculptures and other cultural quotations within his own paintings. The “cabinet” in these works is comprised of Weatherbys' unique hybridizing of both the standard supports of painting and the formal elements of geometric abstraction. Weathersby takes a particular interest in the "verso" side of his art objects which is evidenced in his cutaways of the picture plane.
Weathersby's studio is in a former mid century furniture store in the faded downtown of Newark, NJ and traveling there evokes the NYC to NJ pilgrimages of Smithon's essays. To imagine Smithson and Donald Judd traveling the same ignoble turnpike in search of "the Triassic sedimentary rocks of the Newark series" is to bear witness to the power of creative intent. I suspect the idea of rock hunting appealed to Smithson in part because excavation involves the act of sifting through utterly common material with an eye for the secret knowledge within. The six artists represented in this show all exhibit an artistic capacity that I hold in the highest regard: the ability to employ materials as a form of thought. I called this metaphorical space at the outset which is something that is carved out when a creative work effectively enlarges the world by thinking it so.
8/27/2016
Monuments in Reverse
Saturday, September 17 at 6 PM - 10 PM
245 Varet, 245 Varet St., Brooklyn, NY
Jon Cowan, Madora Frey, Charles Goldman, Erin O'Keefe,Sarah Tortora
Ken Weathersby
Curated by Jake Cartwright
The selection of the six artists represented was intuitive but the artistic fore-bearer that emerged was Robert Smithson. The title Monuments in Reverse is interpreted from a series of mid sixties essays Smithson penned about his home state of New Jersey. Each essay is approached as a territorial expedition into the state with Smithson mining the land as a whole for raw material. It's apparent that Smithson takes particular pleasure in finding aesthetic inspiration where most would see industrial blight; a mode of thinking exemplified by "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey" (1967). He applies a rascally kind of imaginative intellect to the industrial "monuments" and likens the landscape to "ruins in reverse". He is of course known as an artist whose practice took him outside of the traditional gallery confines but his influence was first evident in the inverse development: non-traditional materials, methods, and concepts being introduced into a gallery setting. He achieved this in large part by applying this style of imaginative intellect. Smithson made a different kind of art by thinking different kinds of thoughts, an approach epitomized by his idea of "Non-Sites” which he defined as “a three dimensional picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site...It is by this dimensional metaphor that one site can represent another site which does not resemble it”.
...
Ken Weathersby's work seems to owe it's structural sensibility in part to the early collecting tradition of the Wunderkammer, or cabinet of wonders. While the Wunderkammer shared the ambition of modern museums to create a taxonomy of knowledge they differed in that these earlier archives were most often personal collections in private homes. This meant that while they expressed a sense of the world's breadth they necessarily did so from a singular viewpoint. Weathersby undertakes his own subjective cataloging by nesting printed reproductions of art historical sculptures and other cultural quotations within his own paintings. The “cabinet” in these works is comprised of Weatherbys' unique hybridizing of both the standard supports of painting and the formal elements of geometric abstraction. Weathersby takes a particular interest in the "verso" side of his art objects which is evidenced in his cutaways of the picture plane.
Weathersby's studio is in a former mid century furniture store in the faded downtown of Newark, NJ and traveling there evokes the NYC to NJ pilgrimages of Smithon's essays. To imagine Smithson and Donald Judd traveling the same ignoble turnpike in search of "the Triassic sedimentary rocks of the Newark series" is to bear witness to the power of creative intent. I suspect the idea of rock hunting appealed to Smithson in part because excavation involves the act of sifting through utterly common material with an eye for the secret knowledge within. The six artists represented in this show all exhibit an artistic capacity that I hold in the highest regard: the ability to employ materials as a form of thought. I called this metaphorical space at the outset which is something that is carved out when a creative work effectively enlarges the world by thinking it so.
Grant and Fellowship
2/25/2016
Ken Weathersby awarded 2016 NJ State Council on the Arts/ Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Individual Artist Grant & Fellowship in Painting.
# # #
2/25/2016
Ken Weathersby awarded 2016 NJ State Council on the Arts/ Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Individual Artist Grant & Fellowship in Painting.
# # #
Artist Talk
11/23/2015
THE PATH OF THE NEEDLE
a talk about Alfred Jensen's painting, "Seeking to Unravel the Shape of an Enzyme", 1977, at the Newark Museum
Alfred Jensen created paintings that are visually dazzling and ruggedly physical. Colorful patterns seem driven by rivers of complex, abstract information. Art interwoven with ideas in this unusual way appears to offer a mystery to solve. Jensen's enigma has engaged my imagination and inspired me as an artist for a long time. On Sunday, December 13, 2015, at 2pm, I will be standing in front of his work "Seeking to Unravel the Shape of an Enzyme", at the Newark Museum, exploring its structure and implications, attempting to follow a thread.
Museum admission is free that day for Newark residents, for all others *SUGGESTED* admission fee of $12.
The Newark Museum, 49 Washington St., Newark, NJ, 07102
11/23/2015
THE PATH OF THE NEEDLE
a talk about Alfred Jensen's painting, "Seeking to Unravel the Shape of an Enzyme", 1977, at the Newark Museum
Alfred Jensen created paintings that are visually dazzling and ruggedly physical. Colorful patterns seem driven by rivers of complex, abstract information. Art interwoven with ideas in this unusual way appears to offer a mystery to solve. Jensen's enigma has engaged my imagination and inspired me as an artist for a long time. On Sunday, December 13, 2015, at 2pm, I will be standing in front of his work "Seeking to Unravel the Shape of an Enzyme", at the Newark Museum, exploring its structure and implications, attempting to follow a thread.
Museum admission is free that day for Newark residents, for all others *SUGGESTED* admission fee of $12.
The Newark Museum, 49 Washington St., Newark, NJ, 07102
Exhibition
10/9/2015
Part to Whole: work by Li Trincere and Ken Weathersby
curated by Karen Schifano
Key Projects, LIC, NY
November 7 - 22, 2015
Reception: Saturday, November 7, 2 - 4 PM
Part to Whole:
At first glance, the work of these two artists seems to have very little in common.
Li Trincere's powerful and intensely colored, shaped canvases exist as charged objects that feel iconic and yet also contingent. The inner organization, formed of colored shapes, serves to structure and energize the painting shape by reversing the arrow directionality of its outer profile. We sense a greater whole, but the divisions seem to also break this whole apart from the inside. Trincere's work seems to issue from some pre-verbal place and yet it is also articulate, accessible and intensely present.
The collaged and deconstructed wall pieces by Ken Weathersby are, on the other hand, usually neutral in color or black and white, sometimes with colored grid accents. He uses the conventions of painting creation, with its stretcher bars, underlying grid structure and canvas skin, as equal elements in his formal language, mixing and matching underpinnings and surface, image and structural elements to form a new kind of whole that seems to be always in the process of devolving and recreating itself. Images cut out of art history books are inserted into some of the compositions, creating reference to the world outside the abstract system, and setting up viewing lines that behave almost as "a cinematic eye-line match... which mimic, echo and extend the artist’s and viewer’s acts of looking within a spatial field of abstraction."
However, both artists are involved with our bodily response to their work, using scale and literal dimensionality to approach a sculptural/haptic feeling. Rich built up surfaces in Trincere, textured and cut-open painting skins and wooden grids in Weathersby, tempt us to touch, to experience the painting as object in our own time and space. Weathersby acknowledges and questions the conventions that we use to define painting in its long history. And Trincere's use of shaped canvases also reframes painting's traditional role, from a rectangular window of illusionistic space, into an iconic object of charismatic presence.
As Rudolph Arnheim argues in both "Visual Thinking" and "Art and Visual Perception", the act of perception is in itself a form of thinking, a grasping of basic structural features, which have their parallel in the organization of the outside world. Basing his discussions on gestalt psychology, he states that we perceive wholes, and therefore a needed feeling of balance, through various rules of the connection of parts: through similarity, contiguity, closure, symmetry, and past experience, for example.
Both Trincere and Weathersby operate using these rules to different ends, each forming their own unique species of wholes from parts, but also allowing for their deconstruction again into their constituent elements. By placing their work together in one room, we are made aware, not only of the provocative edginess of each artist's issues, but are newly conscious of our own assumptions and perceptions as viewers looking for solid ground.
--Karen Schifano
Key Projects
4129 41st Street, #2G
Long Island City, NY 11104
Hours:
Saturday and Sunday from 1 - 5 PM
and by appointment
10/9/2015
Part to Whole: work by Li Trincere and Ken Weathersby
curated by Karen Schifano
Key Projects, LIC, NY
November 7 - 22, 2015
Reception: Saturday, November 7, 2 - 4 PM
Part to Whole:
At first glance, the work of these two artists seems to have very little in common.
Li Trincere's powerful and intensely colored, shaped canvases exist as charged objects that feel iconic and yet also contingent. The inner organization, formed of colored shapes, serves to structure and energize the painting shape by reversing the arrow directionality of its outer profile. We sense a greater whole, but the divisions seem to also break this whole apart from the inside. Trincere's work seems to issue from some pre-verbal place and yet it is also articulate, accessible and intensely present.
The collaged and deconstructed wall pieces by Ken Weathersby are, on the other hand, usually neutral in color or black and white, sometimes with colored grid accents. He uses the conventions of painting creation, with its stretcher bars, underlying grid structure and canvas skin, as equal elements in his formal language, mixing and matching underpinnings and surface, image and structural elements to form a new kind of whole that seems to be always in the process of devolving and recreating itself. Images cut out of art history books are inserted into some of the compositions, creating reference to the world outside the abstract system, and setting up viewing lines that behave almost as "a cinematic eye-line match... which mimic, echo and extend the artist’s and viewer’s acts of looking within a spatial field of abstraction."
However, both artists are involved with our bodily response to their work, using scale and literal dimensionality to approach a sculptural/haptic feeling. Rich built up surfaces in Trincere, textured and cut-open painting skins and wooden grids in Weathersby, tempt us to touch, to experience the painting as object in our own time and space. Weathersby acknowledges and questions the conventions that we use to define painting in its long history. And Trincere's use of shaped canvases also reframes painting's traditional role, from a rectangular window of illusionistic space, into an iconic object of charismatic presence.
As Rudolph Arnheim argues in both "Visual Thinking" and "Art and Visual Perception", the act of perception is in itself a form of thinking, a grasping of basic structural features, which have their parallel in the organization of the outside world. Basing his discussions on gestalt psychology, he states that we perceive wholes, and therefore a needed feeling of balance, through various rules of the connection of parts: through similarity, contiguity, closure, symmetry, and past experience, for example.
Both Trincere and Weathersby operate using these rules to different ends, each forming their own unique species of wholes from parts, but also allowing for their deconstruction again into their constituent elements. By placing their work together in one room, we are made aware, not only of the provocative edginess of each artist's issues, but are newly conscious of our own assumptions and perceptions as viewers looking for solid ground.
--Karen Schifano
Key Projects
4129 41st Street, #2G
Long Island City, NY 11104
Hours:
Saturday and Sunday from 1 - 5 PM
and by appointment
Exhibition
10/9/2015
Molting
October 15 - December 19, 2015
Reception: October 17, 7pm-10pm
Group exhibition at Aferro Gallery, 73 Market St., Newark, NJ
curated by Kayla Carucci, Alex Scott Cumming, and Jacob Mandel
Artists:
Alexandra Desipris
Kevin Durkin
Manuela Eichner
Jessica Ellis
Gilbert Hsiao
Ryan Patrick Martin
Kelli McGuire
Tomo Mori
Alicia Papanek
Molly Soda
Vaughn Spann
Ceaphas Stubbs
Andrea Garcia Vasquez
Ken Weathersby
Juno Zago
10/9/2015
Molting
October 15 - December 19, 2015
Reception: October 17, 7pm-10pm
Group exhibition at Aferro Gallery, 73 Market St., Newark, NJ
curated by Kayla Carucci, Alex Scott Cumming, and Jacob Mandel
Artists:
Alexandra Desipris
Kevin Durkin
Manuela Eichner
Jessica Ellis
Gilbert Hsiao
Ryan Patrick Martin
Kelli McGuire
Tomo Mori
Alicia Papanek
Molly Soda
Vaughn Spann
Ceaphas Stubbs
Andrea Garcia Vasquez
Ken Weathersby
Juno Zago
Exhibition
10/9/2015
Constrasting Abstractions
October 8, 2015 - February 12, 2016
Group show at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation's 14 Maple Gallery
Morristown, NJ.
10/9/2015
Constrasting Abstractions
October 8, 2015 - February 12, 2016
Group show at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation's 14 Maple Gallery
Morristown, NJ.
Exhibition
10/9/2015
Improvised Showboat
September 5, 2015
A one-night exhibition at Gary Stephan's studio.
Curated by Lauren Britton, Zachary Keating and Gary Stephan.
Invited artists:
Julia Bland, Regina Bogat, Vincent Como, John Cowan, Cheryl Donegan, Steph Gonzales-Turner, Joanne Greenbaum, Suzanne Joelson, Janine Polak, Ellen Uzane Schneiderman, Jen Schwarting, Leslie Wayne, Ken Weathersby, Summer Wheat
With a surprise installation / performance by Glenn Branca.
10/9/2015
Improvised Showboat
September 5, 2015
A one-night exhibition at Gary Stephan's studio.
Curated by Lauren Britton, Zachary Keating and Gary Stephan.
Invited artists:
Julia Bland, Regina Bogat, Vincent Como, John Cowan, Cheryl Donegan, Steph Gonzales-Turner, Joanne Greenbaum, Suzanne Joelson, Janine Polak, Ellen Uzane Schneiderman, Jen Schwarting, Leslie Wayne, Ken Weathersby, Summer Wheat
With a surprise installation / performance by Glenn Branca.
Exhibition
10/9/2015
MA Crossed with KW:
recent work by Michele Alpern and Ken Weathersby
at Kent Place Gallery
October 16 – November 20, 2015
Reception 6-8 pm, Friday, October 16
Michele Alpern and Ken Weathersby have been closely sharing their lives and discussing their work for almost twenty years, while working separately. This is their first two-person exhibition together. Their artwork is quite different, but perhaps has some commonalities: an interest in montage; a condensed economy of form; complicating relationships among figure, ground, and support; an inclination as viewers toward reading and puzzling out, in addition to gazing.
Michele Alpern's recent small drawings are composed of very fine pencil lines on paper, which she mounts into books. The drawings focus on depicting edges, the borderline space where an entity meets another entity or ground. And the very small pencil lines themselves consist mostly of the edges where the graphite meets the paper. The drawings’ sequential placement in books foregrounds temporal relationships as well as spatial ones. She is interested in thresholds, fugitive states of betweenness, the process of configuring relationality and identity.
Ken Weathersby's works in this show present wood panels (painted or not) and stretched linen, cut into, layered, and sometimes reversed. Photos of figures, or, more precisely, photos of representations of figures (sculptures, actors, musicians, puppets) are held within the panels. They confront and react to aggressive optical grids and to each other within an abstract space. The figures gesture or glance laterally across and within that space, a movement that apes and is perpendicular to our looking at the work.
Michele Alpern is an artist and a writer. She graduated from Rutgers and Columbia universities and has exhibited in the New York City area, where she lives.
Ken Weathersby's paintings have been frequently exhibited nationally and internationally at galleries, museums, and universities; his most recent solo shows were at Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn. Weathersby received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He has taught visual arts at Kent Place School since 2002
Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ. Gallery hours are Monday – Friday, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm.
10/9/2015
MA Crossed with KW:
recent work by Michele Alpern and Ken Weathersby
at Kent Place Gallery
October 16 – November 20, 2015
Reception 6-8 pm, Friday, October 16
Michele Alpern and Ken Weathersby have been closely sharing their lives and discussing their work for almost twenty years, while working separately. This is their first two-person exhibition together. Their artwork is quite different, but perhaps has some commonalities: an interest in montage; a condensed economy of form; complicating relationships among figure, ground, and support; an inclination as viewers toward reading and puzzling out, in addition to gazing.
Michele Alpern's recent small drawings are composed of very fine pencil lines on paper, which she mounts into books. The drawings focus on depicting edges, the borderline space where an entity meets another entity or ground. And the very small pencil lines themselves consist mostly of the edges where the graphite meets the paper. The drawings’ sequential placement in books foregrounds temporal relationships as well as spatial ones. She is interested in thresholds, fugitive states of betweenness, the process of configuring relationality and identity.
Ken Weathersby's works in this show present wood panels (painted or not) and stretched linen, cut into, layered, and sometimes reversed. Photos of figures, or, more precisely, photos of representations of figures (sculptures, actors, musicians, puppets) are held within the panels. They confront and react to aggressive optical grids and to each other within an abstract space. The figures gesture or glance laterally across and within that space, a movement that apes and is perpendicular to our looking at the work.
Michele Alpern is an artist and a writer. She graduated from Rutgers and Columbia universities and has exhibited in the New York City area, where she lives.
Ken Weathersby's paintings have been frequently exhibited nationally and internationally at galleries, museums, and universities; his most recent solo shows were at Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn. Weathersby received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He has taught visual arts at Kent Place School since 2002
Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ. Gallery hours are Monday – Friday, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm.
Exhibition
6/9/2015
Off the Grid at Pierogi Gallery
Gallery 2
6/9/2015
Off the Grid at Pierogi Gallery
Gallery 2
12 June – 12 July 2015
Each of these four artists incorporates geometric elements in their work, hinting at the grid but veering off in imprecise and idiosyncratic directions. John Phillip Abbott develops the font for his text paintings in a loosely based grid format, using spray paint, stencil techniques and, for the paintings in this exhibition, strips of wood glued to the canvas surface. Beth Campbell’s “Potential Future Drawings” series, and her related mobile sculptures (one of which will be included in this exhibition), exhibit sequenced series of choices and possibilities, expanding exponentially. In her “Every Word I Spoke” drawing series, Kathryn Refi deconstructs words that she spoke on a particular day into color-coded grids corresponding to the words and letters, turning language into an imprecise grid. The off-kilter geometric forms in Ken Weathersby’s paintings suggest a precision that is not quite there. One painting included in this exhibition, “220 (tns),” consists of a wooden latice work placed in front of a collaged canvas. In another, “205,” irregular rectangles of wood crowd into the edges of a bi-color painted grid.
Pierogi: 177 North 9th Street Brooklyn, NY 11211
Opening Reception: Fri, 12 June. 7-9pm
John Phillip Abbot, Beth Campbell, Kathryn Refi, Ken Weathersby
John Phillip Abbot, Beth Campbell, Kathryn Refi, Ken Weathersby
Each of these four artists incorporates geometric elements in their work, hinting at the grid but veering off in imprecise and idiosyncratic directions. John Phillip Abbott develops the font for his text paintings in a loosely based grid format, using spray paint, stencil techniques and, for the paintings in this exhibition, strips of wood glued to the canvas surface. Beth Campbell’s “Potential Future Drawings” series, and her related mobile sculptures (one of which will be included in this exhibition), exhibit sequenced series of choices and possibilities, expanding exponentially. In her “Every Word I Spoke” drawing series, Kathryn Refi deconstructs words that she spoke on a particular day into color-coded grids corresponding to the words and letters, turning language into an imprecise grid. The off-kilter geometric forms in Ken Weathersby’s paintings suggest a precision that is not quite there. One painting included in this exhibition, “220 (tns),” consists of a wooden latice work placed in front of a collaged canvas. In another, “205,” irregular rectangles of wood crowd into the edges of a bi-color painted grid.
Pierogi: 177 North 9th Street Brooklyn, NY 11211
# # #
Exhibition
4/28/2015
Textual at ODETTA Gallery
4/28/2015
Textual at ODETTA Gallery
Leonardo Benzant, Annette Cords, Elana Herzog, Ken Weathersby
April 24- May 31, 2015
OPENING Reception: Saturday April 25, 6-8 pm
Artists’ Talk: Sunday, May 10, 2-4 pm
229 Cook Street, Brooklyn, NY 11206
Gallery hours: Fri‐Sun 1‐6 pm and by appointment.
Exhibition
4/28/2015
SEERS, SIGNS Gerd Borkelmann, Cody Tumblin and Ken Weathersby
4/28/2015
SEERS, SIGNS Gerd Borkelmann, Cody Tumblin and Ken Weathersby
Curated by Dan Devening
April 30 - June 12, 2015
opening reception: Thursday, April 30 from 6- 9 p.m.
Artist Talk
4/6/2015
I will present a short slide talk about my work at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University on Tuesday, April 7, 2015.
Begins at 7pm.
4/6/2015
Begins at 7pm.
Exhibition
4/1/2015
"Therely Bare (Redux)" at IS Projects, Leiden, the Netherlands April 11 - May 25, 2015 (then travelling to Athens, Greece for Arts Athina and then Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville, TN, USA)
4/1/2015
"Therely Bare (Redux)" at IS Projects, Leiden, the Netherlands April 11 - May 25, 2015 (then travelling to Athens, Greece for Arts Athina and then Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville, TN, USA)
Curated by John Tallman in association with IS-projects, Therely Bare (Redux) is an exhibition of non-objective art featuring the work of eleven artists from six countries. Working in a range of styles, the artists of this exhibition share in common a subversive or playful approach to the traditions of painting. The exhibition title Therely Bare (Redux) is wordplay, an inversion of “barely there.” It also hints at the curatorial premises of the exhibition. The physical presence of the work in the exhibition is not in question but the conceptual motives behind the work are more ambiguous. In this sense, the work is hiding in plain sight. The exhibition is meant to challenge typical modes of viewing and hopefully raise questions about means of perception.
Participating artists: Billy Gruner (AU), Clary Stolte (NL), Guido Winkler (NL), Iemke van Dijk (NL), John Tallman (US), Ken Weathersby (US), Kwangyup Cheon (KR), Kevin Finklea (US), Lorri Ott (US), Richard Van Der Aa (FR) and Simon Ingram (NZ).
IS-projects
Guido Winkler, Iemke van Dijk
Drie Octoberstraat 16-A
2313 ZP Leiden
The Netherlands
Artist Talk
11/17/2014
11/17/2014
On Tuesday, November 11, I gave a slide talk about my work and process at the Trestle Gallery . I discussed my painting and ideas, showing works going back to the late 1980s, and up to the present.
# # #
Exhibition
2/12/2014
2/12/2014
OFF THE WALL at Parallel Art Space
A group exhibition with works that in various ways
converse with and diverge from the traditional wall format.
Gilbert Hsiao
Stacie Johnson
Alex Paik
Kim Tran
Ken Weathersby
February 22 – March 23, 2014 Reception: Saturday, February 22, 6 pm – 9 pm Hours: Sat/Sun 1-6pm and by appointment Parallel Art Space: 17-17 Troutman Street #220, Ridgewood, NY 11385
• • •
The viewing of all painting from the Old
Masters to the “Super Flat” is, among other things, an experience with
space. Different than the storied development of pictorial illusion in
art, the space that is considered in “Off the Wall” is the actual,
real-time environment of the art object; areas surrounding it, in front
of it, and most especially behind it, in this case, the supporting wall
itself.
The interest in and involvement with the wall behind
the art perhaps has its roots in the rich tradition of the construction
of the painted image, built up as it is, through the accretion of layers
of pigmented medium, thin and close to the gessoed substrate in some
areas, thick and impastoed in others. The Grisaille method of
underpainting is an excellent example of this historic push and pull
movement of paint through space as in this technique, the white
highlights of a painting are built up in layers to a kind of shallow,
bas-relief topography across the picture plane. The art makers long
standing occupation with movement, both away from and out toward the
viewer in space has modern examples in Frank Stella’s “Exotic Bird”
series, wherein arabesque, curly-q drafting tool shapes leap brightly
off the canvas, and in the monochrome, “Spatial” paintings of Lucio
Fontana, wherein slashes through the stretched canvas pull the space
just behind the artwork directly into viewer consideration.
The works in “Off the Wall” in some ways respond to these patterns of
painterly innovation, contributing substantively to the discourse from
their own points of intention and concern. Paired with a Post-modern
era’s consideration of context, these artists, through the formal
engagement of the art objects environs, pull context into co-operation.
Existing both within the disciplines of painting, sculpture and design
as well as in the liminal spaces in-between, the works in “Off the Wall”
stay rooted to the wall, but not confined to it, vibrating out across
the divisions of two-dimensions to three and back again.
In the way that painters weave layers of
shape, line, and color across the canvas, so too does Ken Weathersby
inter-lace his wood-based constructions with paint, collaged images and
found objects. On whether the material focus in his work pushes his
concerns toward the sculptural, the artist has offered, “Because of the
emphasis on physical aspects of painting, and the sometimes elaborate
wood structures that develop, people have asked me if they are becoming
sculpture. The answer is no, even if the thing becomes free-standing,
it’s still painting. Responding to the conditions of painting gives me
something to work against. “ By working against the concerns of
painting, the artist mines the oft times under-appreciated areas at the
margins of consideration, the edges, the borders of form and the spaces
in between.
# # #
Publication
2/12/2014
2/12/2014
New American Paintings #110 features my recent
paintings. This is my third appearance in NAP.
###
Curating
1/17/2014
"Data, Dust" - Becky Brown at Kent Place Gallery
Monday January 13, 2013 – Friday February 7, 2014
Reception: Friday January 17, 6-8pm
Brown’s exhibition, titled “Data, Dust”, will fill the gallery with a complex, vivid installation combining painting, collage, words and objects.
“Data, Dust” will include work from her “Complexes” series, long, scroll-like drawings that arrange found images and abstract shapes to form a kind of visual poetry. Structural ideas from literature, as well as shuffling of signs, marks and pictures underlie the elaborate and surprising works produced. The compositions are both playful and serious.
The artist has said, “My work focuses on visual vs. text language (their distinct conventions and inevitable overlaps); and the relationship of this composite language to architecture, urban space and the tradition of abstract art.”
The artist is a 2012 MFA graduate of the fine arts program at Hunter College. She has recently exhibited in New York City; Delhi, India; Tegucigalpa, Honduras; Vienna, Austria; Berlin, Germany and Lodz, Poland. Residencies include Yaddo, I-Park Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and The WhyNot Place in Delhi, India. Since 2007, she has written art criticism for the Brooklyn Rail and artcritical.com.
Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ. Gallery hours are Monday – Friday, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm. For more information call (908) 273-0900, or visit www.kentplace.org.
# # #
1/17/2014
"Data, Dust" - Becky Brown at Kent Place Gallery
Monday January 13, 2013 – Friday February 7, 2014
Reception: Friday January 17, 6-8pm
Brown’s exhibition, titled “Data, Dust”, will fill the gallery with a complex, vivid installation combining painting, collage, words and objects.
“Data, Dust” will include work from her “Complexes” series, long, scroll-like drawings that arrange found images and abstract shapes to form a kind of visual poetry. Structural ideas from literature, as well as shuffling of signs, marks and pictures underlie the elaborate and surprising works produced. The compositions are both playful and serious.
The artist has said, “My work focuses on visual vs. text language (their distinct conventions and inevitable overlaps); and the relationship of this composite language to architecture, urban space and the tradition of abstract art.”
The artist is a 2012 MFA graduate of the fine arts program at Hunter College. She has recently exhibited in New York City; Delhi, India; Tegucigalpa, Honduras; Vienna, Austria; Berlin, Germany and Lodz, Poland. Residencies include Yaddo, I-Park Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and The WhyNot Place in Delhi, India. Since 2007, she has written art criticism for the Brooklyn Rail and artcritical.com.
Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ. Gallery hours are Monday – Friday, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm. For more information call (908) 273-0900, or visit www.kentplace.org.
# # #
Artist Talk
11/8/2013
11/8/2013
On Thursday, November 7, at 7pm, I gave a slide talk
about my work and process at the Montclair Art Museum, along with four
other artists (Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze, Dahlia Elsayed, Phoenix
Lindsey-Hall, Nyugen E. Smith).
# # #
curating
9/11/2013
9/11/2013
“Joggie, 1983” Jason Stopa at Kent Place Gallery
Kent Place Gallery presents paintings by Jason Stopa from September 9 – October 4, 2013.
Reception for the artist from 6-8 pm, Friday, September 27.
Stopa’s paintings in this show are playful, vivid,
and refer to childhood experiences. The “Joggie” referred to in the
show’s title was Stopa’s imaginary childhood friend, and 1983 refers to the
year the artist was born. Both imagination
and memory are deeply embedded themes in these paintings. At the same time, the works are dynamic
abstract statements of the possibilities of paint, with passages alternately
thickly troweled or thinly brushed, using combinations of acrylic, oil, enamel,
spray paint and, at times, glitter. Iconic images of basketball nets,
watermelons, rainbows and more float on scintillating painterly fields, as if
in the mind’s eye.
Stopa states, “I make abstract paintings with representational references.
Currently, my palette is limited to pastels, neon and blacks. I'm
interested in making work where the frame/edge is pronounced, where pattern
becomes form and where there is a marked distinction between thin and thick
handling.
I have two bodies of work for this show. One is Joggie. The other is
Brooklyn Zoo. I grew up on the east coast, and the Brooklyn Zoo series are a
group of paintings that reference urban settings. Basketball, food and hip hop
music find their way into these works.”
According to Kent Place Gallery Director Ken Weathersby, “Stopa’s paintings
present something direct and evocative with complexity. There is always a tie
in to personal experience in a way that moves beyond the personal. I see
a social dimension in Stopa’s art, something that resonates with both humor and
a critical edge, as the images situate themselves in relation to the broader
field of historic and contemporary painting. We ask, ‘What is generally
seen as an iconic thing, and what is iconic in these paintings?’ and for the
sensitive viewer there emerges a kind of identification with the ‘voice’ of the
artist and the mood evoked here. I think it is wonderful to start the
season at Kent Place Gallery with this rewarding show.”
Stopa’s work has been presented in numerous exhibitions in NYC including
Janet Kurnatowksi Gallery, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and Bull
& Ram Gallery. He holds an MFA from Pratt Institute, NY.
Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue,
Summit, NJ. Gallery hours are Monday – Friday, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm.
For more information call (908) 273-0900, or visit www.kentplace.org.
# # #
Exhibition
6/19/2013
6/19/2013
detail, 198(dc)
Linda Francis, John O'Connor, Ken Weathersby
Suite 217, 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn, NY
June 6 - July 14, 2013
Thoughts on
“Linda Francis, John O’Connor, Ken
Weathersby”
at Suite 217
He had shown that the image
did not exist, only chains of images, and that the very way these were
assembled, from the genetic code to the Renault production chain, this assembly
itself constituted an image, an image that reflected how we fit into the center
or the periphery of the universe.
--Jean-Luc Godard, “Changer d’image”
In a video commissioned for
French television in 1982, whose narration is quoted above in translation, Godard
wrestles with the question of whether and how images can resist commodification. The exhibition that joins works by Linda
Francis, John O’Connor, and Ken Weathersby similarly makes me think about how
artists can have a critical relationship to the near-omnipresent forces of the
commodity market, in a culture of capital that has expanded even further over
the past few decades. The artworks here
provoke questions about the flow of capital exchange that seems to saturate
every aspect of our lives.
Fluidity, flexibility:
oft-cited keywords of the transnational corporate economy, which penetrates
public space and institutions through privatization, and personal experience
through digital information technology.
The mobile realm of production contracts labor wherever profit is
greatest, while the deregulated financial industry increasingly speculates on
the flow of symbolic capital itself.
Smooth operation is ostensibly the order of the day.
Placing high stakes, making
hearts ache / He’s loved in seven languages / Diamond nights and ruby lights,
high in the sky / Heaven help him, when he falls
--Sade, “Smooth Operator”
Linda Francis’s recent work
is based on electron-microscope images of the surface of a failed heat shield
of a 1990s space shuttle, images that she overlays repeatedly on the
computer. Her pieces present
technological visualizations of physical structure—a structure designed,
unsuccessfully, to harness resistance.
The artworks also incorporate into the imagery evidence of the media
that produce them, such as pixelation.
In Interference, the crystalline components arrayed within the image
suggest patterned organization while eluding it. Across the multiple silkscreened prints
assembled in the piece, repetition and alignment at the edges structure the
image. Thus pattern recognition in Interference
is both fugitive and precise. Indeed a
strong diagonal current crosses a literal gap to a separate, larger panel that
leans on the floor against the wall.
Shifts in scale and near-repetitions are vertiginous.
Also patternlike but
dizzyingly evasive, We Can Build You
is a more physically factured, painted version of the image at greater
magnification. It resembles
representations of biological code, and its title (taken from the Phillip K.
Dick novel) evokes the manipulations of biotechnology, and more generally the
way technological capitalism works on us.
Francis’s pieces invite contemplation of hypermediation and replication,
as well as contingency, fissure, and friction, with a coolly observant gaze.
John O’Connor also indexes
research material in his drawings, which underscore the imbrication of
psychological experience with an information economy. As the Surrealists channeled the illogical
logic of the unconscious, O’Connor cultivates delirious overloads of
information processing. He produces
drawings by using shifting, idiosyncratic codes: converting text into numbers,
reversing letters, translating letters into colors by randomly devised systems,
running garbled text through an electronic dictionary.
Turing
(named for the computer scientist and his famous test of whether machines can
think) presents an oval loop of linked bits of textual data. The loop surrounds a set of inwardly folding,
bunching shapes that evoke an organism introjecting and expelling. O’Connor generated the incomprehensible data
by a dialogue between his free associations, processed through multiple
overcodings, and an electronic dictionary’s responses (one of which eerily speaks
to Alan Turing’s persecution for his sexuality). Characteristic of the artist’s work, the
drawing appears both diagrammatic and indecipherable.
In SUSEJ, a drawing of intricately colored grids, O’Connor includes
notations of his text-to-color coding at the paper’s edges. The piece invites us to comprehend the design
of the delicate arrangement of colors, but its structuring principles are
opaque. Similarly, the thin, almost
weightless sculptures Future Rods are
covered in blocky text concerning prediction, which resists deciphering. Obtruding on the gallery floor, they evoke
the forces of futures speculation that invest contemporary life.
O’Connor’s artistic practice
mines the extra-aesthetic, representing processed information from the
provinces of socioeconomics, politics, science, mass culture, and personal
life. His work does not so much
assimilate these realms into absorbable images, but rather creates incongruity,
discordance, uncanny disconcertment.
Ken Weathersby, on the other
hand, makes dissonant the constitutive elements of conventional art objects
themselves, specifically paintings: that is, paint applied for perceptual
activity, canvas or linen, and wooden support.
In 198 (dc), paint is applied
to a wood support, but that substrate is also image: it’s an elaborate grid of
layered wood strips, which cutouts in the painted front surface reveal from the
picture plane. Meanwhile the painted
image, an optically active grid of black and white squares, is a material slab
of acrylic film directly glued to the wood.
The resemblance of the grids, and the equivocation of figure and ground
at the level of image and physical material, confound distinctions between
structure and surface.
In the freestanding 194 (z), another painted grid of tiny
squares echoes a larger grid of wood strips that supports the painting. In this piece, the wood strips enclose the
painting, holding it within. The
structure is a delicate cage that partially obscures the painting, here in its
conventional form of acrylic on a rectangle of fabric over stretcher bars. Planar yet viewable in the round, the hybrid 194 (z) presents us with ambiguity about
what is supportive structure and what is visual display.
Weathersby’s work foregrounds
how the realms of visual image and material production are implicated with each
other. It is as though painting is
posing questions about its constituent terms.
In 197 (dcch), what looks like
a painting—a thin plane of an optically active grid of colors—is dissected to
present a literal, physical interior that contains overlapping parts of other
gridded paintings and wooden grids. The
piece highlights a sense of imbrication and conditionality.
Interestingly, the container
is also a key figure in contemporary economics; the container ship is pivotal
to global exchange, as it’s designed to make the supply chain as smooth as
possible. Indeed, as the forces of
transnational capitalism are ever more pervasive, they operate largely below
the threshold of perceptibility. The
artwork of Weathersby, Francis, and O’Connor each raises issues of imbrication,
of congruence and incongruity. It resonates
keenly with the extra-artistic socioeconomic situation, and its discontents.
Exhibition
4/7/2013
4/7/2013
"Silent Opera", a solo show at One River Gallery, Englewood, NJ. April 19 through May 24, 2013.
Reception Friday, April 19, 6 - 9 pm.
Ken Weathersby’s
exhibition, Silent Opera, presents works that transpose and shuffle
optical and physical aspects. In the paintings, painted grids of primary color
or high-contrast black and white are interrupted, displaced, removed,
enclosed or cut into. In the collage-based works, found images are
submerged under dense, wooden grids.
The idea of a painting’s
abstract face or a photographed human image as a site of display is
muted and complicated by these interventions. When an object is
exhibited, it is like a performer stepping forward onto a stage, and if
the sound of the song is cut or muffled, we hear the sound of the
performer’s footsteps, the incidental stage business, the bump and
clatter of conventions that normally surround the song.
“Responding to the given conditions of painting gives me something to
work against. I’ve tried to separate the parts of physical language of
painting, the paint surface, the wooden support, the canvas or linen,
and reset them in new relations. Recently I’ve also been cannibalizing
my bookshelf, taking whole pages mostly from art books, and building on
top of them; hiding them, replacing them, saving them, burying them.”
One River Gallery - 49 N. Dean St., Englewood, NJ 07631
Publication
4/7/2013
Hearing the guitar riff toward the end of Boston’s 1976 rock song “Peace of Mind” from a passing car radio the other day, I was a little surprised to find myself gripped by the sound, just as when I was a teenager and predictably compelled by such things many years ago.
4/7/2013
Hearing a classic rock riff births a false memory concerning Dieter Krieg's giant paintings in "Refigured Painting - the German Image 1960-88".
Neo-Expressionism and Power Chords
by Ken Weathersby
Hearing the guitar riff toward the end of Boston’s 1976 rock song “Peace of Mind” from a passing car radio the other day, I was a little surprised to find myself gripped by the sound, just as when I was a teenager and predictably compelled by such things many years ago.
The musical gesture is certainly a cliché but I listened; a cluster of chords form a simple, blocky, repeated figure. The fully cranked electric guitar and amp pump out a sound soaked in a humming spectrum of overtone distortion. All other instruments drop out during the break and let it hang excitingly in the air. The aural space around it for that moment is vast.
The brief rhythmic guitar break is a statement of the drive that’s layered up and elaborated throughout the entire song, but here it is stripped down for a minute, right to the heart of the matter: a sonic emotional mission statement by the long-haired, red-eyed stoner at the center of it all. He soars for a moment through an inner space of pure feeling, whipping out in this riff an energy that majestically trumps all that boring “corporate ladder” and “competition” crap.
As I listened, the emotional freight carried by this guitar riff called to mind something of what I encountered later in life in the loaded brush marks of Neo Expressionist paintings. I spontaneously visualized big German pictures from the 1970s and 1980s. I first actually saw such canvases at the Toledo Museum of Art in 1988, in the traveling exhibition “Painting Refigured”. That show, organized by the Guggenheim Museum and Williams College Museum of Art, took stock of German painting between 1960 and 1988, with an emphasis on the return of figuration, but also a high concentration of the heavy-duty use of oil paint on enormous canvases. Artists in the show included Baselitz, Kiefer, Lupertz, and Polke. I remembered standing in the museum taking in the way a particular painting featured a massive stroke from a paint-loaded brush that seemed to have been the size of a broom. The colors were mixed right on the canvas, inside the smeared mark, to make unexpected contrasts and crazy marbled streaks, countless bleeds and clots within an individual swipe of paint. This memory, as it was focused in my mind’s eye, was of a huge painting made with a single monumental mark, an abstraction and at the same time an indirect representation of the presence of a giant, a towering artist who might have created this work in a flash, with a single dab. After locating and consulting the exhibition catalog for “Refigured Painting”, I couldn’t find a record of this particular painting anywhere. I realized that my memory of this piece was closely associated with a couple of untitled paintings from 1985, by Dieter Krieg. Looking at the reproductions now, I see that they are neither fully abstract nor composed of a single stroke. One represents what looks like a chicken leg and a thermometer, and the other one depicts a huge fish hook piercing a scrap of paper with the word “idiot” scrawled on it. Looking at these in the “Refigured Painting” catalog, I realized that my recollection of a monumental single-stroke painting was a false memory, essentially an invention of my own. It didn’t exist, but was maybe accurate as an involuntary distillation of part of my impression at the time of the show. The Krieg paintings certainly were composed of the kind of heavy, fraught marks I thought of hearing that Boston song.
The macho (almost all were men) German painters whose photos appeared in the back of the catalogs (I pulled out and consulted another catalog of a similar show, “Expressions: New Art from Germany”, which included many of the same artists and toured US museums earlier in the ‘80s) were dressed and styled as tough rebels, attempting rock star glamour (though maybe more punk rock than arena rock) in their black leather jackets, five o’clock-shadowed chins and scowls. A 1981 painting in “Refigured Painting” by Helmut Middendorf called “Singer” is dominated by a hunched, skinny figure holding a microphone stand, but was clearly directly copied from a photo of guitarist smashing his instrument on the stage from the cover of the Clash’s “London Calling”(1979).
As there is something signaling excess, even hinting at chaos in an overdriven distorted guitar on the edge of feedback, so there is in the touch of a gigantic brush dripping with a giant blob of mottled oil color. Each contains potential worlds within itself-- and each can present a virtuosic dishing out of monumental forms, fat floating slabs for the ears or the eyes. In both cases the expression is a presumption of intensity and power deployed. In both cases the awareness of the touch of a creating hand invites one to identify and emulate by miming a swinging gesture of a brush, or a thrash at an air guitar. It’s a seductive image of mastery, full of grandiosity.
The implication of a controlling agent behind these expressions, able to propel and direct such potent stuff, suggests to me now that the appeal of these forms and the identification they offered promised compensation for adolescent male anxiety, a fulfilling of lack, an allaying of fear. It went without saying that all my male high school friends liked that guitar sound (it was beyond assumed), just as my colleagues in art school were excited about those big German smears of paint. It was a feeling. It was more than a feeling.
###
Exhibition
1/31/2013
1/31/2013
"Nearly Neutral"
curated by John O'Connor
January 29 - February 26, 2013
Heimbold Visual Arts Center at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY
artists:
Michele Alpern, Ivin Ballen, Dawn Clements, Matthew Fisher, Linda Francis, Rachel Hayes, Ridley Howard, Allan Macintyre, Jerome Marshak, Ryan Mrozowkski, Matthew Northridge, Bruce Pearson, Antonia Perez, Shahpour Pouyan, Kanishka Raja, Timothy Smith, Bruce Stiglich, Ken Weathersby
# # #
Exhibition
1/31/2013
1/31/2013
"Cache" a solo show of five new works at NIAD Art Center, Richmond, CA, through February 25, 2013.
"For his new collages, New York artist Ken Weathersby has taken to
cannibalizing his bookshelf. Using entire pages from an art book, mostly
images of Greek sculpture, or other figurative images, Weathersby
buries each under one of his signature wooden grids. The pieces become
elegant and complex explorations of the picture plane. Cache: New Work From Ken Weathersby, a selection of the artist’s most recent collages are on view in NIAD’s annex gallery."
--NIAD Gallery Director Tim Buckwalter
# # #
Curating
9/23/2012
9/23/2012
(for "The Structural Catalyst" - my extended essay & slide show about this exhibition on youtube, click here.)
“Mark Dagley 1976 - 2011” An Abstract Retrospective at Kent Place Gallery
The Kent Place
Gallery will present a chronological selection of artworks spanning 35 years by
Mark Dagley, from Monday, September 10, through Friday, October 5, 2012. There will be a reception for the artist from
6-8 pm on Friday, September 28.
Mark Dagley’s visually dazzling, exploratory abstract art has been exhibited in New York and
internationally since the mid-1980s.
This Kent Place Gallery exhibition is a carefully selected timeline,
including strong pieces from all periods, reaching back to a few very early
works from 1976 and concluding with recent paintings. (To coincide with this
overview, Minus Space gallery in Brooklyn will open an exciting show of
Dagley’s newest works, called “Structural Solutions.” The Minus Space exhibition
runs September 7 – October 27.)
In the
paintings, works on paper and sculptures at Kent Place, one can see Dagley developing
a wide range of artistic possibilities, including hallucinatory optical and
retinal color effects, intense patterns, contradictory painterly spaces, and
geometric constructions. There is a through-line
of abstraction, and of surprising wit and inventiveness, evidence of a rigorous
and playful sensibility linking all the objects on view.
One of the most
striking pieces in the show is a chunky, stacked “ziggurat” from the mid-eighties
that seems to be both a sculpture and a painting. Its squat monumentality and position on the
floor say sculpture—sculpture that refers to architecture. Its black, reflective surface is lush and
slick, almost reading as standing liquid. This surface is clearly a poured
paint film, and the stretched canvas visible on the sides of each of the
object’s “steps” further links it to traditions of painting in general, and to other
black paintings in particular. One can
think of Stella’s “pin stripe” paintings, or of the black square images of
Malevich. The glossy surface and
simplified formal progressions in such works by Dagley also resemble early
video game icons, introducing a flavor of the digital. The condensation of
these implications and more into this elegant self-contained object has unusual
humor and poetry.
Gallery Director
Ken Weathersby said, “I am very excited to be able to present this show at Kent
Place. Mark Dagley is a significant
artist, someone whose achievement and ongoing uncompromised creativity I
greatly admire. When we first discussed
the possibility of his exhibiting here, it was his idea to do a chronological
overview. What could be better in a school setting, for young artists to see,
than a record of someone creating, developing and experimenting over three and
a half decades? We included a group of
working drawings as well as finished pieces.
Mark’s thinking is present in all of this, but seeing his process and
notes to himself in the drawings gives a peek behind the curtain, to some of
how he gets there, which will be great for my students. This is also a show
that contemporary artists will want to see.
I can think of many active painters in New York (myself included) who
can be informed by it.”
Mark Dagley was
born in Washington DC and lives in Jersey City, New Jersey. Venues for his recent New York solo shows
include Minus Space, and Up & Co. He
has shown extensively in the US and Europe since the mid-1980s, including many
important solo and group exhibitions, and is included in many major public and
private collections.
Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42
Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ. Gallery
hours are Monday – Friday, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm.
For more information call (908) 273-0900, or visit www.kentplace.org.
# # #
Exhibition
7/28/2012
7/28/2012
Group Exhibition
Masquerader
curated by Ken Resseger
Aug 5 - Aug 12, 2012
Reception: Aug 5, 4-7 pm
Artists:
Artists:
George Blaha
Michael Brennan
Just Kids
Carey Maxon
KD Resseger
Lynn Talbot
Just Kids
Carey Maxon
KD Resseger
Lynn Talbot
Ken Weathersby
"Charlie
plays an actor who bungles several scenes and is kicked out. He returns
convincingly dressed as a lady and charms the director. Even so, Charlie
never makes it into the film, winding up at the bottom of a well.
- The Masquerader, 1914 starring Charlie Chaplin (synopsis of) —-"
- The Masquerader, 1914 starring Charlie Chaplin (synopsis of) —-"
The Howard Art Project
1386 Dorchester Ave.
Dorchester MA
# # #
1386 Dorchester Ave.
Dorchester MA
# # #
Exhibition
7/11/2012
Group Exhibition
July 12–August 17, 2012
Artists: Rachel Beach, Peter Demos, Andrew Falkowski, Emilio
Gomariz, Jay Shinn, Suzanne Song, Rebecca Ward, and Ken Weathersby
"Mixed Greens presents Post-Op, a group exhibition exploring the influence of Op Art within contemporary visual art practice. The recognizable movement of the mid-60s was dismissed by many critics of the time, but the movement—grown out of geometric abstraction, trompe l’oeil, and the uncertainty and perceptual change of the mid-20th Century—has proven to be of current importance. Post-Op brings together eight artists working in a variety of media, all of whom contemplate perception, form, function, and rationality to create works tied to the lineage of the Op movement. Through color, line, lighting, and even animation, these artists explore visual illusion in exciting ways.
Ken Weathersby uses colored patterns to render optically stimulating surfaces. Then, through physical interventions, he removes and replaces areas of painted canvas with surgical precision. While the tight acrylic and graphite patterns generate a sense of retinal movement, the interventions call attention to the physicality within, and extending beyond, the illusory picture plane."
Mixed Greens -- 531 west 26th street, 1st floor -- new york, ny 10001 -- tel: 212 331 8888 -- fax: 212 343 2134 -- info@mixedgreens.com
# # #
7/11/2012
Group Exhibition
Post-Op
July 12–August 17, 2012
Opening: Thursday, July 12, 5-7pm
Artists: Rachel Beach, Peter Demos, Andrew Falkowski, Emilio
Gomariz, Jay Shinn, Suzanne Song, Rebecca Ward, and Ken Weathersby "Mixed Greens presents Post-Op, a group exhibition exploring the influence of Op Art within contemporary visual art practice. The recognizable movement of the mid-60s was dismissed by many critics of the time, but the movement—grown out of geometric abstraction, trompe l’oeil, and the uncertainty and perceptual change of the mid-20th Century—has proven to be of current importance. Post-Op brings together eight artists working in a variety of media, all of whom contemplate perception, form, function, and rationality to create works tied to the lineage of the Op movement. Through color, line, lighting, and even animation, these artists explore visual illusion in exciting ways.
Ken Weathersby uses colored patterns to render optically stimulating surfaces. Then, through physical interventions, he removes and replaces areas of painted canvas with surgical precision. While the tight acrylic and graphite patterns generate a sense of retinal movement, the interventions call attention to the physicality within, and extending beyond, the illusory picture plane."
Mixed Greens -- 531 west 26th street, 1st floor -- new york, ny 10001 -- tel: 212 331 8888 -- fax: 212 343 2134 -- info@mixedgreens.com
# # #
Exhibition
5/17/2012
5/17/2012
Ken Weathersby
Strange Fit
1 June – 1 July, 2012
Opening reception: Friday, 1 June. 7-9pm
Hours
11am to 6pm, Tuesday through Sunday and by appointment
Location
177 North 9th Street Brooklyn, NY 11211
Contact:
E: info@pierogi.com
www.pierogi2000.com
Strange Fit
1 June – 1 July, 2012
Opening reception: Friday, 1 June. 7-9pm
Hours
11am to 6pm, Tuesday through Sunday and by appointment
Location
177 North 9th Street Brooklyn, NY 11211
Contact:
E: info@pierogi.com
www.pierogi2000.com
"Ken Weathersby’s exhibition, Strange Fit, presents abstract paintings that shuffle optical and physical elements, playing the visual against the tactile. In each painting there is an unraveling of expectations as paint, linen, and wood deviate from their usual roles. Grids of bright color on the painted fronts of the canvases create retinal effects like moiré patterns, and the suggestion of visual movement and space. But those surfaces are often interrupted by a reordering of the parts of painting. Works have pieces removed and replaced, or have parts of their painted faces covered, reversed or hidden from view. Painting seems to have been taken apart, then carefully fitted back together, but fitted together strangely, with odd elisions, inversions and substitutions."
# # #
# # #
Exhibition
2/26/2012
The Other Ken Weathersby
Gallery Aferro - 73 Market Street, Newark, NJ 07102
http://www.aferro.org
March 10 – April 14, 2012
Reception, March 10, 7pm.
"Ken Weathersby’s exhibition at Gallery Aferro includes easel-sized, patterned abstract paintings, photographic works, and several wall-mounted boxes containing tiny, crafted objects resembling miniature paintings.
The works in the show shuffle the traditional given stuff of pictures and picture-making. The paintings are subtly pulled apart, or have pieces cut out and removed, or their painted faces refuse to be seen. The wall-mounted boxes may be mere models for groupings of larger works, or may be works in themselves. This intentional ambiguity extends to photographs included in the show, paired portraits, which offer false resemblance and shifting identity in seemingly straightforward profile pictures."
# # #
2/26/2012
The Other Ken Weathersby
Gallery Aferro - 73 Market Street, Newark, NJ 07102
http://www.aferro.org
March 10 – April 14, 2012
Reception, March 10, 7pm.
"Ken Weathersby’s exhibition at Gallery Aferro includes easel-sized, patterned abstract paintings, photographic works, and several wall-mounted boxes containing tiny, crafted objects resembling miniature paintings.
The works in the show shuffle the traditional given stuff of pictures and picture-making. The paintings are subtly pulled apart, or have pieces cut out and removed, or their painted faces refuse to be seen. The wall-mounted boxes may be mere models for groupings of larger works, or may be works in themselves. This intentional ambiguity extends to photographs included in the show, paired portraits, which offer false resemblance and shifting identity in seemingly straightforward profile pictures."
# # #
Curating
2/14/2012
image: Untitled (Parallels 66), detail, 2011, acrylic polymer and bismuth on canvas, Jeffrey Scott Mathews
You Have Found a Way to Be Here
Jeffrey Scott Mathews
Kent Place Gallery
Tuesday, February 14 – Friday, March 9, 2012. Reception: 6-8 pm, Friday, March 9.
Mathew’s exhibition, titled “You Have Found a Way to Be Here”, includes abstract works in the unusual medium of bismuth on canvas. Spectacular, colorful deposits of the melted metal crystallize on the surface of several paintings. Others works feature powerful, quilted geometric grids of colored fabric. The whole exhibition unites an underlying mystical aura with a lucid understanding of contemporary painting’s possibilities.
The artist has said, “The exhibition title taken as a precept relates to the tenets of hermeticism, the occult, alchemy, magick, consciousness and devotion. What is to be found in the work is primarily geometric, (approximately) symmetric, ordered, gestured and crystallized. I am intent on expanding upon Minimalist and Post-Minimalist strategies.” Mathews work offers a complex statement, highly attuned to the visual and physical properties of painting. It is also geared toward the possibility of activating a historical link. He cites his interest and involvement with the aims of past artists and writers, including JG Ballard, the Shakers, Jorge Luis Borges, Yves Klein, Anni Albers and others. Regarding his unusual technique, the artist explains, “Triangles in repetition and sewn together become hermetic tapestries… molten bismuth is applied to linen or canvas; tracing the path of the artists hand, only to be naturally crystallized over.”
Gallery Director Ken Weathersby said of Mathew’s art, “The surfaces are incredibly palpable and create a site where the artist compresses information, sensation and energy into a concentrated and refined form. In this mixture we see artist’s actions and the workings of matter joined in an unusual way. An enormous amount of processing and discrete conjuring results in works both rugged and delicate. A kind of lucid, canny, post-post-modern version of the alchemist’s “philosopher’s stone” seems on the verge of forming before our eyes. These works are strange, but entirely convincing.”
The artist is a graduate of the MFA program at Cranbrook Academy of Art, in Michigan. His work has previously been included in group shows at French Neon, St. Cecilias Convent, Hal Bromm Gallery, X Initiaive, all in NY, and a recent two-person show at Jolie Laide Gallery in Philadelphia, among other exhibitions. Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ. Gallery hours are Monday – Friday, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm. For more information call (908) 273-0900, or visit www.kentplace.org. # # #
2/14/2012
image: Untitled (Parallels 66), detail, 2011, acrylic polymer and bismuth on canvas, Jeffrey Scott Mathews
You Have Found a Way to Be Here
Jeffrey Scott Mathews
Kent Place Gallery
Tuesday, February 14 – Friday, March 9, 2012. Reception: 6-8 pm, Friday, March 9.
Mathew’s exhibition, titled “You Have Found a Way to Be Here”, includes abstract works in the unusual medium of bismuth on canvas. Spectacular, colorful deposits of the melted metal crystallize on the surface of several paintings. Others works feature powerful, quilted geometric grids of colored fabric. The whole exhibition unites an underlying mystical aura with a lucid understanding of contemporary painting’s possibilities.
The artist has said, “The exhibition title taken as a precept relates to the tenets of hermeticism, the occult, alchemy, magick, consciousness and devotion. What is to be found in the work is primarily geometric, (approximately) symmetric, ordered, gestured and crystallized. I am intent on expanding upon Minimalist and Post-Minimalist strategies.” Mathews work offers a complex statement, highly attuned to the visual and physical properties of painting. It is also geared toward the possibility of activating a historical link. He cites his interest and involvement with the aims of past artists and writers, including JG Ballard, the Shakers, Jorge Luis Borges, Yves Klein, Anni Albers and others. Regarding his unusual technique, the artist explains, “Triangles in repetition and sewn together become hermetic tapestries… molten bismuth is applied to linen or canvas; tracing the path of the artists hand, only to be naturally crystallized over.”
Gallery Director Ken Weathersby said of Mathew’s art, “The surfaces are incredibly palpable and create a site where the artist compresses information, sensation and energy into a concentrated and refined form. In this mixture we see artist’s actions and the workings of matter joined in an unusual way. An enormous amount of processing and discrete conjuring results in works both rugged and delicate. A kind of lucid, canny, post-post-modern version of the alchemist’s “philosopher’s stone” seems on the verge of forming before our eyes. These works are strange, but entirely convincing.”
The artist is a graduate of the MFA program at Cranbrook Academy of Art, in Michigan. His work has previously been included in group shows at French Neon, St. Cecilias Convent, Hal Bromm Gallery, X Initiaive, all in NY, and a recent two-person show at Jolie Laide Gallery in Philadelphia, among other exhibitions. Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ. Gallery hours are Monday – Friday, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm. For more information call (908) 273-0900, or visit www.kentplace.org. # # #
Exhibition
1/3/2012
"Textility," at the Visual Art Center of New Jersey.
Reception: Friday, January 13, 6-8pm.
Through April 1, 2012.
Sunday, March 25, 2:00 pm-4:00 pm, talk with the artists and curators.
"Co-curators Mary Birmingham and Joanne Mattera coined the word "textility" to describe a new sensibility that they divide into three separate categories: paintings without paint (and its corollary, drawing without pencil), textiles without thread, and idiosyncratic work made with a strong focus on materiality and process." (Sharon Butler - Two Coats of Paint blog)
"Ken Weathersby deconstructs painting's physical components, interrupting the expected relationships among wooden stretcher, canvas, and painted image. A cutaway section on his diptych, "179 (twn)", reveals a gridded wooden network that suggests the warp and weft structure of weaving and also references the wooden stretcher bars. If Lucio Fontana cut his canvas to reveal the space behind painting, Ken Weathersby seems to dissect his, displacing, inserting, and reversing sections." (Mary Birmingham - "Textility" catalog essay)
Participating artists: Joell Baxter, Caroline Burton, Sharon Butler, Mary Carlson, Jennifer Cecere, Pip Culbert, Elisa D'Arrigo, Grace DeGennaro, Barbara Ellmann, Carly Glovinski, Elana Herzog, Marietta Hoferer, Nava Lubelski, Stephen Maine, Lael Marshall, Derick Melander, Sam Messenger, Sam Moyer, Lalani Nan, Aric Obrosey, Gelah Penn, Debra Ramsay, Susan Still Scott, Arlene Shechet, Susanna Starr, Leslie Wayne, Ken Weathersby and Peter Weber.
A fully illustrated catalog that includes essays by both curators will accompany the show.
Visual Arts Center of New Jersey
68 Elm Street, Summit, NJ 07901
908.273.9121
# # #
1/3/2012
"Textility," at the Visual Art Center of New Jersey.
Reception: Friday, January 13, 6-8pm.
Through April 1, 2012.
Sunday, March 25, 2:00 pm-4:00 pm, talk with the artists and curators.
"Co-curators Mary Birmingham and Joanne Mattera coined the word "textility" to describe a new sensibility that they divide into three separate categories: paintings without paint (and its corollary, drawing without pencil), textiles without thread, and idiosyncratic work made with a strong focus on materiality and process." (Sharon Butler - Two Coats of Paint blog)
"Ken Weathersby deconstructs painting's physical components, interrupting the expected relationships among wooden stretcher, canvas, and painted image. A cutaway section on his diptych, "179 (twn)", reveals a gridded wooden network that suggests the warp and weft structure of weaving and also references the wooden stretcher bars. If Lucio Fontana cut his canvas to reveal the space behind painting, Ken Weathersby seems to dissect his, displacing, inserting, and reversing sections." (Mary Birmingham - "Textility" catalog essay)
Participating artists: Joell Baxter, Caroline Burton, Sharon Butler, Mary Carlson, Jennifer Cecere, Pip Culbert, Elisa D'Arrigo, Grace DeGennaro, Barbara Ellmann, Carly Glovinski, Elana Herzog, Marietta Hoferer, Nava Lubelski, Stephen Maine, Lael Marshall, Derick Melander, Sam Messenger, Sam Moyer, Lalani Nan, Aric Obrosey, Gelah Penn, Debra Ramsay, Susan Still Scott, Arlene Shechet, Susanna Starr, Leslie Wayne, Ken Weathersby and Peter Weber.
A fully illustrated catalog that includes essays by both curators will accompany the show.
Visual Arts Center of New Jersey
68 Elm Street, Summit, NJ 07901
908.273.9121
# # #
Artist Talk (video)
12/20/2011
Artist talk at Aferro Gallery on 12-8-11.
Click on the image to see the talk on youtube.
(10 min.)
# # #
12/20/2011
Artist talk at Aferro Gallery on 12-8-11.
Click on the image to see the talk on youtube.
(10 min.)
# # #
Exhibitions
9/1/2011
Without End
I'll be showing three new paintings in the exhibition, "Without End" at University of Delaware's Crane Gallery in Philadelphia.
Crane Gallery
1400 American St.
Philadelphia, PA
and in...
Faction
a group show, at University of Dayton, in Dayton, Ohio.
Oct. 3 - Oct. 24, 2011 (reception Tuesday, October 18th, 6 - 8pm.
Art Street, Studio D
University of Dayton
Dayton Ohio, 45469
# # #
9/1/2011
Without End
I'll be showing three new paintings in the exhibition, "Without End" at University of Delaware's Crane Gallery in Philadelphia.
“… In this exhibition, the work selected looks through the lens of process in making art, and specifically the construction and deconstruction of ideas, formula, aesthetics and memory…”
Sept. 8 - Oct. 6, 2011 (reception Sept. 8, 6-9pm)Crane Gallery
1400 American St.
Philadelphia, PA
and in...
Faction
a group show, at University of Dayton, in Dayton, Ohio.
Oct. 3 - Oct. 24, 2011 (reception Tuesday, October 18th, 6 - 8pm.
Art Street, Studio D
University of Dayton
Dayton Ohio, 45469
# # #
Exhibition
5/26/2011
Ken Weathersby’s "Time is the Diamond"
Weathersby’s art is extremely forthright but not immediately fully forthcoming; initially appearing accessible, it is complicated, dense, and full of rich and intriguing contradiction. At a quick glance, his images are of a type one might expect to be manufactured, but instead we see that every single aspect of the work is handcrafted, from the elaborate stretchers and framing, to the taped and painted areas, to the surface cuts and insertions. Materially and structurally, he makes plain how the object is made, but there is often a sense of peekaboo or sleight of hand in the layers, displacement, and disruption of image and spaces. One would expect the use of the grid and checkerboard to lead to stability, but more often than not these normally regular fields are set ajar, slid apart, flipped open, broken, or misaligned. This is not art that panders, but rather insists that we engage by visually assembling, disassembling, and reassembling each work’s constituent parts in order to see, experience, and understand a holistic image and object. This is one way that Weathersby’s art extends painting’s possibilities.
Weathersby also extends paintings’s possibilities via the emotional and psychological spaces and situations it instigates. Intellectually, we might encounter his work as a visual puzzle to be solved, but there is more at stake here. What is the emotion of assembly and disassembly, visibility and invisibility, regularity and disruption, and why is this interesting and how does it enhance our lives? What is the psychology of gaps, slips, incisions, displacements, and what use is this to us? Weathersby’s art isn’t cruel or demanding, but is instead made with the utmost regard for the viewer, conveying integrity, openness, and generosity. Respectfully but rigorously, the spaces of the paintings echo the intimate, perplexing, meaningful spaces of ourselves, our bodies and thoughts, the things we acknowledge and know and attempt to share but are often beyond words. In this work we encounter our own self-knowledge and contradictions, aspirations and ambiguity. By confronting the parts of Weathersby’s art we can experience something in bits and pieces as right and whole in many different configurations and encounters. This is Weathersby’s diamond, painting’s health, and Art’s payoff.
Chris Ashley
Oakland, CA
August 2011
###
5/26/2011
Time Is the Diamond (detail), Ken Weathersby, 2011, printed paper on linen over archival foamboard, less than 5" tall
Some Walls
"Time Is the Diamond" will be on view August 7 - September 25, 2011. Some Walls is a curatorial and writing project in a private home in Oakland, California directed by artist and writer Chris Ashley.
Some Walls
"Time Is the Diamond" will be on view August 7 - September 25, 2011. Some Walls is a curatorial and writing project in a private home in Oakland, California directed by artist and writer Chris Ashley.
Ken Weathersby’s "Time is the Diamond"
Some argue that painting, like Humpty Dumpty, has fallen off the wall, taken a great fall, and can’t be put back together again: dropped, cracked open, oozed out, and finished. But painters like Ken Weathersby have shown that painting appears to continue living a healthy life long after its reported demise. Paintings do things and are about things that other mediums can’t match. While much art continues on a seemingly rapid path towards newer technologies and entertainment, encouraging fast looking and sound bite-like understanding, the technology of most painting, handmade and viewed slowly, at a finely granular level, might gradually be seen as anti-technology, or rather, as a kind of antidote to quicker, bigger, and shinier art. The technology of painting is more like Fred Flintstone’s car, made out of stone, wood, and animal skins, and powered and stopped by the driver’s feet.
In addition to the fundamentals of painting, however, its literal and conceptual deconstruction is an issue inherent to the medium throughout history. Painting has moved from being made on a specific wall, to being made for a specific wall or setting, and ultimately made to be completely portable and adaptable to different environments. Patronage has shifted among the church, the state, the wealthy, and the commoner. And, periodically, the question asked again and again is, just what is a painting: what shape is it, is it flat, how does it hang, what size is it, and must it be made with paint?
Ken Weathersby’s art engages smartly and sensitively with the possibilities of painting. Simultaneously clear-minded and intuitive, rational and risky, he pulls painting apart and puts it back together, making something new and quirky and thoughtful. Canvases are sliced and diced, but unlike Lucio Fontana’s cuts opening a void, Weathersby’s cuts are surgical, so that parts can be reattached, or transplanted, or opened to view another level of the painting. He cuts, rotates, shifts, reverses, and inserts. The classic grid or checkerboard is interrupted or made imperfect. Fronts and backs visibly co-exist, and the rarely seen chassis, staples, nails, screws, and threads are exposed. Elaborate carpentry normally behind the scenes becomes a central player. Weathersby’s paintings don’t merely question what a painting is, but provide physical evidence of several visual and philosophical resolutions to the properties, problems, expectations, and contradictions of painting by exploring front and back, inside and outside, the plane of the surface and depicted and actual space, pattern and disruption, and craft and art.
Weathersby’s small works, made with foam core, linen, wood, tape, and the images of his work reproduced on exhibition announcements, are not exactly studies. Although they use many of the same motifs and structures and share the same subjects and concepts found in his larger size work, they are individual pieces that can stand alone. To call them miniatures would not be an insult or diminution, but instead a useful label to place these small pieces as a specific set within Weathersby’s body of work. And though small, each works scale reads as large and full-sized, or, rather, right-sized.
Lined up on a simple shelf and leaning against the wall are twenty-two works in less than twelve linear feet, the smallest measuring approximately 2.5 x 1.5 inches, the largest, a real outlier, at just over 8 x 5 inches. This installation, Time is the Diamond, titled after a song by the American band Low, provides an overview and record of Weathersby’s invention, wit, and curiosity, of what painting might be, aspires to be, and can’t overcome. The song’s dense, abstract, almost impenetrable lyrics have a folk quality, listing things the singer is or is not, or has and has lost, akin to the hybrid and transgressive qualities in Weathersby’s art that are ultimately resolved, over time, in honed, precise, finished works:
In addition to the fundamentals of painting, however, its literal and conceptual deconstruction is an issue inherent to the medium throughout history. Painting has moved from being made on a specific wall, to being made for a specific wall or setting, and ultimately made to be completely portable and adaptable to different environments. Patronage has shifted among the church, the state, the wealthy, and the commoner. And, periodically, the question asked again and again is, just what is a painting: what shape is it, is it flat, how does it hang, what size is it, and must it be made with paint?
Ken Weathersby’s art engages smartly and sensitively with the possibilities of painting. Simultaneously clear-minded and intuitive, rational and risky, he pulls painting apart and puts it back together, making something new and quirky and thoughtful. Canvases are sliced and diced, but unlike Lucio Fontana’s cuts opening a void, Weathersby’s cuts are surgical, so that parts can be reattached, or transplanted, or opened to view another level of the painting. He cuts, rotates, shifts, reverses, and inserts. The classic grid or checkerboard is interrupted or made imperfect. Fronts and backs visibly co-exist, and the rarely seen chassis, staples, nails, screws, and threads are exposed. Elaborate carpentry normally behind the scenes becomes a central player. Weathersby’s paintings don’t merely question what a painting is, but provide physical evidence of several visual and philosophical resolutions to the properties, problems, expectations, and contradictions of painting by exploring front and back, inside and outside, the plane of the surface and depicted and actual space, pattern and disruption, and craft and art.
Weathersby’s small works, made with foam core, linen, wood, tape, and the images of his work reproduced on exhibition announcements, are not exactly studies. Although they use many of the same motifs and structures and share the same subjects and concepts found in his larger size work, they are individual pieces that can stand alone. To call them miniatures would not be an insult or diminution, but instead a useful label to place these small pieces as a specific set within Weathersby’s body of work. And though small, each works scale reads as large and full-sized, or, rather, right-sized.
Lined up on a simple shelf and leaning against the wall are twenty-two works in less than twelve linear feet, the smallest measuring approximately 2.5 x 1.5 inches, the largest, a real outlier, at just over 8 x 5 inches. This installation, Time is the Diamond, titled after a song by the American band Low, provides an overview and record of Weathersby’s invention, wit, and curiosity, of what painting might be, aspires to be, and can’t overcome. The song’s dense, abstract, almost impenetrable lyrics have a folk quality, listing things the singer is or is not, or has and has lost, akin to the hybrid and transgressive qualities in Weathersby’s art that are ultimately resolved, over time, in honed, precise, finished works:
If I’m not a lion
And I’m not an island
If time is the diamond
Well all right.
And I’m not an island
If time is the diamond
Well all right.
Weathersby’s art is extremely forthright but not immediately fully forthcoming; initially appearing accessible, it is complicated, dense, and full of rich and intriguing contradiction. At a quick glance, his images are of a type one might expect to be manufactured, but instead we see that every single aspect of the work is handcrafted, from the elaborate stretchers and framing, to the taped and painted areas, to the surface cuts and insertions. Materially and structurally, he makes plain how the object is made, but there is often a sense of peekaboo or sleight of hand in the layers, displacement, and disruption of image and spaces. One would expect the use of the grid and checkerboard to lead to stability, but more often than not these normally regular fields are set ajar, slid apart, flipped open, broken, or misaligned. This is not art that panders, but rather insists that we engage by visually assembling, disassembling, and reassembling each work’s constituent parts in order to see, experience, and understand a holistic image and object. This is one way that Weathersby’s art extends painting’s possibilities.
Weathersby also extends paintings’s possibilities via the emotional and psychological spaces and situations it instigates. Intellectually, we might encounter his work as a visual puzzle to be solved, but there is more at stake here. What is the emotion of assembly and disassembly, visibility and invisibility, regularity and disruption, and why is this interesting and how does it enhance our lives? What is the psychology of gaps, slips, incisions, displacements, and what use is this to us? Weathersby’s art isn’t cruel or demanding, but is instead made with the utmost regard for the viewer, conveying integrity, openness, and generosity. Respectfully but rigorously, the spaces of the paintings echo the intimate, perplexing, meaningful spaces of ourselves, our bodies and thoughts, the things we acknowledge and know and attempt to share but are often beyond words. In this work we encounter our own self-knowledge and contradictions, aspirations and ambiguity. By confronting the parts of Weathersby’s art we can experience something in bits and pieces as right and whole in many different configurations and encounters. This is Weathersby’s diamond, painting’s health, and Art’s payoff.
Chris Ashley
Oakland, CA
August 2011
###
Publication
3/1/2011
New American Paintings 2011 Northeast Edition features three recent KW paintings. Backward-facing painting "173"(Lnd)--detail above-- is on the back cover. The juror for this edition was Laura Hoptman, curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, NY.
###
3/1/2011
New American Paintings 2011 Northeast Edition features three recent KW paintings. Backward-facing painting "173"(Lnd)--detail above-- is on the back cover. The juror for this edition was Laura Hoptman, curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, NY.
###
Exhibition
2/20/2011
179(twnR), detail, Ken Weathersby, 2010
POSTCONCEPTUALISM: THE MALLEABLE OBJECT opens March 10, 2011 at University of Maryland's Stamp Gallery.
Artist panel-- March 17, 2011, 6pm.
Essay by Mark Cameron Boyd (excerpt):
"POSTCONCEPTUALISM: THE MALLEABLE OBJECT explores the work of nine artists who individually extend and expand upon the theories and ideas of Conceptual Art in unique ways...
...Recent work by Ken Weathersby resurrects painting through a negotiation between the intellectual and physical properties of the support. Weathersby subverts the 'language of painting' through a three-dimensional manipulation that disrupts our perception by creating a 'no-space space.'..."
# # #
2/20/2011
179(twnR), detail, Ken Weathersby, 2010
POSTCONCEPTUALISM: THE MALLEABLE OBJECT opens March 10, 2011 at University of Maryland's Stamp Gallery.
Artist panel-- March 17, 2011, 6pm.
Essay by Mark Cameron Boyd (excerpt):
"POSTCONCEPTUALISM: THE MALLEABLE OBJECT explores the work of nine artists who individually extend and expand upon the theories and ideas of Conceptual Art in unique ways...
...Recent work by Ken Weathersby resurrects painting through a negotiation between the intellectual and physical properties of the support. Weathersby subverts the 'language of painting' through a three-dimensional manipulation that disrupts our perception by creating a 'no-space space.'..."
# # #
Residency
2/18/2011
studio aferro, Newark, NJ
My studio at home has become something of a puzzle with many complicated moving parts--work in progress and tools and books take up an increasing amount of the space.
Starting February 19, 2011, I'll be doing a residency at Aferro Studios in Newark, NJ. The residency goes until August of 2011, so for the next six months, I'll see what it's like to work a little differently. (Update: The residency was extended to a full year-- I'll be there until February of 2012.) It will be the first time since my loft in Williamsburg in the 90's that I'll have a dedicated, work-only studio space of over 1,200 sq. feet. The studio at Aferro should allow me to spread out and work on more projects at once, and on larger pieces.
Evonne Davis and Emma Wilcox run the program there, and they seem to have a good thing going, attracting many interesting artists from all over.
###
2/18/2011
studio aferro, Newark, NJ
My studio at home has become something of a puzzle with many complicated moving parts--work in progress and tools and books take up an increasing amount of the space.
Starting February 19, 2011, I'll be doing a residency at Aferro Studios in Newark, NJ. The residency goes until August of 2011, so for the next six months, I'll see what it's like to work a little differently. (Update: The residency was extended to a full year-- I'll be there until February of 2012.) It will be the first time since my loft in Williamsburg in the 90's that I'll have a dedicated, work-only studio space of over 1,200 sq. feet. The studio at Aferro should allow me to spread out and work on more projects at once, and on larger pieces.
Evonne Davis and Emma Wilcox run the program there, and they seem to have a good thing going, attracting many interesting artists from all over.
###
Curating
2/7/2011
sweet stain (detail), Bruce Stiglich, oil, acrylic, pencil & ink on canvas, paper, wood & cashmere
Summit, NJ--
Bruce Stiglich’s “Accumulation/Hallucination”
Kent Place Gallery
Monday, February 14 – Friday, March 11
Closing reception Friday March 11, 6—8 pm
Works in the show combine painting, drawing and the gathering of found objects to create complex, beautiful and densely painted collections of surfaces and images.
“Sweet Stain” (above), uses a wide range of means, including oil paint, acrylic, graphite, ink, wood, and, crucially, cashmere. A tiny scrap of stained cashmere formed the starting point of this complex work. Stiglich painted a portrait of the scrap of fabric, enlarged and copied his own painting, represented it again in another way, again and again, and each new view became a part of the whole. The cluster of representations contains mirrorings and repetitions, but also surprises that open up space for the imagination. It is a kaleidoscopic outgrowth of remembering and reflecting. Yet the subject (if that shred of stained fabric is really the subject) remains enigmatic.
Such a ceaseless return to a mute and mysterious object, and the possibly obsessive circling around it with art, brings to mind Citizen Kane’s rosebud, Proust’s madeleine, that little scrap of blue velvet so prized by Frank in David Lynch’s film. The point for me is that Stiglich creates an exciting, almost hallucinatory visual world, and the work resists collapsing into an easy interpretation.
New York Times art critic Ken Johnson has said, “Style in Bruce Stiglich's work is psychological, as the seemingly obsessive repetition of tiny marks that build up into dense vibrating textures suggest the feverishly compulsive activity of an inspired monomaniac. You may be reminded of Jackson Pollock's drip works or folk artists who are driven to decorate their homes with countless polka dots or flattened beer cans.”
Bruce says, “My work is a compiling of personal history. I work in series. These series become installations. They span an extended period of time. It begins with a discovery of found images, objects and doodles that to me seem incomplete. The process of completing the images is self referential in nature.”
Bruce Stiglich’s art work has been seen in numerous exhibitions in recent years in New York City and the New York area, in Pennsylvania, and in Miami, Florida. He currently teaches at Parsons School of Design, and has also taught at Pont-Aven School of Art in France, and at the State University of New York. He has been a curator of several art exhibitions at MyPAC, in Miami, FL.
Kent Place Gallery
42 Norwood Ave.
Summit, NJ 07902
###
2/7/2011
sweet stain (detail), Bruce Stiglich, oil, acrylic, pencil & ink on canvas, paper, wood & cashmere
Summit, NJ--
Bruce Stiglich’s “Accumulation/Hallucination”
Kent Place Gallery
Monday, February 14 – Friday, March 11
Closing reception Friday March 11, 6—8 pm
Works in the show combine painting, drawing and the gathering of found objects to create complex, beautiful and densely painted collections of surfaces and images.
“Sweet Stain” (above), uses a wide range of means, including oil paint, acrylic, graphite, ink, wood, and, crucially, cashmere. A tiny scrap of stained cashmere formed the starting point of this complex work. Stiglich painted a portrait of the scrap of fabric, enlarged and copied his own painting, represented it again in another way, again and again, and each new view became a part of the whole. The cluster of representations contains mirrorings and repetitions, but also surprises that open up space for the imagination. It is a kaleidoscopic outgrowth of remembering and reflecting. Yet the subject (if that shred of stained fabric is really the subject) remains enigmatic.
Such a ceaseless return to a mute and mysterious object, and the possibly obsessive circling around it with art, brings to mind Citizen Kane’s rosebud, Proust’s madeleine, that little scrap of blue velvet so prized by Frank in David Lynch’s film. The point for me is that Stiglich creates an exciting, almost hallucinatory visual world, and the work resists collapsing into an easy interpretation.
New York Times art critic Ken Johnson has said, “Style in Bruce Stiglich's work is psychological, as the seemingly obsessive repetition of tiny marks that build up into dense vibrating textures suggest the feverishly compulsive activity of an inspired monomaniac. You may be reminded of Jackson Pollock's drip works or folk artists who are driven to decorate their homes with countless polka dots or flattened beer cans.”
Bruce says, “My work is a compiling of personal history. I work in series. These series become installations. They span an extended period of time. It begins with a discovery of found images, objects and doodles that to me seem incomplete. The process of completing the images is self referential in nature.”
Bruce Stiglich’s art work has been seen in numerous exhibitions in recent years in New York City and the New York area, in Pennsylvania, and in Miami, Florida. He currently teaches at Parsons School of Design, and has also taught at Pont-Aven School of Art in France, and at the State University of New York. He has been a curator of several art exhibitions at MyPAC, in Miami, FL.
Kent Place Gallery
42 Norwood Ave.
Summit, NJ 07902
###
Exhibition
1/13/2011
THERELY BARE
(curated by John Tallman and Ron Buffington)
January 14-February 15, 2011
Reception:
Friday, January 14, 5:30pm - 8:00pm
Kate Beck (usa)
Alan Ebnother (usa)
Kevin Finklea (usa)
Billy Gruner and Sarah Keighery (aus)
Jeffrey Cortland Jones (usa)
Michael Paul Oman-Reagan (usa)
Lorri Ott (usa)
Leopoldine Roux (belg)
Clary Stolte (nd)
Lars Strandh (nor)
Richard Van Der Aa (aus/fr)
Iemke Van Dijk (nd)
Ken Weathersby (usa)
Guido Winkler (nd)
Lain York (usa)
THERELY BARE, an exhibition of non-objective art curated by John Tallman and Ron Buffington, will feature the work of 16 artists from around the world, including the United States, France, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Working in a style sometimes called reductive, these artists share a subversive approach to the traditions of painting. The exhibition title is wordplay, an inversion of “barely there.” It also hints at the curatorial premise of the exhibition. The abstract paintings in the show are explicitly physical and tend to have a forthright facture and presence, but also work within the means of painting itself to obfuscate, conceal or contradict expectations. In this sense, the work is hiding in plain sight. THERELY BARE challenges typical modes of viewing and raises questions about perception itself.
The curators, both professors at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, curated this exhibition specifically for AVA , but it will also be traveling to Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville, and the Art Gallery of Kent State University later in the year.
AVA Gallery
30 Frazier Avenue
Chattanooga, TN 37450
# # #
1/13/2011
THERELY BARE
(curated by John Tallman and Ron Buffington)
January 14-February 15, 2011
Reception:
Friday, January 14, 5:30pm - 8:00pm
Kate Beck (usa)
Alan Ebnother (usa)
Kevin Finklea (usa)
Billy Gruner and Sarah Keighery (aus)
Jeffrey Cortland Jones (usa)
Michael Paul Oman-Reagan (usa)
Lorri Ott (usa)
Leopoldine Roux (belg)
Clary Stolte (nd)
Lars Strandh (nor)
Richard Van Der Aa (aus/fr)
Iemke Van Dijk (nd)
Ken Weathersby (usa)
Guido Winkler (nd)
Lain York (usa)
THERELY BARE, an exhibition of non-objective art curated by John Tallman and Ron Buffington, will feature the work of 16 artists from around the world, including the United States, France, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Working in a style sometimes called reductive, these artists share a subversive approach to the traditions of painting. The exhibition title is wordplay, an inversion of “barely there.” It also hints at the curatorial premise of the exhibition. The abstract paintings in the show are explicitly physical and tend to have a forthright facture and presence, but also work within the means of painting itself to obfuscate, conceal or contradict expectations. In this sense, the work is hiding in plain sight. THERELY BARE challenges typical modes of viewing and raises questions about perception itself.
The curators, both professors at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, curated this exhibition specifically for AVA , but it will also be traveling to Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville, and the Art Gallery of Kent State University later in the year.
AVA Gallery
30 Frazier Avenue
Chattanooga, TN 37450
# # #
Exhibition
1/13/2011
detail, Syntax, Ken Weathersby, acrylic on canvas, 2005
VISUAL PHRASING
(curated by Virginia Butera)
January 20 - April 17, 2011
Reception: Jan. 20, 4:30 - 7 pm, (artist's panel, 7 - 8 pm)
Jonathan Allmaier, Patricia Bender, Robert Bohn, Collette Broeders, Carrie Crow and John Greiner, Bill Davis, Joseph Farbrook, Lesley Flanigan, Adel Gorgy, Meredith Re' Grimsley, Industry of the Ordinary (Adam Brooks and Mathew Wilson), Marty Jonas, Patti Jordan, Meg Klim, Liz Lee (Lake View, So Yoon Lym, Claire Marcus, Christina Massey, Gail Morrison-Hall, Jen Pepper, Tristan Perich, Mary Pinto, Debra Ramsay, Susan Reedy, Rocco Scary, Karen Shaw, Sam Smith, Jamie Marie Waelchli, Ken Weathersby, Mark Wojcik, Jing Zhou, Sue Zwick
VISUAL PHRASING is part of a four-part project combining art, music, dance and poetry collectively called THE PHRASE IN ART.
It is funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
Therese A. Maloney Art Gallery
College of Saint Elizabeth
2 Convent Road
Morristown, NJ 07960
###
1/13/2011
detail, Syntax, Ken Weathersby, acrylic on canvas, 2005
VISUAL PHRASING
(curated by Virginia Butera)
January 20 - April 17, 2011
Reception: Jan. 20, 4:30 - 7 pm, (artist's panel, 7 - 8 pm)
Jonathan Allmaier, Patricia Bender, Robert Bohn, Collette Broeders, Carrie Crow and John Greiner, Bill Davis, Joseph Farbrook, Lesley Flanigan, Adel Gorgy, Meredith Re' Grimsley, Industry of the Ordinary (Adam Brooks and Mathew Wilson), Marty Jonas, Patti Jordan, Meg Klim, Liz Lee (Lake View, So Yoon Lym, Claire Marcus, Christina Massey, Gail Morrison-Hall, Jen Pepper, Tristan Perich, Mary Pinto, Debra Ramsay, Susan Reedy, Rocco Scary, Karen Shaw, Sam Smith, Jamie Marie Waelchli, Ken Weathersby, Mark Wojcik, Jing Zhou, Sue Zwick
VISUAL PHRASING is part of a four-part project combining art, music, dance and poetry collectively called THE PHRASE IN ART.
It is funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
Therese A. Maloney Art Gallery
College of Saint Elizabeth
2 Convent Road
Morristown, NJ 07960
###
Artist Talk
12/7/2010
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Sarah Lawrence College Department of Art
A talk about painting by Ken Weathersby, with images.
###
12/7/2010
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Sarah Lawrence College Department of Art
A talk about painting by Ken Weathersby, with images.
###
SEVEN - Miami
11/10/2010
I'll be showing new paintings at SEVEN - Miami
with Pierogi Gallery Nov. 30 - Dec. 5, 2010.
SEVEN: Pierogi Gallery, Hales Gallery, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, BravinLee Programs, Postmasters Gallery, P.P.O.W and Winkleman Gallery in the Wynwood District, for art fair week in Miami.
# # #
11/10/2010
I'll be showing new paintings at SEVEN - Miami
with Pierogi Gallery Nov. 30 - Dec. 5, 2010.
SEVEN: Pierogi Gallery, Hales Gallery, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, BravinLee Programs, Postmasters Gallery, P.P.O.W and Winkleman Gallery in the Wynwood District, for art fair week in Miami.
# # #
Curating
10/22/2010
But Not Tonight, Jeffrey Cortland Jones, Enamel on acrylic panel, 2 parts, 8” x 17”
Summit, NJ-- The Kent Place Gallery will present an exhibition of art by Jeffrey Cortland Jones from Friday, October 22 – Friday, November 19, 2010. There will be a reception at the gallery from 6-8 pm on Friday, October 22.
Jones’ paintings at Kent Place will be a new body of work, all dated 2010. These new abstractions display a powerfully refined language of material, surface and gesture. The artist works on relatively small sheets of smooth and reflective plexiglass. He applies enamel paint to cover, edge, mark or blur the surfaces. By doing so, he continually unfolds a multiplicity of expression and play within a rigorous and serious vein of abstract painting.
In describing his own thoughts about his paintings, Jones offers the following: “Painting is simply: obsessive, correcting, locating, apprehending, pigment, fog, field, continuous, resistance.” This list suggests Jones’ intense interest in the processes of making the work.
Pairs of Jones’ painted panels are exhibited together as one artwork. Presenting a painting in two parts, setting its parts side by side as a diptych, has a long history in western painting, and may bring up ideas of contrasting opposites, such as in Medieval parallel depictions of heaven and hell. Closer to our time, Jones’ two-panel pieces here might recall minimal artworks by Donald Judd (an artist who also used plexiglass), artworks which, like these, juxtaposed carefully weighted doses of similarity and difference in similar repeated units to great effect.
According to gallery director Ken Weathersby, “There is an exciting dynamic in these works between transparency, translucency and opacity. Partly through the development of that dynamic, there is an important, shifting balance between atmosphere and object. We tend to want to see through or into the space in paintings. That is part of what painting inherits from its past role as a window onto a fictional world. Jones’ paintings raise that history in a way with their use of a transparent and reflecting surface. But, then again, our view is obscured, our attention is brought to the fact of the material, of the object. We feel we are getting a partial view, maybe a glimpse, like a quick look out the window of a fast moving car, but we never see more than what we could touch.”
Jeffrey Cortland Jones is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Dayton, in Dayton Ohio. He has exhibited widely. His recent exhibitions include solo shows in Oakland, CA (Some Walls, 2009), Indianapolis, IN (Christopher West Presents, 2010), and many group shows nationally and internationally including shows in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Buenos Aires, and Berlin.
Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ. Gallery hours are Monday – Friday, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm. For more information call (908) 273-0900, or visit www.kentplace.org.
# # #
10/22/2010
But Not Tonight, Jeffrey Cortland Jones, Enamel on acrylic panel, 2 parts, 8” x 17”
Summit, NJ-- The Kent Place Gallery will present an exhibition of art by Jeffrey Cortland Jones from Friday, October 22 – Friday, November 19, 2010. There will be a reception at the gallery from 6-8 pm on Friday, October 22.
Jones’ paintings at Kent Place will be a new body of work, all dated 2010. These new abstractions display a powerfully refined language of material, surface and gesture. The artist works on relatively small sheets of smooth and reflective plexiglass. He applies enamel paint to cover, edge, mark or blur the surfaces. By doing so, he continually unfolds a multiplicity of expression and play within a rigorous and serious vein of abstract painting.
In describing his own thoughts about his paintings, Jones offers the following: “Painting is simply: obsessive, correcting, locating, apprehending, pigment, fog, field, continuous, resistance.” This list suggests Jones’ intense interest in the processes of making the work.
Pairs of Jones’ painted panels are exhibited together as one artwork. Presenting a painting in two parts, setting its parts side by side as a diptych, has a long history in western painting, and may bring up ideas of contrasting opposites, such as in Medieval parallel depictions of heaven and hell. Closer to our time, Jones’ two-panel pieces here might recall minimal artworks by Donald Judd (an artist who also used plexiglass), artworks which, like these, juxtaposed carefully weighted doses of similarity and difference in similar repeated units to great effect.
According to gallery director Ken Weathersby, “There is an exciting dynamic in these works between transparency, translucency and opacity. Partly through the development of that dynamic, there is an important, shifting balance between atmosphere and object. We tend to want to see through or into the space in paintings. That is part of what painting inherits from its past role as a window onto a fictional world. Jones’ paintings raise that history in a way with their use of a transparent and reflecting surface. But, then again, our view is obscured, our attention is brought to the fact of the material, of the object. We feel we are getting a partial view, maybe a glimpse, like a quick look out the window of a fast moving car, but we never see more than what we could touch.”
Jeffrey Cortland Jones is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Dayton, in Dayton Ohio. He has exhibited widely. His recent exhibitions include solo shows in Oakland, CA (Some Walls, 2009), Indianapolis, IN (Christopher West Presents, 2010), and many group shows nationally and internationally including shows in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Buenos Aires, and Berlin.
Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ. Gallery hours are Monday – Friday, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm. For more information call (908) 273-0900, or visit www.kentplace.org.
# # #
Curating
9/17/2010
Winter Beach, Polina Barskaya, watercolor on paper, 23" x 27"
Summit, NJ-- Kent Place Gallery will present an exhibition of art by Polina Barskaya from Wednesday, September 15 through Friday, October 8, 2010. There will be a reception for the artist from 6:00-8:00 p.m. on Thursday, September 23.
Barskaya’s exhibition will be comprised of expressive water color and ink paintings on paper, some quite large. Her subjects are individuals and groups of figures drawn from her experience between and within two cultures.
The artist has said, “I was born in Ukraine in 1984, which was still part of the Soviet Union. When I was 4 years old most of my family immigrated to the United States as political refugees… I grew up in Brighton Beach, a predominantly Russian-Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn… American television was a big influence on me. My reality was defined by Old World Soviet-Jewish mentality and New World American values and freedoms… I am exploring my own history.”
Barskaya’s paintings show the influence of expressionism, drawing emotions of pathos and intrigue, along with a bit of kitsch humor, from her sensitive, lush presentation of the bodies, clothing, faces and hands of her subjects. She also develops implications of narrative through the relationships played out within paintings, and through spatial compositions that are informed partly by her interest in film. She has taken a keen interest in the complexity of character and situation in the works of Godard, Fellini, Almodovar and Woody Allen. She has said, “…one goal I have is to be able to do what a filmmaker does, only with paint.”
The artist is a recent graduate of the MFA program at Pratt Institute. Her work has previously been included in group exhibitions at Laba Gallery, Steuben Gallery, The Water Street Gallery and Digital Sandbox Gallery, all in New York City.
Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. For more information call (908) 273-0900.
# # #
9/17/2010
Winter Beach, Polina Barskaya, watercolor on paper, 23" x 27"
Summit, NJ-- Kent Place Gallery will present an exhibition of art by Polina Barskaya from Wednesday, September 15 through Friday, October 8, 2010. There will be a reception for the artist from 6:00-8:00 p.m. on Thursday, September 23.
Barskaya’s exhibition will be comprised of expressive water color and ink paintings on paper, some quite large. Her subjects are individuals and groups of figures drawn from her experience between and within two cultures.
The artist has said, “I was born in Ukraine in 1984, which was still part of the Soviet Union. When I was 4 years old most of my family immigrated to the United States as political refugees… I grew up in Brighton Beach, a predominantly Russian-Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn… American television was a big influence on me. My reality was defined by Old World Soviet-Jewish mentality and New World American values and freedoms… I am exploring my own history.”
Barskaya’s paintings show the influence of expressionism, drawing emotions of pathos and intrigue, along with a bit of kitsch humor, from her sensitive, lush presentation of the bodies, clothing, faces and hands of her subjects. She also develops implications of narrative through the relationships played out within paintings, and through spatial compositions that are informed partly by her interest in film. She has taken a keen interest in the complexity of character and situation in the works of Godard, Fellini, Almodovar and Woody Allen. She has said, “…one goal I have is to be able to do what a filmmaker does, only with paint.”
The artist is a recent graduate of the MFA program at Pratt Institute. Her work has previously been included in group exhibitions at Laba Gallery, Steuben Gallery, The Water Street Gallery and Digital Sandbox Gallery, all in New York City.
Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. For more information call (908) 273-0900.
# # #
Upcoming Exhibitions
9/6/2010
drawing 102 (detail), 2010
CENTENNIAL EXHIBITION
USM Museum of Art
Hattiesburg, MS
Oct. 21 - Nov. 20, 2010
AQUA ART FAIR
with Horse Trader Projects
Miami
Dec. 1 - 5, 2010
THERELY BARE
traveling show
curated by John Tallman and Ron Buffington
THERELY BARE@
AVA Gallery
30 Frazier Ave
Chattanooga, TN 37450
423-265-4282
January 14, 2011 – February 25, 2011
Opening Reception: Friday, January 14,
5 to 8pm
THERELY BARE@
Zeitgeist Gallery
1819 21st Ave S
Nashville, TN 37212-3705
(615) 256-4805
March 3, 2011- April 2, 2011
Opening Reception: TBA
POSTCONCEPTUALISM: THE MALLEABLE OBJECT University of Maryland Stamp Gallery curated by Mark Cameron Boyd
March 7 - April 8, 2011
# # #
9/6/2010
drawing 102 (detail), 2010
CENTENNIAL EXHIBITION
USM Museum of Art
Hattiesburg, MS
Oct. 21 - Nov. 20, 2010
AQUA ART FAIR
with Horse Trader Projects
Miami
Dec. 1 - 5, 2010
THERELY BARE
traveling show
curated by John Tallman and Ron Buffington
THERELY BARE@
AVA Gallery
30 Frazier Ave
Chattanooga, TN 37450
423-265-4282
January 14, 2011 – February 25, 2011
Opening Reception: Friday, January 14,
5 to 8pm
THERELY BARE@
Zeitgeist Gallery
1819 21st Ave S
Nashville, TN 37212-3705
(615) 256-4805
March 3, 2011- April 2, 2011
Opening Reception: TBA
POSTCONCEPTUALISM: THE MALLEABLE OBJECT University of Maryland Stamp Gallery curated by Mark Cameron Boyd
March 7 - April 8, 2011
# # #
Exhibition
5/9/2010
PERFECT MISMATCH
Ken Weathersby solo show
Pierogi Gallery
May 28 - June 27, 2010
(reception May 28, 7 - 9 pm)
Pierogi is pleased to present the first New York exhibition of Ken Weathersby's paintings. These are paintings of intense, elegant grids of primary color that subtly invert expectations in a number of ways. While some of the carefully penciled and painted canvases simply display their colorful patterns, others, in whole or in part, are turned to face the wall. Several have cut-away sections, which have been replaced by fitted inset panels painted with grids that either mimic or contrast with the surrounding canvas. The exhibition also contains a number of two-sided paintings, which may be flipped and re-hung during the course of the show to expose a hidden view. Another painting is set flush within a carved-out hole and is situated within, rather than hung on, the surface of the gallery wall.
The paintings in the show are related in feeling to minimal and monochrome abstract painting, presenting color and materials matter-of-factly, but according to the artist they were also partly prompted by the work of 15th century Sienese painter Giovanni di Paolo: “Giovanni's works are full of contradictions, full of visual opulence but also of things withheld.”
Weathersby's paintings are simultaneously conceptual and visual. In his essay “Malleable Objects,” Washington DC area curator Mark Cameron Boyd has referred to Weathersby as a “post-conceptual artist”, one whose work “addresses missed theoretical opportunities inherent in object-making.” This exhibition as a whole and the individual works within it are oriented to create a visual play of optical experiences, but also a particular kind of mental or conceptual engagement. According to the artist, “Paintings are visual objects. Usually we think of the 'object' part as supporting the 'visual,' of the wooden stretcher and canvas as just being there to hold up the image that we are meant to see. But those two different aspects can play with or against each other to open other thoughts or yield different problems. When the painting not only presents, but also denies pleasure or information, it complicates things. It can require some deciphering. It must be held in the mind as well as seen.”
Ken Weathersby received an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Detroit. His work was recently included in The National Academy of Art Museum's 183rd Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art in New York and in Postconceptualism at Moderno in Washington, DC. His paintings were featured in the Mid-Atlantic edition of New American Paintings. He is the recipient of a Mid-Atlantic Arts / New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Painting.
PIEROGI
177 North 9th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
T. 718.599.2144
F. 718.599.1666
E. info@pierogi2000.com
www.pierogi2000.com
# # #
5/9/2010
PERFECT MISMATCH
Ken Weathersby solo show
Pierogi Gallery
May 28 - June 27, 2010
(reception May 28, 7 - 9 pm)
Pierogi is pleased to present the first New York exhibition of Ken Weathersby's paintings. These are paintings of intense, elegant grids of primary color that subtly invert expectations in a number of ways. While some of the carefully penciled and painted canvases simply display their colorful patterns, others, in whole or in part, are turned to face the wall. Several have cut-away sections, which have been replaced by fitted inset panels painted with grids that either mimic or contrast with the surrounding canvas. The exhibition also contains a number of two-sided paintings, which may be flipped and re-hung during the course of the show to expose a hidden view. Another painting is set flush within a carved-out hole and is situated within, rather than hung on, the surface of the gallery wall.
The paintings in the show are related in feeling to minimal and monochrome abstract painting, presenting color and materials matter-of-factly, but according to the artist they were also partly prompted by the work of 15th century Sienese painter Giovanni di Paolo: “Giovanni's works are full of contradictions, full of visual opulence but also of things withheld.”
Weathersby's paintings are simultaneously conceptual and visual. In his essay “Malleable Objects,” Washington DC area curator Mark Cameron Boyd has referred to Weathersby as a “post-conceptual artist”, one whose work “addresses missed theoretical opportunities inherent in object-making.” This exhibition as a whole and the individual works within it are oriented to create a visual play of optical experiences, but also a particular kind of mental or conceptual engagement. According to the artist, “Paintings are visual objects. Usually we think of the 'object' part as supporting the 'visual,' of the wooden stretcher and canvas as just being there to hold up the image that we are meant to see. But those two different aspects can play with or against each other to open other thoughts or yield different problems. When the painting not only presents, but also denies pleasure or information, it complicates things. It can require some deciphering. It must be held in the mind as well as seen.”
Ken Weathersby received an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Detroit. His work was recently included in The National Academy of Art Museum's 183rd Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art in New York and in Postconceptualism at Moderno in Washington, DC. His paintings were featured in the Mid-Atlantic edition of New American Paintings. He is the recipient of a Mid-Atlantic Arts / New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Painting.
PIEROGI
177 North 9th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
T. 718.599.2144
F. 718.599.1666
E. info@pierogi2000.com
www.pierogi2000.com
# # #
Auction
5/9/2010
157(j) will be part of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions' 2010 benefit auction, selected by David John Dick (of youhavebeenheresometime) along with art by these four other artists:
Matt Connors
Ian McDonald
William J. O'Brien
Ivan Terestchenko
Public viewing at LACE beginning May 7
Auction May 20, 2010
www.welcometolace.org/auction/
www.youhavebeenheresometime.blogspot.com
# # #
5/9/2010
157(j) will be part of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions' 2010 benefit auction, selected by David John Dick (of youhavebeenheresometime) along with art by these four other artists:
Matt Connors
Ian McDonald
William J. O'Brien
Ivan Terestchenko
Public viewing at LACE beginning May 7
Auction May 20, 2010
www.welcometolace.org/auction/
www.youhavebeenheresometime.blogspot.com
# # #
Exhibition
3/22/2010
CONTINUING COLOR ABSTRACTION
A group show curated by Rella Stuart-Hunt.
Exhibition: April 13 - May 8, 2010.
Reception: Thursday, April 15, 6 - 8 pm.
THE PAINTING CENTER has moved into its new space:
547 West 27th Street, NY, NY.
www.thepaintingcenter.org
212-343-1060
director@thepaintingcenter.org
# # #
3/22/2010
CONTINUING COLOR ABSTRACTION
A group show curated by Rella Stuart-Hunt.
Exhibition: April 13 - May 8, 2010.
Reception: Thursday, April 15, 6 - 8 pm.
THE PAINTING CENTER has moved into its new space:
547 West 27th Street, NY, NY.
www.thepaintingcenter.org
212-343-1060
director@thepaintingcenter.org
# # #
Curating
2/16/2010
Crying (contemporary caveperson), Miyuki Tsushima, detail, overall 6” x 4”, 2008
SEE YOU THERE / Miyuki Tsushima at Kent Place Gallery
Summit,NJ -- The Kent Place Gallery will present an exhibition of art by Miyuki Tsushima from Friday, February 12 – Friday March 12, 2010. There will be a reception for the artist from 6-8 pm on Friday March 5.
Tsushima’s installation includes paintings, objects and printed images. The whole space of Kent Place gallery becomes the canvas for her work. Painted, drawn and found images of animals, shooting range targets, and humans, including Tsushima’s “contemporary caveperson” figures are placed together in scenes that suggest multiple stories and evoke emotion. The “contemporary caveperson” refers to an ongoing motif in Tsushima’s work, a set of fictional characters who struggle to come to terms with and survive the difficulties and complexities of the world.
According to Kent Place Gallery Director Ken Weathersby, Tsushima’s work is evocative on a number of levels. “In formal terms, her work ranges widely. One element of this is her very loose, gestural marking, which is expressive, and seems to describe a space or an atmosphere. At the same time and sometimes combined with this, there are beautiful, extremely delicately rendered small drawings and paintings, so sensitive, and also very controlled. And then there are found elements, including printed images like shooting range targets with the silhouettes of small animals. All of these elements work together. The installation as a whole raises thoughts about relationships and alienation, perspective and identity. The show makes room for emotional response and empathy, but in an open-ended way. This is a beautiful and thought-provoking exhibition.”
Miyuki Tsushima grew up in Tokyo and attended an all-girls high school. She currently lives and works in New York City. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from The School of Visual Arts in New York, and a Bachelor of Law from Keio University in Tokyo. She is a recipient of the Aaron Siskind Memorial Award. She has exhibited her art in New York and internationally.
Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ. Gallery hours are Monday – Friday, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm. For more information call (908) 273-0900, or visit www.kentplace.org.
# # #
2/16/2010
Crying (contemporary caveperson), Miyuki Tsushima, detail, overall 6” x 4”, 2008
SEE YOU THERE / Miyuki Tsushima at Kent Place Gallery
Summit,NJ -- The Kent Place Gallery will present an exhibition of art by Miyuki Tsushima from Friday, February 12 – Friday March 12, 2010. There will be a reception for the artist from 6-8 pm on Friday March 5.
Tsushima’s installation includes paintings, objects and printed images. The whole space of Kent Place gallery becomes the canvas for her work. Painted, drawn and found images of animals, shooting range targets, and humans, including Tsushima’s “contemporary caveperson” figures are placed together in scenes that suggest multiple stories and evoke emotion. The “contemporary caveperson” refers to an ongoing motif in Tsushima’s work, a set of fictional characters who struggle to come to terms with and survive the difficulties and complexities of the world.
According to Kent Place Gallery Director Ken Weathersby, Tsushima’s work is evocative on a number of levels. “In formal terms, her work ranges widely. One element of this is her very loose, gestural marking, which is expressive, and seems to describe a space or an atmosphere. At the same time and sometimes combined with this, there are beautiful, extremely delicately rendered small drawings and paintings, so sensitive, and also very controlled. And then there are found elements, including printed images like shooting range targets with the silhouettes of small animals. All of these elements work together. The installation as a whole raises thoughts about relationships and alienation, perspective and identity. The show makes room for emotional response and empathy, but in an open-ended way. This is a beautiful and thought-provoking exhibition.”
Miyuki Tsushima grew up in Tokyo and attended an all-girls high school. She currently lives and works in New York City. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from The School of Visual Arts in New York, and a Bachelor of Law from Keio University in Tokyo. She is a recipient of the Aaron Siskind Memorial Award. She has exhibited her art in New York and internationally.
Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ. Gallery hours are Monday – Friday, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm. For more information call (908) 273-0900, or visit www.kentplace.org.
# # #
Curating
10/14/2009
Familiar Faces, the month of january, 2009 (installation view at Kent Place Gallery), HTML drawings by Chris Ashley
courtesy of George Lawson Gallery
“A FEW MONTHS” CHRIS ASHLEY AT KENT PLACE GALLERY
Summit, NJ -- Kent Place Gallery will present "A Few Months" an exhibition of new art by Chris Ashley, from Monday October 19 to Friday November 20. There will be a reception from 6 to 8 pm on Friday October 23.
Chris Ashley produces beautiful, jewel-like colored drawings. He creates a fresh drawing, each one a new and unique idea, every single day. His medium for this daily discipline is HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), a digital process not usually associated with fine art in the sense of traditional painting and drawing. Ashley’s work shows that it can be an ideal medium both for aesthetic delight as well as endless invention.
This ongoing string of artistic variations is made to exist primarily within a digital world, since HTML is native to the internet. For years now the drawings have been published daily on his blog, “Look, See—“ (http://looksee.chrisashley.net/), but for this exhibition at Kent Place Gallery, Ashley presents five months’ worth of carefully printed images of his HTML works, which will be displayed in the gallery grouped in five large blocks, one block on each wall of the gallery, like five calendars. This provides the chance to see the images simultaneously, note the evolution of Ashley’s ideas, and compare work produced at different times.
According to gallery director Ken Weathersby, “Ashley is also a fantastic abstract painter in the traditional sense (with paint on canvas), and knows art history and contemporary art. His work with HTML is so interesting and such a unique project. I’m very excited to have it here at Kent Place Gallery. He has been working with this somewhat unusual medium for many years now, and in a totally focused way. Even though one might think that HTML presents only certain limited variables, Chris produces seemingly infinite surprises. I began visiting his blog daily some time ago and was often moved to leave comments on particular works. When I selected the five months that appear here at Kent Place Gallery, I chose a range that I think displays that quality of the unexpected that I find in his art. For example, one of the months uses vintage photographs as a jumping-off point, bringing in an aspect of collage, and with a fantastic visual humor. Another one deals with invented caricatures of human faces in a way that touches on ideas of cartooning, of masks, of the grotesque, and also of Picasso and cubism. Chris is just very knowledgeable and wise about the history of image-making, of the long traditions of painting and drawing, and it shows in these witty and resonant digital pieces.”
Chris Ashley lives, makes art and teaches in Oakland, California. He has exhibited widely and frequently—his recent and upcoming shows include exhibitions at George Lawson Gallery in San Francisco, Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley, Rhizome at the New Museum, Semantics Gallery in Cincinnati and the Marx Gallery in Covington, Kentucky. His artwork appears here courtesy of George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, California.
Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ. Gallery hours are Monday – Friday, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm. For more information call (908) 273-0900, or visit www.kentplace.org.
# # #
10/14/2009
Familiar Faces, the month of january, 2009 (installation view at Kent Place Gallery), HTML drawings by Chris Ashley
courtesy of George Lawson Gallery
“A FEW MONTHS” CHRIS ASHLEY AT KENT PLACE GALLERY
Summit, NJ -- Kent Place Gallery will present "A Few Months" an exhibition of new art by Chris Ashley, from Monday October 19 to Friday November 20. There will be a reception from 6 to 8 pm on Friday October 23.
Chris Ashley produces beautiful, jewel-like colored drawings. He creates a fresh drawing, each one a new and unique idea, every single day. His medium for this daily discipline is HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), a digital process not usually associated with fine art in the sense of traditional painting and drawing. Ashley’s work shows that it can be an ideal medium both for aesthetic delight as well as endless invention.
This ongoing string of artistic variations is made to exist primarily within a digital world, since HTML is native to the internet. For years now the drawings have been published daily on his blog, “Look, See—“ (http://looksee.chrisashley.net/), but for this exhibition at Kent Place Gallery, Ashley presents five months’ worth of carefully printed images of his HTML works, which will be displayed in the gallery grouped in five large blocks, one block on each wall of the gallery, like five calendars. This provides the chance to see the images simultaneously, note the evolution of Ashley’s ideas, and compare work produced at different times.
According to gallery director Ken Weathersby, “Ashley is also a fantastic abstract painter in the traditional sense (with paint on canvas), and knows art history and contemporary art. His work with HTML is so interesting and such a unique project. I’m very excited to have it here at Kent Place Gallery. He has been working with this somewhat unusual medium for many years now, and in a totally focused way. Even though one might think that HTML presents only certain limited variables, Chris produces seemingly infinite surprises. I began visiting his blog daily some time ago and was often moved to leave comments on particular works. When I selected the five months that appear here at Kent Place Gallery, I chose a range that I think displays that quality of the unexpected that I find in his art. For example, one of the months uses vintage photographs as a jumping-off point, bringing in an aspect of collage, and with a fantastic visual humor. Another one deals with invented caricatures of human faces in a way that touches on ideas of cartooning, of masks, of the grotesque, and also of Picasso and cubism. Chris is just very knowledgeable and wise about the history of image-making, of the long traditions of painting and drawing, and it shows in these witty and resonant digital pieces.”
Chris Ashley lives, makes art and teaches in Oakland, California. He has exhibited widely and frequently—his recent and upcoming shows include exhibitions at George Lawson Gallery in San Francisco, Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley, Rhizome at the New Museum, Semantics Gallery in Cincinnati and the Marx Gallery in Covington, Kentucky. His artwork appears here courtesy of George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, California.
Kent Place Gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School, 42 Norwood Avenue, Summit, NJ. Gallery hours are Monday – Friday, 9:00 am to 4:00 pm. For more information call (908) 273-0900, or visit www.kentplace.org.
# # #
Exhibition
8/19/2009
165 (wky - detail), 2009
THE REVERSE SIDE ALSO HAS A REVERSE SIDE
Ken Weathersby - Exhibition
Summit, NJ -- Kent Place Gallery will present an exhibition of new paintings by Ken Weathersby from Thursday, September 10, to Friday, October 9. There will be an artist’s reception from 6 to 8 pm on Thursday, September 10.
Kent Place Gallery
at Kent Place School
42 Norwood Avenue
Summit, NJ 07902 - 0308
Hours: Monday - Friday, 9am to 4pm
Phone: 908.273.0900
###
8/19/2009
165 (wky - detail), 2009
THE REVERSE SIDE ALSO HAS A REVERSE SIDE
Ken Weathersby - Exhibition
Summit, NJ -- Kent Place Gallery will present an exhibition of new paintings by Ken Weathersby from Thursday, September 10, to Friday, October 9. There will be an artist’s reception from 6 to 8 pm on Thursday, September 10.
Kent Place Gallery
at Kent Place School
42 Norwood Avenue
Summit, NJ 07902 - 0308
Hours: Monday - Friday, 9am to 4pm
Phone: 908.273.0900
###
Exhibition
7/6/2009
The Grid
August 19 - October 17, 2009
MP5³ - Milepost 5, 900 NE 81st Avenue, Portland, Oregon.
Opening reception: August 22, 7-9pm
Closing reception: October 17, 7-9pm
A group show curated by TJ Norris.
###
7/6/2009
The Grid
August 19 - October 17, 2009
MP5³ - Milepost 5, 900 NE 81st Avenue, Portland, Oregon.
Opening reception: August 22, 7-9pm
Closing reception: October 17, 7-9pm
A group show curated by TJ Norris.
###
Exhibition
1/16/2009
157(J - detail, verso), 2008
New Jersey State Council on the Arts 2007-2008 Visual Arts Fellowship Exhibition.
April 10 through June 5, 2009 at Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ.
Reception: Friday, April 24 from 6-8pm.
There is a catalogue for this exhibition.
Visual Arts Center of New Jersey
68 Elm Street
Summit, NJ 07901
Tel: 908. 273.9121
###
1/16/2009
157(J - detail, verso), 2008
New Jersey State Council on the Arts 2007-2008 Visual Arts Fellowship Exhibition.
April 10 through June 5, 2009 at Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ.
Reception: Friday, April 24 from 6-8pm.
There is a catalogue for this exhibition.
Visual Arts Center of New Jersey
68 Elm Street
Summit, NJ 07901
Tel: 908. 273.9121
###
Artist Talk
10/26/2008
"Musical" Painting (detail), ca.1989, Ken Weathersby
Tuesday November 11, 6-7pm
101 Recitation Hall
University of Delaware Department of Art
A talk about painting by Ken Weathersby, showing images and mapping some preoccupations, including fields, mazes, minigrids, and turnarounds.
This presentation is free and open to the public.
###
10/26/2008
"Musical" Painting (detail), ca.1989, Ken Weathersby
Tuesday November 11, 6-7pm
101 Recitation Hall
University of Delaware Department of Art
A talk about painting by Ken Weathersby, showing images and mapping some preoccupations, including fields, mazes, minigrids, and turnarounds.
This presentation is free and open to the public.
###
Exhibition
10/23/2008
147 (detail), 2006
Korus Project, A group exhibition.
November 7 through November 20, 2008 at Korus House in Washington, DC. Reception November 7, 6-8pm.
November 21 through December 3 at the Hun Gallery in New York. Reception November 21, 6-8pm.
The Hun Gallery is at 12 West 32nd St., 3rd Floor, NY, NY 10001
tel. 212.594.1312
hungallery.org
###
10/23/2008
147 (detail), 2006
Korus Project, A group exhibition.
November 7 through November 20, 2008 at Korus House in Washington, DC. Reception November 7, 6-8pm.
November 21 through December 3 at the Hun Gallery in New York. Reception November 21, 6-8pm.
The Hun Gallery is at 12 West 32nd St., 3rd Floor, NY, NY 10001
tel. 212.594.1312
hungallery.org
###
Exhibition
8/26/2008
Maze 1 (detail), 1999, Ken Weathersby
Calculating Art: Mathematics in the Visual Field, on view from September 4 through October 8, 2008.
Therese A. Maloney Art Gallery at the College of Saint Elizabeth, 2 Convent Road, Morristown, NJ 07960
Opening reception: Thursday, September 4th, 4:30 to 7pm in the Maloney Art Gallery.
A group show curated by Dr. Virginia Butera.
###
8/26/2008
Maze 1 (detail), 1999, Ken Weathersby
Calculating Art: Mathematics in the Visual Field, on view from September 4 through October 8, 2008.
Therese A. Maloney Art Gallery at the College of Saint Elizabeth, 2 Convent Road, Morristown, NJ 07960
Opening reception: Thursday, September 4th, 4:30 to 7pm in the Maloney Art Gallery.
A group show curated by Dr. Virginia Butera.
###
Art for Obama
8/17/2008
For All, transparent film, paint, wood, paper, available light, 2008, Michele Alpern (photo by kw)
MoveOn.org Political Action and Obey Giant are offering artists a chance to show at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. The call is for any 2D or 3D creation that exemplifies the positive vision of Obama's campaign. (Good luck competing with the beautiful entry above.) The deadline is 11:59 a.m. EDT on August 18, 2008. The top five pieces, as determined by MoveOn's independent panel of judges (Shepard Fairey, Moby, Thurston Moore, Nancy Spector, DJ Spooky, Cydney Payton, Ross Bleckner, April Gornik, Eric Fischl and Laura Dawn) will be shown at the Manifest Hope Gallery show at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. The top 30 pieces will be auctioned on eBay with proceeds going to progressive causes.
###
8/17/2008
For All, transparent film, paint, wood, paper, available light, 2008, Michele Alpern (photo by kw)
MoveOn.org Political Action and Obey Giant are offering artists a chance to show at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. The call is for any 2D or 3D creation that exemplifies the positive vision of Obama's campaign. (Good luck competing with the beautiful entry above.) The deadline is 11:59 a.m. EDT on August 18, 2008. The top five pieces, as determined by MoveOn's independent panel of judges (Shepard Fairey, Moby, Thurston Moore, Nancy Spector, DJ Spooky, Cydney Payton, Ross Bleckner, April Gornik, Eric Fischl and Laura Dawn) will be shown at the Manifest Hope Gallery show at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. The top 30 pieces will be auctioned on eBay with proceeds going to progressive causes.
###
Publication
3/26/2008
New American Paintings #75 2008 Mid-Atlantic Edition features KW paintings 150 and 153 (murder of abel).
###
3/26/2008
New American Paintings #75 2008 Mid-Atlantic Edition features KW paintings 150 and 153 (murder of abel).
###
Exhibition
3/23/2008
The National Academy Museum's 183rd Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art, on view from May 29 through September 7, 2008.
From the museum's press release:
"A two-sided painting construction by Ken Weathersby offers subtle changes in form, from one side to the other, as the hidden surface is revealed to the viewer."
"This Annual consists of exceptional contemporary works by newly emerging artists and established artists. The annual invitational exhibition offers an opportunity to the public to preview new artistic directions in contemporary American art. Included in this exhibition are artists Jose Bedia, Leonardo Drew, Ming Fay, Maria Elena Gonzalez, Steven Holl, Ben LaRocco, David Reed, David Row, Sean Scully, Barbara Takenaga, Don Voisine, James Wines, Betty Woodman and many others. Selections were made from over four-hundred recommended artists submitted for consideration and chosen by a curatorial committee comprised of a panel of seven prominent National Academicians.
A catalogue documenting trends, process, and media explored by the artists who are participating accompanies this exhibition. Written by art historian and Artist Membership Director, Nancy Malloy, this important resource includes an introduction by the Academy's President, Susan Shatter.
A separate awards committee of National Academician's will also give away over $100,000 in prizes."
The National Academy Museum: 1083 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128, Tel: 212.369.4880
###
3/23/2008
The National Academy Museum's 183rd Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art, on view from May 29 through September 7, 2008.
From the museum's press release:
"A two-sided painting construction by Ken Weathersby offers subtle changes in form, from one side to the other, as the hidden surface is revealed to the viewer."
"This Annual consists of exceptional contemporary works by newly emerging artists and established artists. The annual invitational exhibition offers an opportunity to the public to preview new artistic directions in contemporary American art. Included in this exhibition are artists Jose Bedia, Leonardo Drew, Ming Fay, Maria Elena Gonzalez, Steven Holl, Ben LaRocco, David Reed, David Row, Sean Scully, Barbara Takenaga, Don Voisine, James Wines, Betty Woodman and many others. Selections were made from over four-hundred recommended artists submitted for consideration and chosen by a curatorial committee comprised of a panel of seven prominent National Academicians.
A catalogue documenting trends, process, and media explored by the artists who are participating accompanies this exhibition. Written by art historian and Artist Membership Director, Nancy Malloy, this important resource includes an introduction by the Academy's President, Susan Shatter.
A separate awards committee of National Academician's will also give away over $100,000 in prizes."
The National Academy Museum: 1083 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128, Tel: 212.369.4880
###
Fellowship
2/15/2008
Ken Weathersby awarded 2008 Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation / NJ State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Painting.
###
2/15/2008
Ken Weathersby awarded 2008 Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation / NJ State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Painting.
###
Interview (in Luna Park Review, archived winter 2008 issue)
1/16/2008
Hootenanny Number One, 1994-- cover by Ken Weathersby.
RE: HOOTENANNY
Founding editors David Keith and Ken Weathersby talk about the unique, handbound literary and artists' journal that brought together a large and strange assortment of visual artists, poets, cartoonists, scientists, novelists and others. In the mid-90's Hootenanny could be found in the Whitney and Guggenheim museum stores and bookstores around New York as well as stores in Paris, Boston and a few other cities. Luna Park's interview traces the short history of Hootenanny.
Published to coincide with the launch of Luna Park Review's new web site,
www.lunaparkreview.com
January 31, 2008.
Ken Weathersby is also the featured visual artist for this quarterly issue of Luna Park.
###
1/16/2008
Hootenanny Number One, 1994-- cover by Ken Weathersby.
RE: HOOTENANNY
Founding editors David Keith and Ken Weathersby talk about the unique, handbound literary and artists' journal that brought together a large and strange assortment of visual artists, poets, cartoonists, scientists, novelists and others. In the mid-90's Hootenanny could be found in the Whitney and Guggenheim museum stores and bookstores around New York as well as stores in Paris, Boston and a few other cities. Luna Park's interview traces the short history of Hootenanny.
Published to coincide with the launch of Luna Park Review's new web site,
www.lunaparkreview.com
January 31, 2008.
Ken Weathersby is also the featured visual artist for this quarterly issue of Luna Park.
###
Curating
12/13/2007
Installation view--three works by Jeremy Dyer.
AGAINST NATURE AT KENT PLACE GALLERY
Summit, NJ -- The Kent Place Gallery will exhibit recent art by ten professional artists whose works address aspects of conflict between humans and the rest of nature. The exhibition, titled "Against Nature," was curated by gallery director Ken Weathersby and will be on display from January 10 to February 6, 2008.
The works in the show range from photographs by Jeremy Dyer, which capture a dark, anxious sense of landscape, to paintings by Jonathan Allen that superimpose human interventions, adventures and errors in layers upon colorful fields.
Jesse Patrick Martin's drawings evoke dazzling and beautiful, but monstrously hybrid, forms. They seem to be composed of mineral, plant and possibly animal parts and imply our contemporary concerns with genetic engineering, as well as harking back to images in J. K. Huysmans' decadent French novel, Against Nature. Huysmans' literary work was one inspiration for the exhibition. According to Weathersby, "In the novel, the protagonist is in pursuit of the artificial in all experience. He is rebelling against everything that is considered natural. He develops a preference, which he avidly pursues, first for artificial flowers, and then, when that interest becomes exhausted, for real flowers that are so strange that they seem artificial. In all cases, he believes that ordinary nature is inferior. The horror of nature and the sentimental love of nature, both of which Huysmans' book address, run through modern culture and have surfaced in many forms. We find ourselves now in a time when, because of global warming and many other concerns, these issues emerge in a new way. This exhibition is intended to address that fact."
Delicate beauty is also represented in the exhibition in photographs by Miwa Koizumi. Her images of translucent, floating creatures become tempered with irony when one realizes that the "creatures" are fashioned from bits of plastic bottles and other litter.
Ernest Concepcion's large drawing "A Desire for Conflict (or how I managed to transform myself and stay the same)" evokes a frantic sense of conflict in a field populated with a multitude of clashing figures, while Peter Jacobs' richly textured painting "Marching to Extinction" gestures toward the final and only known evolutionary end-point for all species, including our own.
Both Adam Grossi and Amie Robinson locate a front line of conflict closer to home. Robinson's painting imagines animals mysteriously placed and acting within the space of an ordinary house in "Salvaging What Is Left". The houses and water symbols in Grossi's painting "Precipitation Zone" seem to raise issues of sprawl, the suburbs and ground water.
Michael Wyshock's video "Waterbang" is a poetic, psychedelically patterned, constantly looping work that layers real-world imagery and movement. It is a study in building intensity and complication.
Steve Jarvis' "Ark II Project" suggests (and plans for) a radical solution to our troubled relationship with our planet. The diagrams and documents he displays prepare for saving whatever animals survive our self-destruction as humans, and include drawings of protective suits tailored for chimpanzees and other creatures.
An artist's reception will be held Friday, January 18 from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. in the gallery. The exhibit and reception are free and open to the public. The Kent Place Gallery, located in Summit on the campus of Kent Place School, is open from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Monday through Friday, or by appointment with Ken Weathersby, Director. For more information please visit www.kentplace.org. Jonathan Allen's work seen in this exhibition was supported by grants by the George Sugarman Foundation and the Puffin Foundation
# # #
12/13/2007
Installation view--three works by Jeremy Dyer.
AGAINST NATURE AT KENT PLACE GALLERY
Summit, NJ -- The Kent Place Gallery will exhibit recent art by ten professional artists whose works address aspects of conflict between humans and the rest of nature. The exhibition, titled "Against Nature," was curated by gallery director Ken Weathersby and will be on display from January 10 to February 6, 2008.
The works in the show range from photographs by Jeremy Dyer, which capture a dark, anxious sense of landscape, to paintings by Jonathan Allen that superimpose human interventions, adventures and errors in layers upon colorful fields.
Jesse Patrick Martin's drawings evoke dazzling and beautiful, but monstrously hybrid, forms. They seem to be composed of mineral, plant and possibly animal parts and imply our contemporary concerns with genetic engineering, as well as harking back to images in J. K. Huysmans' decadent French novel, Against Nature. Huysmans' literary work was one inspiration for the exhibition. According to Weathersby, "In the novel, the protagonist is in pursuit of the artificial in all experience. He is rebelling against everything that is considered natural. He develops a preference, which he avidly pursues, first for artificial flowers, and then, when that interest becomes exhausted, for real flowers that are so strange that they seem artificial. In all cases, he believes that ordinary nature is inferior. The horror of nature and the sentimental love of nature, both of which Huysmans' book address, run through modern culture and have surfaced in many forms. We find ourselves now in a time when, because of global warming and many other concerns, these issues emerge in a new way. This exhibition is intended to address that fact."
Delicate beauty is also represented in the exhibition in photographs by Miwa Koizumi. Her images of translucent, floating creatures become tempered with irony when one realizes that the "creatures" are fashioned from bits of plastic bottles and other litter.
Ernest Concepcion's large drawing "A Desire for Conflict (or how I managed to transform myself and stay the same)" evokes a frantic sense of conflict in a field populated with a multitude of clashing figures, while Peter Jacobs' richly textured painting "Marching to Extinction" gestures toward the final and only known evolutionary end-point for all species, including our own.
Both Adam Grossi and Amie Robinson locate a front line of conflict closer to home. Robinson's painting imagines animals mysteriously placed and acting within the space of an ordinary house in "Salvaging What Is Left". The houses and water symbols in Grossi's painting "Precipitation Zone" seem to raise issues of sprawl, the suburbs and ground water.
Michael Wyshock's video "Waterbang" is a poetic, psychedelically patterned, constantly looping work that layers real-world imagery and movement. It is a study in building intensity and complication.
Steve Jarvis' "Ark II Project" suggests (and plans for) a radical solution to our troubled relationship with our planet. The diagrams and documents he displays prepare for saving whatever animals survive our self-destruction as humans, and include drawings of protective suits tailored for chimpanzees and other creatures.
An artist's reception will be held Friday, January 18 from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. in the gallery. The exhibit and reception are free and open to the public. The Kent Place Gallery, located in Summit on the campus of Kent Place School, is open from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Monday through Friday, or by appointment with Ken Weathersby, Director. For more information please visit www.kentplace.org. Jonathan Allen's work seen in this exhibition was supported by grants by the George Sugarman Foundation and the Puffin Foundation
# # #
