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 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.
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.
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.
12/2/2021
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
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.
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).
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 of 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 .
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.
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/
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
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.
# # #
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.
###
10/31/2017
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.
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
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
2/16/2017
February 16, 2017
The editors of ARTnews:
Pictures at an Exhibition: KEN WEATHERSBY at MINUS SPACE
(link)
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
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
# # #
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.
2/25/2016
Ken Weathersby awarded 2016 NJ State Council on the Arts/ Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Individual Artist Grant & Fellowship in Painting.
# # #
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
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
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
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
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
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.
6/9/2015
Off the Grid at Pierogi Gallery
Gallery 2
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
4/28/2015
Textual at ODETTA Gallery
4/28/2015
SEERS, SIGNS Gerd Borkelmann, Cody Tumblin and Ken Weathersby
4/6/2015
Begins at 7pm.
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)
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.
# # #
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.
# # #
2/12/2014
New American Paintings #110 features my recent
paintings. This is my third appearance in NAP.
###
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.
# # #
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).
# # #
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.
# # #
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
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
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.
###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
# # #
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
# # #
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.
# # #
7/28/2012
Group Exhibition
Masquerader
curated by Ken Resseger
Aug 5 - Aug 12, 2012
Artists:
Just Kids
Carey Maxon
KD Resseger
Lynn Talbot
- The Masquerader, 1914 starring Charlie Chaplin (synopsis of) —-"
1386 Dorchester Ave.
Dorchester MA
# # #
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
# # #
5/17/2012
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
# # #
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."
# # #
2/14/2012
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. # # #
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
# # #
12/20/2011
Artist talk at Aferro Gallery on 12-8-11.
Click on the image to see the talk on youtube.
(10 min.)
# # #
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
# # #
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
# # #
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.
# # #
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
###
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.
###
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
###
10/31/2008
160 (detail--160 is invisible in this view), 2008
"Giddy Construction"
Brent Hallard, an Australian artist who currently lives and works in Tokyo, prompted a discussion about paintings 147 and 160. Read it in full at Visual Discrepancies. Click the image above to go there.
Hallard: "...I wanted to know how these giddy surfaces were constructed. Plus I was interested in the cut-a-way, the replace, and the sometimes hidden—the strategies and things that muck with the head as much as they do with the work and the reading..."
###
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.
###
10/23/2008
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
###
