(Guttenberg NJ) Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present MADE HERE: Winter 2020 a group exhibition of our Winter Artists in Residence; Lucas Almeida, Jason Robert Bauer, Vassilina Dikidjieva, Charlotte Massip and Adams Puryear. On view March 31st - April 26th. The works included in MADE HERE: Winter 2020 were created during the artist’s 3 month Space & Time Artist Residency at Guttenberg Arts. Guttenberg Arts will host an opening reception for MADE HERE: Winter 2020 on Tuesday March 31st from 7pm - 9pm.
During his time at Guttenberg Arts, Lucas Almeida’s delved deeper into his creative process by exploring a range of mediums including drawing, etching and writing poetry. Almeida’s daily practice of drawing acts as a foundation for his other processes. Finding shapes with meaningful content and a balance between light and dark result in a series of sequential drawings that express movement and transformation which often feature themes that arise at the spur of a moment. In short, Almeida believes that art should help people feel more alive and compares reality to a really big cake. Almeida explains, “Everyone has a slice of cake, the same way each one experiences reality in a unique way. That ‘slice’ that keeps on growing accordingly with what each one does in life. No one knows for sure what that cake tastes like, some people say that is an orange cake, other’s say it’s carrot, and there’s a bunch that wishes that would be a chocolate cake, but no one truly knows, all we have is some hints, some close clues to whatever it might be.”
Jason Robert Bauer works in pursuit of equanimity creating mental, physical and spiritual spaces through sculpture, video, installation, sound and light. His work explores concepts of perception and interconnectivity with an emphasis on minutiae and vernacular construction using heirloom and repurposed objects. Bauer has been working primarily with glass for over 13 years and while at Guttenberg Arts acted as a consultant and the pilot artist in resident for the newly established glassblowing facilities.
Vassilina Dikidjieva’s artworks are linked of her architectural fascination with cultural heritage and contemporary art. Discovering ancient places in Bulgaria, Ethiopia, Greece, Egypt and Italy felt like time traveling for the artist. During her travels, Dikidjieva finds themes from history and mythology which she strives to rethink in her paintings, prints and drawings. Dikidjieva states, “Juxtapositions of opposites have been an important approach in my architectural and artistic projects and I recently embraced printmaking to revisit with increased clarity and intensity ancient symbols, elements, iconic images in the context of current hot topics and events.” While in residence at Guttenberg Arts, Dikidjieva expanded her practice to include screen printing and one of her main explorations was a tribute to Leonardo in which she reflects the phenomenon that five hundred years after Leonardo’s death, Mona Lisa is more popular than ever, outshining all other art icons and becoming a symbol of the Louvre Museum.
Charlotte Massip invites us to a permanent questioning on the visible reality and the gap between it and its representation. For her, the body is as much a material as a reflection, an object of study as a subject of thought and in her work the two remain constantly overlapping. Her incisive eye finds in the technique of engraving, both sharp and intimate, the most appropriate tool.
Adams Puryear utilizes the ceramic vessel among other components to reflect his life experiences steeped in culture and technology. Despite each large sculpture having many pieces and materials involved, the utilitarian functional ceramic vessel remains at his work’s center of thought. In general Puryear’s ceramic objects are bluntly shaped, unrefined and appear primitive, with marks from my hand and fingerprints left exposed. Puryear has made this uncomplicated style of clay work for several years and feels the need to cultivate new complex forms and surfaces to incorporate into these components. Puryear believes that this overhaul will be key to develop a more articulated engaging artwork.
Exhibition: March 31, 2020 - April 26, 2020; Opening Reception on Tuesday March 31st, 6-9pm. For more information please contact matt@guttenbergarts.org or 201-868-8585. Guttenberg Art Gallery is free and open to the public by appointment. www.guttenbergarts.org Guttenberg Arts programming is made possible by a grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a division of the Department of State, and administered by the Hudson County Office of Cultural & Heritage Affairs, Thomas A. Degise, Hudson County Executive & the Hudson County Board of Chosen Freeholders.
Important Information regarding Covid-19
Dear Patrons,
We want to share with you what we're doing at Guttenberg Arts to make sure that our space remains a safe and healthy place for the community to gather and enjoy the arts.
Here’s what we’re doing:
Suspending Certain Programs To ensure we do not contribute to the spread of the Covid 19 virus, we are currently suspended our March and April 2020 public programming. This includes cancelling our upcoming Made Here Winter 2020 Group Show Opening Reception scheduled for March 31st and rescheduling our Free India Ink Workshop on April 11th to a later date.
Sanitizing hard surfaces. We are using sanitizing wipes to clean door handles, sink faucets, light switches, buttons, and more daily!
Training staff. In addition to the above measures, our staff and artists are instructed to wash their hands when arriving to work. Any staff member with a cough is asked to remain at home.
Monitoring the situation. Guttenberg Arts will still be open for business until further notice and we welcome our studio renters and gallery goers to continue to visit our space. However, we do ask all our patrons to email studio@guttenbergarts.org prior to visiting so we can schedule your visit. We will be monitoring the situation as it progresses and we will keep an open channel of communication with all of you.
New Exhibition Dates: The Winter 2020 Group Exhibition will still be on view by appointment from Saturday April 4th - April 26th. Again, please email us to schedule your gallery tour.
Here’s what you can do to help us:
Stay home if you are sick!
Wash your hands when you arrive. Washing your hands thoroughly for at least 20 seconds is the best way to stop the spread of disease. Keep yourself and your fellow patrons safe by washing your hands in our restrooms before enjoying the gallery or beginning or work.
We hope you understand our decision to limit the amount of group gatherings at our space as we feel it’s in the best interest of the community at large. Please do not hesitate to reach out to our Director Matt Barteluce at matt@guttenbergarts.org with any questions or concerns!
Visiting Critic: Paola Gallio of Assembly Room!
Guttenberg Arts presents Rob Swainston's "AMERICA IS REALLY HARD TO SEE" at Spring / Break 2020
America Is Really Hard To See borrows the iconic figure of ‘Boss Tweed’—a notoriously corrupt NYC political boss and real estate titan—from an 1871 political cartoon titled ‘THE BRAINS’ by Tomas Nast. Nast was relentless in his exposure of political corruption and capitalist greed, and was instrumental in Tweed’s eventual demise. Originally intended for newspaper circulation, Swainston reinterprets this image as a large-scale multi-layered woodblock. Contemporary figures in power-suits flank Nast’s historic caricature of greed. Backlighting produces shifting moiré patterns as the viewer moves past the image. Swainston calls this ‘the unstable image’ and posits this effect as analogous to power’s disappearing act in contemporary society. In an accompanying room-sized stop-animation video, the artist attempts to ‘confront the boss’ but his rebellion is short lived.
Artist Bio
Born and raised in rural Pennsylvania and based in New York, Rob Swainston is an Assistant Professor of Art+Design in Printmaking at Purchase College and Master Printer for collaborative printshop Prints of Darkness. His art intersects printmaking, painting, installation, and sculpture. Rob received a BA in Social Science from Hampshire College and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. Rob claims: “All images are historically negotiated assemblages between humans, machines, materials, and social structures. In a society where social knowledge and power have become pure image, the print technologies historically central to this transformation can act as double-agent. Artists working in print media can be chameleons moving between image-makers and image-reproducers.” Rob has been awarded numerous awards and residencies including Skowhegan, Marie Walsh Sharpe, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Solo and group exhibitions include Marginal Utility, David Krut Projects, Bravin Lee Programs, Socrates Sculpture Park, Smack Mellon, Munson Williams Proctor Museum of Art, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, IPCNY, Canada Gallery, Queens Museum, and the Bronx Museum.
Rob Swainston
America Is Really Hard To See
Installation, woodblock print on poly-knit fabric with light, 87” x 120” x 8” wide and Stop-animation video, 10 min 38 sec long with Eve Sussman, camera assistance and Russ Spitovsky, illustration assistance
Spring / Break Art Fair NYC 2020
Guttenberg Arts Special Project Space
First Exhibition of the Year: The Encyclopedia of Things at the VACNJ
Thank you to The Print Club of New York
Thank you Mona Rubin and the Print Club of New York for their studio visit! It was incredible to get the chance to showcase a handful of our printmakers to their group! You’re all welcome back anytime!
Click here to check out the great work they do for artists http://printclubofnewyork.org/
GET ABSORBED!
Made Here Fall 2019 Press Release
(Guttenberg NJ) Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present MADE HERE: FALL 2019 a group exhibition of our current Artists in Residence; Mary Ancel, Bruno Nadalin and Komikka Patton. On view December 7th - December 31st, 2019. The works included in MADE HERE: FALL 2019 were created during the artist’s 3 month Space & Time Artist Residency at Guttenberg Arts. Guttenberg Arts will host an opening reception for MADE HERE: FALL 2019 on Saturday December 7th from 7pm - 9pm.
Mary Ancel is an artist who works in textiles, print and photography. Her work indulges in excess and obsession, using bright colors, sparkles and rainbows in order to delight and distract. At the same time wistful and celebratory, it navigates her strained relationships to both beauty and loss. During her residency, Ancel produced a body of works on paper that combines her background in printmaking and photography with the materials and techniques from her sculptural practice. These works blend photographic imagery with more abstract textural elements in order to emphasize their fantastical content. Drawing inspiration from embellished Indian painted photographs, the decoration upon these works have been integrated into the imagery, calling attention to the shifting perspectives of illusion and reality. The themes of these works center around thresholds, portals and passageways to other realms; through both the imagery and the material combinations, Ancel generates a series of densely embellished realities.
Bruno Nadalin’s work focuses on the grotesque and monstrous as an avenue towards expressing and exorcising social and personal anxieties. Nadalin’s art is primarily narrative in approach, although the conditions of these narratives tend to be ambiguous and undefined. At Guttenberg Arts, Nadalin developed a series of etchings, utilizing hard ground, soft ground, and aquatint, which feature human forms undergoing traumas of definition. The figures in these pieces push upon one another, intrude into one another’s space, sharing limbs, their features shifting and melding, like the thieves in Canto XXV of Dante’s Inferno. There seems to be an attempt at connection between the beings in these etchings, yet this often appears to be thwarted or channeled into aggression, while the nebulous space that surrounds them highlights the disquieting nature of their interaction and resists a context which may help to ground and thereby reconcile them.
Pulling on Afrofuturist themes, Komikka Patton’s motifs relate to Black motherhood and motherships. In a post-apocalyptic world that reconstructs societal hierarchies and authorities with a mark of an “X” and brings forth a voice to a truth that seems to have been denied access to a sanctioned stage. Patton has recently returned from overseas and her most contemporary work cycles narratives that explore comprehensive visions of futuristic Utopias/Dystopias that converge at the intersection of awareness, power, and emancipation; anchoring them with direct relevance to contemporary social issues in ways that communicate their (Blacks) participation in, and alienation from the larger world. Using drawing, printmaking, and collage gives me opportunity to tap into the world of the fictional, surreal, and mythical. And worlds are born, realms that are stories of survival and that seem to be made up of a biologically ingrained endurance that boils down to skin color. Mother was born out of the unknown as it relates to ancestry, self, having a single black mom, fear of motherhood, and mortality. At Guttenberg Arts, Patton is interested in perceptions of time in relation to Blackness. Just how fluid is time when wrapped in traume, what does it mean when the past does not stay in the past, and what happens when the past is also the future.
Prior to the Opening Reception to MADE HERE: FALL 2019 on December 7th, Guttenberg Arts will host a Holiday art sale in support of their new glass blowing facilities (3pm - 7pm). Exhibition: December 7, 2019 - December 31st, 2019; Opening Reception on Saturday December 7th, 7-9pm.
Guttenberg Arts programming is made possible by a grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a division of the Department of State, and administered by the Hudson County Office of Cultural & Heritage Affairs, Thomas A. Degise, Hudson County Executive & the Hudson County Board of Chosen Freeholders.
