MADE HERE: FALL 2016

Amie Cunat / oscar valero / Rafael corzo

Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present “MADE HERE Fall 2016” a group exhibition of the current Artists in Residence; Amie Cunat, Rafael Corzo and Oscar Valero. On view December 9th, 2016 - January 27th, 2017. The works included in MADE HERE were created during the artist’s residences this past Fall. The title “MADE HERE” carries not only multiple definitions, but multiple conceptual meanings ranging from location to identity, the politics of materials and the historical nature of place. All of these new works deeply considered many of these issues and are only just the beginning points for deeper reflection.

Amie Cunat’s current work for “Made Here” involves observing real objects/events then drawing them in my sketchbook.  What began as an observation becomes a painterly image or object that is “of” the original experience. Color choice is a negotiation between its formal function as well as its buoyant and comedic tenor. It is important for Ms. Cunat to maintain a sense of sarcasm or slang between color/composition within my work. It is within slang that she feels vocabulary reveals “cultural” specificity. The works’ visual experience is playful, but sparse in painterly mark-making. This is because Ms. Cunat is interested in developing hand through drawing/cutting (contours developed from adjacent hues). She places significant importance on the interaction between fields of color; therefore, when you see these pieces, there is a simultaneous and holistic affect. In other words, she want figure and ground to achieve equal presence in a given surface.

Throughout Rafael Corzo’s sculptures the viewer will see the prolific use of traditional ceramic techniques. Ceramics is aspiration and wild euphoria where harmony and rhythm can never have enough embellishments. In a constant state of creation and in a virtuous cycle, Mr. Corzo dreams of universality transcending ages. These are the genuine feelings and expansive energy vibrating inside the artist, a true essence. It is the frenzied pursuit of a vision, estoy aquí con fuerza. It is not a fantasy for Mr. Corzo, he gives himself with devotion looking for all beauty: compressed, unreal, ideal and ethereal. With this premise in his heart, and clarity in his mind, art will always be. Like birds looking for the stars on a journey so far the distance, he keeps hope for and faith in a bright tomorrow: so in love with art, so in love with life, creating destiny.

Oscar Valero’ continues his investigation of alphabets and musical compositions through a visual process.  Mr. Valero analyzes them in a graphical way, introducing into the physical world. Musical and Alphabets constructions are translated into the visual medium where the structure is revealed and occupies a space. His research aims to visualize the process from conception to realization of the structure.

made here: Summer 2016

Jeffery meris / austin thomas / taihwa goh

Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present “MADE HERE Summer 2016” a group exhibition of the current Artists in Residence; Austin Thomas, Tai Hwa Goh andJeffery Meris. On view August 3, 2016 - September 6, 2016. The works included inMADE HERE were created during the artist’s residences this past summer. The title “MADE HERE” carries not only multiple definitions, but multiple conceptual meanings ranging from location to identity, the politics of materials and the historical nature of place. All of these new works deeply considered many of these issues and are only just the beginning points for deeper reflection.

Austin Thomas’ current work for MADE HERE focuses on a show of delicate prints, exploring patterns and the possibility of an idea. Pinned to the wall, her printslike her drawings, manifest Thomas’ continued dedication both to the stenciled form and to the independent life of paper. Here various types of stationery and other papers commingle with dots, rectangles, triangles, stripes and voids. Her carefully attenuated placement asks that we look at each piece on its own terms for what it is. Thomassuggests a subtler world, rich with nuance and precision, with enough room to insert our own narratives. This new print work is for aesthetic enjoyment and intellectual contemplation.

Throughout Tai Hwa Goh’s installations, the viewer will see the prolific use of traditional printmaking techniques.  These have a unique luminosity through hand-waxing that carry through Goh’s images that are installed on various architectural elements. These images get obstructed and buried under layers of delicately waxed papers transmitting the echo of the image. The process of layering images intends to reflect the accumulation of memory and experiences, and thus represents impenetrability and vulnerability of human body, but, at the same time, recoverability and powerfulness of selfness. Through this exhibition, Goh becomes the extension of nature and nature becomes the extension of her body. Her images evolve from biological forms to landscape, describing the interaction between the inner and outer mass of human body. In the process of folding, cutting, flipping and overlapping printed materials, images are gradually transformed away from identifiable objects, taking on a naturalistic guise of their own, growing into space, posing questions about our accepted definition of printed works of art, as well as the idea of passage.

Jeffrey Meris’ continues his investigation and interest with economies of migration, real estate, bodies, space and identity. Through the use of constructed, found, ready-­‐made and assembled objects, Meris alludes to a certain level of geopolitical permeability. This body of work is heavily shaped by Meris’ upbringing as a migrant from Haiti -­‐living in the Bahamas-­‐ where ‘they coming’ was more than often a derogatory slur to both indict the peasant like status of Haitian migrants and also reinforce the sub‐humanness of that community. ‘They’ assumes an ambiguous identity fluxing between the luxury tourist, the alien or the immigration officer. Coming from where? Going to where?

jeffery meris: They coming

The sponge is porous, walls permeable. They Coming is the product of Jeffrey Meris’continued investigation and interest with economies of migration, real estate, bodies, space and identity. Through the use of constructed, found, ready-­‐made and assembled objects, Meris alludes to a certain level of geopolitical permeability. They Coming is heavily shaped by Meris’ upbringing as a migrant from Haiti -­‐living in the Bahamas-­‐ where ‘they coming’ was more than often a derogatory slur to both indict the peasant like status of Haitian migrants and also reinforce the sub‐humanness of that community. ‘They’ assumes an ambiguous identity fluxing between the luxury tourist, the alien or the immigration officer. Coming from where? Going to where?

Jeffery Meris earned his BFA in Sculpture at the Tyler School of Art.  Meris has exhibited work at Hilger BrotKunsthalle in Vienna, Austria; D’Agulair Art Foundation in Nassau, Bahamas and the Stella Elkins Gallery in Philadelphia, PA to name a few. Meris has also been a recipient of the J Arthur Khuen Kyrk Award and theSculpture Project Award among others. His work can be found in the Dawn Davies Collection, the Diagulair Art Foundation and the Central Bank of the Bahamas Collection.

austin thomas: New Prints

Thomas’s current work for “New Prints” focuses on a show of delicate prints, exploring patterns and the possibility of an idea.  Nearly all of them created while in residence at Guttenberg Arts. Pinned to the wall, her prints like her drawings, manifest Thomas’ continued dedication both to the stenciled form and to the independent life of paper. Here various types of stationery and other papers commingle with dots, rectangles, triangles, stripes and voids. Her carefully attenuated placement asks that we look at each piece on its own terms for what it is. Thomas suggests a subtler world, rich with nuance and precision, with enough room to insert our own narratives. This new print work is for aesthetic enjoyment and intellectual contemplation.

Austin Thomas is an artist, curator and community builder. Her work has been exhibited at The Drawing Center, Murray Guy, The Sculpture Center, Art in General and at White columns and internationally in Singapore, Australia, and Hungary and at the Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna. From 2007 to 2014, she directed the influential Pocket Utopia gallery.She is a graduate of NYU and is represented by Undercurrent Projects located in the East Village. In the Summer of 2016 her permanent public sculpture for a new park in Brooklyn will be unveiled. She has also done public commissions for the Public Art Fund and Grinnell College. Thomas's work is featured in the book titled "Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists” edited by Sharon Louden.

Tai hwa goh: lULLED LANd

Throughout Tai Hwa Goh’s installations, the viewer will see the prolific use of traditional printmaking techniques. These have a unique luminosity through hand-waxing that carry through Goh’s images that are installed on various architectural elements. These images get obstructed and buried under layers of delicately waxed papers transmitting the echo of the image. The process of layering images intends to reflect the accumulation of memory and experiences, and thus represents impenetrability and vulnerability of human body, but, at the same time, recoverability and powerfulness of selfness. Through this exhibition, Goh becomes the extension of nature and nature becomes the extension of her body. Her images evolve from biological forms to landscape, describing the interaction between the inner and outer mass of human body. In the process of folding, cutting, flipping and overlapping printed materials, images are gradually transformed away from identifiable objects, taking on a naturalistic guise of their own, growing into space, posing questions about our accepted definition of printed works of art, as well as the idea of passage.

Goh earned a BFA and MFA from Seoul National University, and an MFA from the University of Maryland. She has had solo exhibitions at the Sunroom Project Space, Wave Hill, Bronx, NY, William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ; Gallery Aferro, Newark, NJ; Gallery at Flashpoint, Washington, DC; and the Arlington Arts Center, Arlington, VA, to name a few. ; She has also shown major installations at Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island, NY; A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Carriage House, Islip Museum, East Islip, NY; and International Print Center New York. She has participated in residencies at Lower East Side Printshop, New York, NY; the NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY; Emerge 11 at Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ; and Evergreen Museum and Library Residency at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, among others.

MADE HERE Winter 2016

Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present “MADE HERE Winter 2016” a group exhibition of the current Artists in Residence; Chris Bors, Seung-Jong Isaac Lee, Joiri Minaya and Sarah Nicholls. On view April 8 - May 1, 2016. The works included in MADE HERE were created during the artist’s residences this past summer. The title “MADE HERE” carries not only multiple definitions, but multiple conceptual meanings ranging from location to identity, the politics of materials and the historical nature of place. All of these new works deeply considered many of these issues and are only just the beginning points for deeper reflection.\

Seung-Jong Isaac Lee’s newest lithographic prints and rubbings deeply consider ideas of living life in New York City as a foreigner and immigrant. As Lee tries to resolve these issues in his daily life, he choose the ‘manhole’ as a metaphor for his journey. Manholes are seen as an escape route or connection to a new world; the manhole cover as a gate. Thus, Lee creates inter-dimensional portals in his lithographs using the image of the manhole as a symbolic gateway between cultures, nations, and identities. Manhole covers are a reflection of a town’s civic pride, as they are produced by foundries and local authorities. They are also the doors which guide his work to an unknown and underground path, that imply that hardships and storms of life are prerequisites to the new world of escape or freedom.

Chris Bors new paintings use appropriated graphics and imagery from a variety of sources. He has created bold poster-like paintings and prints, sometimes with hand painted elements. Mickey Isis, 2016, features a crudely-rendered Mickey Mouse giving the middle finger, while a large QR code leading to a Google image search of terrorist group Isis floats on the raw canvas. In A.C. (#1), 2016, the sexually-suggestive logo of grindcore band A.C. merges with an abstract painted background of quick brushstrokes and drips.  Influenced by underground comics, punk and metal music, fanzines and graphic design, Bors’s work is a post-pop amalgamation of politics, cultural references and appropriated and drawn visuals. Bors coined the term "virtual dumpster diving" to describe the practice of taking images and videos from the web.

Joiri Minaya work has a direct focus on otherness, self-consciousness and displacement is inspired not only by women in her family, but issues of labor, dislocation, psychology, myth, art history, magic realism and symbols. These new works come from images collected through Google searches of terms like "tropical hair braider", "caribbean hair braider" and "beach braids". She is drawing attention to a recurring way of framing snapshots in these situations and had created compositions that are only interested in the subject whose hair is being braided, reducing the presence of the braider to their hands. By isolating the essential parts of this action by drawing only the hair and the hands a kind of reversal takes place in the portrait, where the main focus, the face, is refused, bringing the attention back to the laboring hands and their intricate and detailed product.

Sarah Nicholls is a visual artist who makes pictures with language, books with pictures, prints with type, and animations with words. She often uses found language and metal type, combining image, visual narrative, and time. For this exhibition, Sarah Nicholls developed woodcuts for a new limited edition book project. Glasshouse is concerned with greenhouses, botanical texts, and the global reshuffling of tropical species. How do we build structures to contain trees meant to grow elsewhere? What is it like to sail off the edge of what you know? What did economic botany mean in a world before chemical plants and the pharmaceutical industry? What is the relationship between science and empire?

CHRIS BORS: KILL YOUR IDOLS

Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present “Kill your Idols”, a solo exhibition of works by Chris Bors, currently an Artist in Residence, on view March 4 through April 2, 2016. Chris Bors’s solo exhibition of new paintings includes his series using logos from hardcore punk bands with a diverse range of imagery in which any visuals are fair game for repurposing, as well as several relying on text only. Titled after the name of the New York City­based hardcore punk band Kill Your Idols, some of the figures represented include rapper Easy­E, Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell, and Saddam Hussein, the latter taken from a drawing by the D.C. sniper John Lee Malvo. Influenced by underground comics, punk and metal music, fanzines and graphic design, Bors’s work is a post­pop amalgamation of politics, cultural references and appropriated and drawn visuals. Bors coined the term "virtual dumpster diving" to describe the practice of taking images and videos from the web.

Bors was born in Ithaca, New York and received his MFA from School of Visual Arts. Solo shows include Randall Scott Projects in Washington, D.C. His art has also been exhibited at PS1 MoMA, White Columns, the Bronx Museum of the Arts and Kinz + Tillou Fine Art in New York, Casino Luxembourg in Luxembourg, Bahnwärterhaus in Esslingen, Germany and Bongoût in Berlin. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Time Out New York, the Brooklyn Rail and featured in Vogue Italia, K48 and Zing magazine. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog featuring an essay by photographer Carl Gunhouse.

JOIRI MINAYA "UNCATERED"

Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present “Uncatered”, a solo exhibition of works by Joiri Minaya, currently an Artist in Residence, on view February 5 through March 1, 2016.

Minaya’s current work for “Uncatered” focuses on the construction of the female subject in relation to nature and landscape in a “tropical” context, shaped by a foreign “gaze” that demands leisure and pleasure. Like nature, femininity has been imagined and represented throughout history as idealized, tamed, conquered / colonized and exoticized. Minaya constantly revises existing cultural products that engage in this form of representation and incorporating them, critically, in her work. These new works include “Siboney" which explores stereotypical constructions of the Caribbean and the Caribbean women based on elaborate fantasies drafted from the position of the foreign other. The performance aims to reflect on the projection of these constructions and how they are later internalized and laboriously constructed by the subject in which they originate. In addition, “DOMINICAN WOMEN - GOOGLE SEARCH POSTCARDS” Uses the postcard format as a platform for images that were culled from a Google search of images for the term  "dominican women". The series consists of re-compositions of the bodies of the women represented in these images or to draw attention to their context. The series is subdivided in different groups that follow different logics to re-compose these bodies. Additional works such as “Container” are the first of a series of performative photographs that feature a woman in natural environments wearing bodysuits made out of fabric with designs that represent nature. “Container” oscillates between ideas of agency and impairment within the construction of the “tropical” as a fantasy of leisure, pleasure and exoticness, and the presence of the female body within this fantasy.The use and consistent presence of the body or figure plus the interest in creating distinct power positions with it seem often contradictory, but are operating simultaneously.

Throughout all her work, Minaya’s direct focus on otherness, self-consciousness and displacement is inspired not only by women in her family, but issues of labor, dislocation, psychology, myth, art history, magic realism and symbols. These works thoroughly question and examine historical hierarchies that inform and condition current identities; constructions and manifest through the body and the resulting they are receipt, internalization and then their subsequent regurgitation. Minaya accomplishes this through her varied in depth exploration throughout different media: painting or sculpture might be a departing point for video or performance, resulting in a merge or develop independently into several works making for a conceptually and visually rich body of works.

Joiri Minaya (1990) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work deals with identity, otherness, self-consciousness and displacement.  Her work investigates the female body and experience within constructions of identity, social space and hierarchies. Born in New York, U.S, she grew up in the Dominican Republic. Minaya graduated from the Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales  (ENAV) in Santo Domingo, D. R. in 2009, the Altos de Chavón School of Design in La Romana, D.R. in 2011 and Parsons the New School for Design in 2013. Minaya lives and works in the US and Dominican Republic.

Sarah Nicholls "Reading Time"

Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present “Reading Time”, a solo exhibition of works by Sarah Nicholls, currently an Artist in Residence, on view January 8 through February 2, 2016. Artist books and artist-driven publications have risen to a new level of prominence despite the ongoing digitization of culture and communication. Books are a technology that, among other things, can respond to and depict the passing of time. Reading is a time-based activity, one that can slow down and create interior lapses in time. Your interior “reading voice” helps to both reinforce the private nature of reading, and the one-on-one connection the act creates.Handmade books in particular ask the reader to pause and contemplate the physicality of the book, the particular hands that have produced the work, and the time it took them to do so.

Reading Time is a reading room installed in the gallery at Guttenberg Arts that invites visitors to engage with monologues, brochures, ephemera, manifestos, scientific matter, propaganda, and alternate histories in the form of printed language. Included are a range of publications and a selection of prints which collectively revolve around the authority of the printed word. Publishing creates community, though that community may only be temporary and hard to hold together. In a culture where visual noise is inescapable, printed matter creates an opportunity to pause, ruminate, speculate, and share. 

Sarah Nicholls is a visual artist who makes pictures with language, books with pictures, prints with type, and animations with words. She often uses found language and metal type, combining image, visual narrative, and time. She has written a collection of self-help aphorisms, she publishes a series of informational pamphlets, and recently completed a field guide to extinct birds. Her limited edition artist books are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Rutgers, Stanford, UCLA, and the University of Pennsylvania, among others. For twelve years, she ran the studio programs at the Center for Book Arts in NYC. Currently she teaches letterpress at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

MADE HERE Fall 2015

Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present “MADE HERE Winter 2015” a group exhibition of the current Artists in Residence; Seung-Jong Isaac Lee, Diana Shpungin, Chad Stayrook, Elisabeth Smolarz and Roberto Visani. On view December 5, 2015 - January 4, 2016. The works included in MADE HERE were created during the artist’s residences this past summer. The title “MADE HERE” carries not only multiple definitions, but multiple conceptual meanings ranging from location to identity, the politics of materials and the historical nature of place. All of these new works deeply considered many of these issues and are only just the beginning points for deeper reflection.

Seung-Jong Isaac Lee’s newest lithographic prints and rubbings deeply consider ideas of living life in New York City as a foreigner and immigrant. As Lee tries to resolve these issues in his daily life, he choose the ‘manhole’ as a metaphor for his journey. Manholes are seen as an escape route or connection to a new world; the manhole cover as a gate. Thus, Lee creates inter-dimensional portals in his lithographs using the image of the manhole as a symbolic gateway between cultures, nations, and identities. Manhole covers are a reflection of a town’s civic pride, as they are produced by foundries and local authorities. They are also the doors which guide his work to an unknown and underground path, that imply that hardships and storms of life are prerequisites to the new world of escape or freedom. Through these ideas, he reinterprets the manhole covers from an aesthetic viewpoint and raises questions about the escape from many things: a routine, daily life and, by extension, nations, ethnicities and disputes. These escapes lead to freedom and the hope of a better life.

Diana Shpungin’s  new works are experimental ceramics in combination with graphite pencil. Shpungin’s use of the graphite pencil as an elemental tool, both permanent and denoting erasure, is the foundation of her practice. These new works reflect an evolution in material and a reflection of it’s meaning. Where ceramics become sculptural installations, they also function as drawing and vice versa. While she meticulously coating objects with graphite pencil as if they removed themselves from the two dimensional plane and into our bodily space providing an ever greater intimacy and physicality with the object itself, these pieces refer to many of the drawings that are further used to create animation works, “purposely failed animations”, or “moving stills”. Ultimately, all these methods maintain a peculiar sense of longing, –the subject matter may directly address this, a formal sensibility of tension may be employed or longing can be implied by way of a self-imposed conceptual failure, –often having a purposeful yet ambiguous sense of incompletion.

Elisabeth Smolarz’s work utilizes objects as portals to memory by collaborating with individuals to create shrine like installations of their own objects in their home environments and thus creating a self-portrait. The installation of their precious objects which embody their sense of selfhood and identity, tells the story of each individual, and forms a series of intricate non-concrete portraits following the tradition of symbolism of a early Still Life paintings. As our first COMMUNITY BASED Artist in Residence at Guttenberg Arts this summer, Ms. Smolarz focused on the population of town of Guttenberg and all its inhabitants of the city are represented. This series of self-portraits together make up a larger community portrait and one that shows what it means to be one of the most densely populated incorporated towns in America. Ms. Smolarz’ s also used our Instagram feed to document her process over the three months that she was in residence.

Chad Stayrook work combines video, installation and performance to present narratives of adventure and discovery. he gathers source material by exploring natural phenomena and unusual landscapes, allowing the world around him to become a playground for storytelling. Unknown places are a starting point for Stayrook’s practice. He leave room for play and spontaneity in all of my work in order to retain a spirit of true exploration. In his newest works, "spacetime vessels" Stayrook deals with the relationship between materials, dimensionality, and temporal experience. The independent mediums of ceramics, sculpture, drawing, photography, and video are combined to form a single interwoven continuum. The result is a melding of ancient, modern, and contemporary techniques and symbols that may or may not describe, in a more formal way, the workings of the universe.

Roberto Visani By using assemblage to create many of the sculptures, these specific materials and objects formulate metaphors which connect the gun to the circumstances surrounding its use and its relationship to the body. The sculptures of firearms made from steel are, initially inspired by colonial era improvised firearms, the series has evolved to consider guns across time and place and the selected refer to different contexts, present and past, national and foreign, collective and individualistic. As an ergonomic form, Visani sees the gun as carrying both a physical and psychological relation to humanity

NOTHINGS

DIANA SHPUNGIN

Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present “Nothings” , a solo exhibition of works by Diana Shpungin, currently an Artist in Residence, on view November 6through December 3, 2015.

...- And dimmer nothings which were real -(Shadows - and a more shadowy light!) Parted upon their misty wings, And, so, confusedly, became Thine image, and - a name - a name!...  -- excerpt from Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlan, 1829

The title of Diana Shpungin’s solo exhibition Nothings, refers to the term as both the standard use meaning as an inconsequential conversation, an informal exchange of ideas and/or an expression of affection as well as “Nothing(s)” as that which can be readily overlooked and their meaning obscured or not immediately obvious. In the selection for this exhibition, Shpunginpairs several understated works that rely on her minimalist aesthetic and conceptual framework. Examining themes of memory, failure, longing and loss, Shpungin’s artwork employs a painstaking process while seeking empathy across identity lines. The works inconspicuous nature is purposeful, in that the gesture of the idea and the obsessive methods to get there was a meditative and somewhat masochistic proposition. The use of graphite pencil as an elemental tool, both permanent and denoting erasure, is the foundation to Shpungin’s practice. While an obsessive language of materials and techniques has been developed based on her late surgeon fathers methods both in medicine and in domestic life. Sculpture functions as drawing and vice versa, meticulously coating objects with graphite pencil as if they removed themselves from the two dimensional plane and into our bodily space providing an ever greater intimacy and physicality with the object itself. Many of the drawings are further used to create animation works, “purposely failed animations”, or “moving stills”. Ultimately, all these methods maintain a peculiar sense of longing, –the subject matter may directly address this, a formal sensibility of tension may be employed or longing can be implied by way of a self-imposed conceptual failure, –often having a purposeful yet ambiguous sense of incompletion.

Diana Shpungin is a Brooklyn based multi-disciplinary artist who was born in Latvia’s seaside capital of Riga under Soviet rule, Shpungin immigrated as a child to the United States, settling in New York City. Shpungin has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions in both national and international venues including: The Bronx Museum of Art, Bronx, NY; Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY; Bass Museum of Art, Miami, FL; Futura Center for Contemporary Art, Prague, Czech Republic; Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Carrousel du Louvre, Paris, France; Invisible Exports, New York, NY; Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, New York, NY; Marc Straus Gallery, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY. Shpungin’s work has been reviewed in publications such as Artforum, Flash Art, Art in America, The New York Times and Timeout London. Shpungin has been awarded residencies with The MacDowell Colony, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, VLA Art and Law and The Bronx Museum AIM Program among others.

the impossible lightness of being

chad stayrook

Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present “The Impossible Lightness of Being” a solo exhibition of works by Chad Stayrook, currently an Artist in Residence, on view October 7 through November 4, 2015. 

The “Impossible Lightness of Being” is an installation built around the form and function of a simple paper airplane. The paper airplane itself is a familiar and playful object often associated with lightheartedness and clowning around. However, in the context of the gallery this form becomes the pedestal that bears the weight of art. The title of this exhibition is a nod to Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” that examines the concept of eternal recurrence and the weight of meaning (purpose) in our lives. Similarly, this exhibition plays with the weight of meaning as pertains to objects when presented in a context outside of their assumed function.

The centerpiece of the installation is a wooden frame built in the shape of a paper airplane. This structure becomes the support for a video monitor that shows the paper airplane in its ideal (albeit impossible) state as an elegant form in endless flight. The series of unfolded paper airplanes represents recurrence and/or attempts at perfection and repetition, while also highlighting inescapable flaws inherent in analog handmade multiples. The ceramic airplanes are an inevitable impossibility. Their floppy materiality highlights the gravity that holds their fate to the ground. Their function as art outweighs their function as planes since an attempt to fly them would ultimately mean their destruction. Stayrook’s works focus on the struggle to find meaning, happiness, and salvation and combine his expectation of failure with the fantastical wanderings of his imagination to create a world that is as believable as it is strange and impossible. 

Chad Stayrook is a living and breathing artist based in Brooklyn NY. His work has been shown around internationally, printed in several publications and is co° ©-directing Present Company Gallery with Brian Balderston and Jose Ruiz , as well as collaborating as Really Large Numbers with Julia Oldham.

in medias res

Roberto Visani

Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present “in medias res”, a solo exhibition of works by Roberto Visani, currently an
Artist in Residence, on view September 7 through October 4, 2015.

The title of Roberto Visani’s solo exhibition “in medias res”, refers to the latin term meaning “in the midst of things”. In his selection of sculptures for this exhibition, Visani is interpreting the phrase as an interwoven narrative in which each of the objects and images possesses its own identity and collectively become a knotted story. The phrase “in medias res” is often applied in theater and poetry to describe a narrative in which the audience/reader enters not at the beginning but somewhere after things have begun and this is where Visani places the audience in his exhibition, a moment of ideas within the space dealing with obscurity and tangibility as a way to explore the relationship of the abstraction of emotions and the personification of firearms.  

By using assemblage to create many of the sculptures, these specific materials and objects formulate metaphors which connect the gun to the circumstances surrounding its use and its relationship to the body. The sculptures of firearms made from steel are, initially inspired by colonial era improvised firearms, the series has evolved to consider guns across time and place and the selected refer to different contexts, present and past, national and foreign, collective and individualistic. As an ergonomic form, Visani sees the gun as carrying both a physical and psychological relation to humanity. Ultimately, his works ask the viewer to move beyond the form of the gun however, to consider larger questions contained within their narratives. “They exist as a record of a time, place, a group, an individual. It is less about the weapon itself and more about the circumstances surrounding its existence, but  also this iconic form which allows us to consider questions of power as well.”  All of the work reflects an ongoing interest in history, language and improvisation in the formation of identity and through the arranged installation of the works, Visani pushes the viewer to explore the spaces between forms that create both dissonance and commonality.

Roberto Visani is a multi-media artist residing in Brooklyn, New York. He has exhibited his work internationally in such venues as the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY, The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, The Bronx Museum of Art, NY, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF, CA, The Contemporary Arts Center, Cleveland, OH, Barbican Galleries, London, UK, and the Ghana National Museum, Accra, Ghana. Visani has been awarded artist residencies from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Henry Street Settlement, NY, and Art Omi to name a few. He is a former NYFA Artist Fellow in Sculpture and Fulbright fellow to Ghana. As part of his Fulbright activities he began creating his iconic guns sculptures. These works have been reviewed in such publications as the New York Times, Art Forum, Art News, and Frieze. Since 2004, Visani has taught at John Jay College, CUNY, NY where he is an associate professor of art.

MADE HERE SUMMER 2015

PAVEL ACOSTA / HEIDI LAU / ELLA SMOLARZ / JUANA VALDES

Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present “MADE HERE 2015” a group exhibition of the current Artists in Residence; Heidi Lau, Juana Valdes, Pavel Acosta, Elisabeth Smolarz. On view August 7, 2015 - September 4, 2015. The works included in MADE HERE were created during the artist’s residences this past summer. The title “MADE HERE” carries not only multiple definitions, but multiple conceptual meanings ranging from location to identity, the politics of materials and the historical nature of place. All of these new works deeply considered many of these issues and are only just the beginning points for deeper reflection.

Pavel Acosta’s move to the United States fundamentally changed his artwork. The unrestricted access to seeing masterpieces at MoMA or The Metropolitan Museum of Art in person was startling and paired with being able to buy any art material at anytime process altering. The skills learned in Cuba (stealing paint off buildings to make works) remain a base metaphor to address life’s struggles in his work as well as the subjects shifting. The new works show Acosta’s source of materials is not the city anymore, but the museums. The museum walls are ambassadors of its policies and ideologies. They are carriers of memories, and ultimately of history and are reflected in the two new pieces he has created during his residency.

Heidi Lau’s work creates an alternate world through excavating fragmented narratives from personal and collective memories that highlight the archaic and invisible and recreate what has been lost to natural or human causes. Lau has worked exhaustively with a variety of traditional mediums including printmaking, ceramics and bookmaking, where printed works on paper function as proposition and contemplative manifestations of darkness and an invisible order of the universe. Lau’s geometric forms, inspired by magic charts and mandalas are juxtaposed with tusche renderings and acid washes resembling nebulas or alchemy. These created artifacts take the form of various objects of remembrance – towers, funeral monuments and fossilized creatures that are disintegrating or infested that compose the history of a mystical world by suggesting its existence and decline.

Elisabeth Smolarz’s work utilizes objects as portals to memory by collaborating with individuals to create shrine like installations of their own objects in their home environments and thus creating a self-portrait. The installation of their precious objects which embody their sense of selfhood and identity, tells the story of each individual, and forms a series of intricate non-concrete portraits following the tradition of symbolism of a early Still Life paintings. As our first COMMUNITY BASED Artist in Residence at Guttenberg Arts this summer, Ms. Smolarz focused on the population of town of Guttenberg and all its inhabitants of the city are represented. This series of self-portraits together make up a larger community portrait and one that shows what it means to be one of the most densely populated incorporated towns in America. Ms. Smolarz’ s also used our Instagram feed to document her process over the three months that she was in residence.

Juana Valdes’ work traces, recollects, and records her own personal experience of migration, directly informed by her Afro-Cuban ethnicity growing up in America. Valdes’ concepts are revealed through her compositions which represent a personal examination of the post-colonial history of the Americas and the current representation of Latinos, Caribbean citizens, Blacks or what the current “Other” is in vogue in mainstream America. Thus the ethno-social exploration dictates the use of found ceramics and images, as they transmute this issue through the everyday objects. In her newest works of found ceramics and prints Valdes aims to push these issues and raises them to a level of spatial and direct interaction with the viewers through the precariousness of the constructions on which the ceramics are arranged, thus heightening our sensibilities and insecurities.

Exhibition: August 7th - September 4th

Mettre noir sur blanc

JUANA VALDES

Guttenberg, NJ (June 24, 2015)— Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present Mettre Noir Sur Blanc a solo exhibition of works by Juana Valdes, currently an Artist in Residence, on view July 3 through August 1, 2015.

As a multi-disciplinary artist Juana Valdes’ work traces, recollects, and records her own personal experience of migration, directly informed by her Afro-Cuban ethnicity growing up in America. Valdes’ focuses on migration’s complex process and constructs history through a continuum that involves both the homespace of the diasporic community along with their new homeland. Working from this base, Valdes’ concepts are revealed through her compositions which represent a personal examination of the post-colonial history of the Americas and the current representation of Latinos, Caribbean citizens, Blacks or what the current “Other” is in vogue in mainstream America, by reflecting on what is ascribed, contested, and granted within. Thus the ethno-social exploration dictates the use of found ceramics and images as they transmute this issue through the everyday objects. Which becomes a personal and time-based reference that is diachronic in orientation and recreates a personal archive of both displacement and remembrance.

Juana Valdes completed her M.F.A. in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in 1993 and her B.F.A. in Sculpture at Parsons School of Design in 1991. She was born in Cabañas, Pinar Del Rio, Cuba and came to the United States in1971. Ms. Valdeswork has been including in exhibitions at the Hudson River Museum, Art in General, El Museo del Barrio, WhiteBox Gallery, Bronx River Art Center, P.S.1 Contemporary Art, Center and Paul Sharpe Contemporary Art, and Nohra Haime Gallery, Newark Museum’s, The Caribbean Abroad: Contemporary Artists and Latino Migration, Un-staged at Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam, D’ailleurs – I Won’t Play Other to Your Sameat Galerie Art & Essai, University Rennes, France and many international venues in Holland, Germany, Australia, Belgium, France, and Poland. Ms. Valdes’ includes in the Newark Museum’s permanent collection and many private collections throughout the United States.

Exhibition: July 3 through August 1, 2015

PRESENT WORKS

Pavel acosta

June 5 - July 1 2015

Guttenberg, NJ (May 22, 2015)— Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present “Present Works” a solo exhibition of works by Pavel Acosta, currently an Artist in Residence, on view June 5 through July 1, 2015.

“Stealing is at the very core of my work, since I first started making art.” Pavel Acosta begins his artist’s statement. Born and raised in Havana with a lack of art making material, inspired Acosta to rethink what it meant to make art, paintings in particular. How does a painter make paintings without paint? With little access to affordable art materials, Acosta began to steal dry paint chips from the crumbling city walls and the objects around him to make paintings or collages of recycled paint on paper and canvas. He called these works Stolen Paintings. This way of surviving as an artist was parallel to the way people need to survive to live in Cuba, by smuggling State resources within the black market as a compensation for low salaries and scarcities. Acosta wanted to explore the boundaries between destroying something or committing a crime, and creating, as well as the concepts of ethics and morality within that society. 

In 2010, Acosta’s move to the United States fundamentally changed his artwork. The unrestricted access to seeing masterpieces at MoMA or The Metropolitan Museum of Art in person was startling and paired with being able to buy any art material at anytime process altering. But he I couldn’t renounce stealing. The skills learned in Cuba remain a base metaphor to address life’s struggles in his work as well as the subjects shifting. Recent works show Acosta’s source of materials is not the city anymore, but the museums. The museum walls are ambassadors of its policies and ideologies. They are carriers of memories, and ultimately of history. In his series Wallscape (2013 – present), Acosta interacts within museums’ permanent collection galleries. The first work in this series took place at El Museo del Barrio, NY, during its 2013 Biennial. For this work, he peeled the paint directly off the wall and used the paint chips to make an exact reproduction of the permanent collection painting hung in front of my wall. 

Acosta continues developing his intricately detailed process by using sheetrock panels that are mounted on a wooden structure, resembling that one finds behind a wall, and are always exhibited hanging from the ceiling, detached from the gallery walls. A QR code next to each painting allows the viewer to access the webpage featuring the original piece in the museum’s website. “...my low-tech works are like spirits that find their way back to their bodies through cutting-edge technology” says Acosta.

The works shown included in this exhibition “Present Works” two of Acosta’s latest works from the series Stolen from the Met – Jo, La Belle Irlandaise by Gustave Courbet (French, Ornans 1819–1877 La Tour-de-Peilz) and Portrait of a Woman (Dutch, Leiden 1606-1669 Amsterdam) by Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn),are being exhibited for the first time in New Jersey. In this series, the artist realizes detailed, 1:1 copies of works from the Met’s –and other major museums’– collections.

LITHOS SARKOPHAGOS

HEIDI LAU

May 9, 2015 - June 1st, 2015

Lithos Sarkophagos / Heidi Lau

Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present Lithos Sarkophagos  a solo exhibition of works by Heidi Lau, currently an Artist in Residence, on view May 9 through June 1, 2015.

Heidi Lau’s work creates an alternate world through excavating fragmented narratives from personal and collective memories that highlight the archaic and invisible and recreate what has been lost to natural or human causes. Lau has worked exhaustively with a variety of traditional mediums including printmaking, ceramics and bookmaking, where printed works on paper function as proposition and contemplative manifestations of darkness and an invisible order of the universe. Lau’s geometric forms, inspired by magic charts and mandalas are juxtaposed with tusche renderings and acid washes resembling nebulas or alchemy. These created artifacts take the form of various objects of remembrance – towers, funeral monuments and fossilized creatures that are disintegrating or infested that compose the history of a mystical world by suggesting its existence and decline.

Being from Macau, a colony of Portugal during its transition into a Chinese province and then an immigrant in the United States, Heidi Lau’s work further examines the anomic nature of history and cultural migration. As well as delving into the nostalgia for collective memories that have inspired to recreate and highlight what she believe is crucial to her identity. In her ceramics works, the flexibility and strength of clay allows her to experiment and create pieces that are a surprise even to herself. Additional methods of scratching, scribbling and engraving the surface of pieces form works that are texturally rich in details, surfaces and that embody memories of many forces. These memories range from the observing colonial houses and monuments from her own childhood and their decay, while strange and wild plants began to take over.
Most of these structures are now demolished or unrecognizable, and thus recreating becomes the only way Lau is connecting to these structures, place and their history.

Heidi Lau grew up in Macau and currently lives and works in Ridgewood, NY. She received her BFA from New York University in 2008. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally; Macao Museum of Art (Macao, China), Wave Hill, Newhouse Center for Contemporary, TSA New York, Rush Corridor Gallery and Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, among others. She has participated in the Bronx Museum Artist In the Market Place Program, Center for Book Arts Workspace Residency, Snug Harbor Artist Residency Program and Emerging Artist Fellowship at Socrates Sculpture Park.

MADE HERE / winter 2015

NEW WORK BY Kirsten Flaherty / susan graham / johanna winters

April 2, 2014 - May 3, 2015, Opening reception: April 2, 7-9pm

Artists In Residence Winter 2015

Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present “MADE HERE Winter 2015” a group exhibition of the current Artists in Residence; Kirsten Flaherty, Susan Graham and Johanna Winters. On view April 2 2015 through May 3 2015.

The works included in MADE HERE Winter 2015 were created during the artists’ residences and address issues and concepts that revolve around humanity, built urban environments and their relationships with nature.

Kirsten Flaherty’s newest etchings use the intimacy and tactility of detailed mezzotints and hand stitching to evoke a deeper sense of empathy for her subjects. These subjects or innocents, such as pit bulls and seals, are deeply affected by our systematic urbanization and our negative impact on our natural environment, as well as how our relationships to the animals themselves. The prints also depict serene landscapes that are abruptly disrupted by a trapped seal bound by wire, which is heightened by Flaherty’s use of thick thread and the piercing of the paper causing the viewer to realize the fragility of life and the fallacies in human nature that come with even more devastating repercussions.

Similar themes of human encroachment on nature are also found in Susan Graham’s newest works. These technically complicated, freestanding porcelain sculptures entitled “Flower Towers” are linear in nature and replicate electrical towers seen to be placed in every landscape heedless of the needs of the environment at hand. Graham’s use of decoration and simple black and white color palettes poetically depict the eternal struggle between nature and technology. Graham’s pieces also reference the sense of humor and clumsiness of cell phone towers disguised as pine trees and their rapidly changing landscapes.

In Johanna Winters’ recent exhibition,Culling the Herd, the works were installed in such a way that evoked the comfortable space of a backyard clothing line where the prints are hung with clips and seemingly cheerful in color, drawing in the viewer. But the illusion is only temporary, upon closer look these intimately scaled prints show characters that are confined or restrained within ambiguous and absurd environments on stages that produce an uncanny sense of empathy from their viewers. For MADE HERE, Winters continues to create a cast of impish characters that both mock and celebrate the gluttony and banality of Middle America and linger in the emotional emptiness that seems to manifest itself in their physical situations.

JOHANNA WINTERS

CULLING THE HERD

March 6 - 31 2015

Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present Culling the Herd, a solo exhibition of works by Johanna Winters, currently an Artist in Residence. On view March 6 through March 31, 2015.

The works included in Culling the Herd, dwell upon Johanna Winters’ childhood in the suburban Upper Midwest where over-­indulgence and herd mentality gives way to characterless freeways and strip mall wastelands. Departing from this landscape, she has created a cast of impish characters that both mock and celebrate the gluttony and banality of Middle America and linger in the emotional emptiness that seems to manifest itself in their physical situations. The prints are intimately scaled, framed as an old polaroid would be, showing a happy moment, but these characters are boxed into oddly delicate intaglio prints with precise line work and muted colors that poise their mammalian creatures, confined or restrained within ambiguous and absurd environments on stages that produce an uncanny sense of empathy from their viewers.

As a nod to her influences, which range from tv cartoons and newspaper comics to the sinister works of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, even extending to contemporary artists such as Barry McGee and Kurt Kemp, Winters chooses to use printmaking’s “low­brow” or graphic nature and its history of conveying social commentary. And like these influential artists, Winters places the viewer with her characters in moments of awkwardness to illustrate the absurdity of human nature as a means of processing and deflecting her dismay at the antics and habits of her surroundings, thus inventing a modern day adage.

Johanna Winters is from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She received a B.A. in studio arts from the University of Wisconsin ­Green Bay. She has worked as the Education Manager at Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Minneapolis where she taught printmaking to students of all ages and abilities. Most recently she has taught printmaking as an Associate Lecturer at UW­ Green Bay. Johanna’s prints have been included in national juried exhibitions and portfolios, as well as exhibitions in Montreal and Germany. Her work will be part of an upcoming two person show at Columbia College in Columbia, Missouri in 2015.

Susan Graham

STUDIO WALLPAPER 2014 (WORK IN PROGRESS)

Feb 6 - March 2 2015

Press Release

February 6 through March 2, 2015

Opening reception: February 6, 7-9pm

Artist In Residence Winter 2015

Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present Studio Wallpaper (a work in progress), a new site specific sugar and porcelain toile installation by Susan Graham, currently Artist in Residence, on view February 6 through March 2, 2015.

Susan Graham’s works are built upon a conceptual standpoint of her unbreakable link with her hometown, family, and childhood. Utilizing her memories, dreams, and personal stories as her topics, Graham ultimately broadens their focus and addresses larger social and political issues that affect us all. This is most evident in her ongoing series of wall installations. Her process, based on the layout of the toile patterned wallpaper from a childhood bedroom, pushes this method to encompass entire rooms with various sized sculptural elements made from both sugar and porcelain that creates patterns representing repetitive acts or actions. These often result in the making of a multitude of similar objects which are linked to a particular psychological state. These materials give the work a deceptive feeling of domesticity or sweetness while the subjects are challenging in their high-low contradictions. 

For Studio Wallpaper (a work in progress), Graham has created a gorgeous, spiral site-specific installation. Referencing to Guttenberg’s long history as the “Embroidery Capital of the United States”, she begins at a corner as the central central point and works outward into the gallery space. The patterns are drawn directly from the embroidered lacework produced by local businesses to form recurring narratives of complex pastoral scenes and the storytelling qualities found in traditional Toile de Jouy wallpaper using the same delicate look and a conceptually similar idea of preciousness, fragility, and intense process. Graham's works again takes these themes to a broader level and addresses human encroachment on nature using decoration that poetically depict the eternal struggle between nature and technology. 

Susan Graham attended Ohio State University and the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her work has been shown at galleries and museums including Neuberger Museum of Art, Musee International des Arts Modestes, Sete, France and the Tucson Museum of Art. Graham has received several fellowships and grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation,  Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Smack Mellon Artist Residency, Ruth Chenven Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Recently, she completed a commissioned public work for an elevator lobby in the Johns Hopkins Hospital’s new medical facility in Baltimore, Maryland.

Exhibition: February 6 - March 6, 2015; Opening reception: February 6, 6-8pm.