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Joseph Clarke
INCIPIENCE May 25. - July 31. Artist Bio Joseph Clarke Is a Connecticut based artist living in Litchfield County and working from his Kent studio. Clarke has been creating large colorful artworks that he describes as action sculptures. Working with house paints, epoxy resin and canvas he sculpts high gloss, textural pieces that are reminiscent of something within the realm of finish fetish. Each work, usually monocramatic, is stretched on a hand made strainer that Clarke builds himself in his wood shop. Coming from a line of do it yourself builders, working with his hands comes naturally. His Grandfather Victor was an electrician, plumber, mechanic, carpenter, and antiauthoritarian. These are all attributes that were passed down to Clarke’s father Mark who additionally became an impressive boat builder, with patented designs that are still in use today. Clarke’s Grandmother Yvonne was also an artist who illustrated professionally and painted often. Joseph Graduated from the Hartford Art School in 2018 with a Bachelors in Fine Art and immediately after started working as a studio assistant for his now ex-professor Power Boothe. This initial apprenticeship had a domino effect that landed him in many artists studios over the years, Including artist Kathleen Kucka who, after founding and opening Furnace Art on Paper in Falls Village, CT, made Clarke associate director of the gallery where he works today. Being a Skateboarder, snowboarder, and artist most of his life Clarke has never been one for following the rest of the pack, he finds joy in mapping his own path in ways that allow for more innovative and creative thinking. |
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Call & Response
through November 19. by The Rev. Dr. Mark Bozzuti - Jones and Dr. Kathy Bozzuti - Jones These paintings and photographs invite the viewer to see with the eyes of the heart and to flow in response to the calls of nature, life, and the divine. Artmaking is our way of responding to these invitations. What is calling to you? The Rev. Dr. Mark Bozzuti-Jones serves as director of Spiritual Formation at Trinity Retreat Center. Artist, poet, social activist, reggae enthusiast, and author of eight books, his most recent books include, Face to the Rising Sun: Reflections on Spirituals & Justice and Absalom Jones: America’s First Black Priest, 2021. Dr. Kathy Bozzuti-Jones is an interfaith minister, essayist, spiritual director, certified mindfulness instructor and contemplative photographer, who has exhibited her photos since 2006 at Trinity Wall Street in New York, as well as in Boston, Washington, and online with ECVA (Episcopalians in the Visual Arts – ECVA.org). |
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Emily Waters
MATRIX May 27. - July 30. 2023 The Souterrain Gallery is pleased to present Matrix, an exhibition of new paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Emily Waters from May 27 through June 30, 2023. The solo exhibition includes 45 portraits (acrylic on wooden panels) comprising 15 matrilineal lines (daughter, mother, and grandmother) displayed with TK watercolors on paper displayed as "relics" with real-life mementos associated with each of the women. The works are inspired by Waters’ recent visit to Lisbon's Church of São Roque, where busts of saints and queens were displayed with their reliquaries and portraits arranged in columns resembling a family tree. For Waters, the portraits called to mind the statues in the Catholic church she attended as a child in rural Illinois, sparking memories of her own mother and grandmother and the influence they had on her life. Each painting in Matrix, originating in portraits of Waters’ friends and neighbors, conveys some critical essence of the woman represented, whether still alive or long deceased. “In the days of old, we would think of the influence the church or state had upon us. Now, we follow celebrities and other influencers," says Waters. “I think of the impact one has as an individual, then, as a mother and grandmother. What impact do we have on the next generation or even how we understand the preceding one? Is it more than genetics?” In addition to the works on display in Matrix, on May 28, the Souterrain Gallery will host “Tea and Matriarchy,” a public event during which the living subjects of Waters’ series will bring additional mementos and photos to initiate a conversation about those no longer present and the impact they continue to have on each other’s lives. Matrix is the second of two exhibitions by Waters presented by the Souterrain Gallery in which she invents a visual language to talk about history, gender, and influence. Last year's “Persistence/Insistence” series pit ancient Greek women against Egyptian-style Birdmen in a timeless conversation on civilization and power. ### About Emily Waters Emily Waters is an artist and teacher living in Brooklyn. She was raised on a farm in Illinois with eight siblings. She was educated at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel and has worked in the graphic design department of the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. For the past several years, she has taught 2D Design at the Cooper Union. |
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Emily Waters
P E R S I S T E N C E July 30.- September 17. 2022 Persistence/Insistence is a series of paintings on paper that feature a Birdman and a Woman. The woman figure is based on Greek vase paintings. She represents growth, life, love, beauty, art, and friendship. She persists in creativity even while the Birdman insists that all is his for the taking. The Birdman is based on Egyptian figures. He represents a culture that had survived 5000 years and sees no reason to change. Emily Waters is an artist and teacher living in Brooklyn. She was raised on a farm in Illinois with 8 siblings. She was educated at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel, Switzerland and has worked in the graphic design department of the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum. For the past several years, she has taught 2D Design at Cooper Union and Drawing/Imaging at Parsons in New York City. Press : by Kathleen Hulser public historian & cultural project manager https://kathleenhulser.medium.com/persistence-insistence-emily-waters-at-souterrain-gallery-f6ebd6141db5 |
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S A M P L E R
May 28. - July 23. Sam Berenfield, sam-berenfield.com
Noah Pica, noahpica.com Emma Redmond, emmaredmond.com Elizabeth Schweizer, elizabethschweizer.com Stefan Sehringer, stefansehringer.com Cassie Sheedy, casssheedy.com Krista Young, kristamarieyoung.com |
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Amber Maida
Oubliette September 4. - November 21. 2021 Artist Statement -b. 1980 Buffalo, NY Amber’s work begins with a spiritual ritual of Chi-cultivation, grounding her deeply into the earth; embodying its energy and guiding her hands like a dance, while simultaneously building a universal, yet intimate story within each work. This symbiotic connection with these energies charges the materials with positivity, preserving a storied past or one yet to be known. Embedded elements of nature enrich the layered, textural quality and symbolic language of her work. Gathered found or saved objects such as preserved plant matter, crystals,fabrics, steel cut nails, eggshells, feathers and bees are fused with paint becoming a visual journal, that honor both the materials and her message. In 2010 Amber sustained major lung surgery, which invited a greater awareness of time, life, love and gratitude. This experience led her to create new collections of mixed media paintings and sculptures based on the intense process of healing and discovery of many silver-linings.Each work aims to honor dualities such as fragility while building/unlocking strength, the old with the new, macro/ micro, and nature vs. man-made materials. Currently, she is enjoying living life, and creating in Warren, CT with her husband, Pete,and their poodle, Eros. more information at : www.ambermaida.com 
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Amber Maida’s work has been included in juried, solo, and group exhibitions throughout the US and in the UK, including The New Britain Museum of American Art (New Britain, CT), The Mattatuck Museum (Waterbury, CT), The Housatonic Museum of Art (Bridgeport, CT),The Silvermine Guild of Art (New Canaan, CT), LA Artcore Annex Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); ArtCube Gallery (Laguna Beach, CA), The Gallery at Black Rock (Bridgeport, CT), Station Gallery (NYC), AIRS (New Haven, CT); Bunny Gunner Gallery (Claremont, CA), The Franklin Arts Center (Brainerd, MN), redFISH Gallery (East Aurora, NY), TheArtBay Gallery (Staffordshire, UK) and others. Maida’s solo exhibition titled “The Silver Lining” was featured at Serendipity Gallery in 2015 (Litchfield, CT). “Entrances and Exits,” a solo exhibition at The Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, CT was awarded to Amber Maida, by the 2016 Mixmaster Juror, Elizabeth Denny, Owner/Director of The Denny Gallery, NYC. From 2007-2009, her paintings were represented at the White Space Gallery (New Haven, CT). A suite of paintings by the artist were selected by Richard’s of Greenwich for the 2009 Art to the Avenue public art exhibition (Greenwich, CT).Throughout her career, Amber’s work has also been featured in several journals including Litchfield Magazine (May/June, 2015), Mode Moderne Journal (issue I, 2012, and issue XI, 2013), Artscope Magazine (July/August 2010), Ink Magazine (January 2008), and in several issues of Art World News Magazine (2009-2015), as well as other publications.Amber currently resides in Warren, CT.
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Hannah Jung
Resting Place May 29. - August.28. 2021 Artist Statement The body of my artwork, “Led by the Light”, visualizes a ‘beacon of hope’ through my own journey of life by portraying symbolic imageries from nature such as sky, water, light and dark. As humans, we strive to find who we are and where we belong on earth. These integral questions in our minds through this journey allow us to utilize the natural world to touch the depths of our hearts that desire to seek the answers and understand our true identities. As the viewers cast their own imagination upon the images, these images are, in turn, transformed by impression from their own past and present and eventually arrive at their destinies. In order to capture its richness of the ethereal beauty on each stage of the journey, I work on a large number of paintings in a series, mainly focused on pure emotions of sky and its reflections on water. As nature begins to lose its concrete meaning, it starts expressing the essence of the image, its color, its smell, its movement, and its atmosphere. Herein, the realities of sky, water, and earth are transformed into spiritual beings, intimate and personal. Such nature echoes the heartbeats of the Creator as a compassionate and loving father and speaks of hope and redemption, renewal, peace and serenity. I believe art has the power to enlighten the eyes of viewers’ hearts to see ordinary nature as a new revelation. This journey into the divine realities of nature invites us to tap into the essential core of our own being. My paintings are meant to encourage the viewers to have these spiritual experiences through their own personal perceptions and interpretations BIO Hannah Jung, a former Juried Artist member from Silvermine Guild Arts Center (2004-2012) and Westport Arts Center (2009-2012), has exhibited nationwide including The White Gallery (2019, Lakeville CT), Lyman Allyn Art Museum (2019 New London), Salmagundi Club (2018, New York NY), Six Summit Gallery (2018, Ivoryton), The Voice of Art Gallery (2018, Cheshire), H. Pelham Curtis Gallery (2012, New Canaan), LH Horton Jr. Gallery (2010, Stockton, CA), Baker Arts Center (2010, Liberal, KS), The John Slade Ely House (2011, New Haven), The Gallery of the Contemporary Art, Sacred Heart University, and General Electric World Headquarters (2008-9, Fairfield CT), Mercy Gallery, Loomis Chaffee School (2008, Windsor), Gallery Korea, Korean Embassy (2005, Washington D.C.), Vision Gallery (2004, New York), and Promenade Gallery at the Bushnell (2003, Hartford), to name a few. Also, she was a recipient in the entry of Art of the Northeast (2006 & 2010) at Silvermine Guild Arts Center and was invited to Artists Residency Program at I-Park (2006, East Haddam CT). Her work has been recognized with numerous awards and reviewed by Republican-American, Record-Journal, Korean Times, Connecticut Post, Cheshire Herald, Westport Now, etc. and her number of paintings are in private collection nationwide. A graduate of Seoul National University, Korea (Bachelor of Fine Arts: Painting) and Southern Connecticut State University (M. Science.), she taught at a number of schools including Housatonic Community College (Bridgeport), Albertus Magnus College (New Haven), Lyman Allyn Art Museum (New London) and public/private schools. Jung is currently working as Director and Artist-inResidence of The Voice of Art, a nonprofit art organization she founded in 2017 based in Cheshire CT and later transformed into a virtual art gallery to nurture expanded viewership in the current art market |
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The Bevans Quartet through September 30.
Two Generations of Bevans Women Make Art Two generations of Bevans women, one a daughter of Margaret and Tom Bevans,the other a granddaughter, have joined with two Bevans daughters-in-law to mount a glorious show of art and costumes at the Souterrain Gallery in West Cornwall, CT.The fact that all three generations have shared a commonality of interest might be explained in part by heredity, in part by the notion that like attracts like, even after generations. Margaret Bevans, among other things, was the children’s editor as Simon & Schuster, and she helped put together the great illustrated children’s book Pat the Bunny. Her husband Tom designed books for Simon and Shuster. Together they also founded The Cornwall Chronicle, the monthly newspaper whose layout has hardly changed since its first issue in 1991. The Bevans daughter, the late Ann Bevans, also known as Pandy, designed in fabrics. Pandy graduated from New York City’s prestigious High School of Music and Art (today’s La Guardia High School), and her design skills are evident. She created quilts whose abstract patterns create the illusion of three dimensionality, or she might use her artistic license to design a simple house in fabric that is strictly two dimensional with a star looking down on the scenet hat seems about to leap into your arms. The Bevans’ granddaughter, Loren, or Lory, is a theatrical costumer. She cut her teeth in a costume shop that was tantamount to a garment-industry sweatshop, but she learned her trade, and before you knew it she was on the road with “The Lion King” before the show had opened on Broadway, and she was still working on the show at the New Amsterdam Theater on opening night and long after.(One of her great concerns was whether the giraffe might topple during the grand processional down the aisles of the orchestra.) Today she teaches costume design at St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn, and some of her costumes for school plays are on display (the bows on two of the schoolgirls’ dresses are hardly your usual wimpy, little-girl bows).Sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall are scenes she’s costumed for various shows, including Nervous Splendor, Let’s Play Too, and Ophelia, and scattered about are fabrics and patterns and the tools of her trade, including a sewing machine or two. On the table with one of the sewing machines is a collection of sewing machine feet, which in layman’s terms are attachments “under which you put the fabric when you sew it,” as Lory describes them, and they all have different functions. You will find hemming feet that create different sized hems, and a buttonhole foot, and an embroidery foot, and so on, along with pins and pin cushions and scissors that are so large that Charles Atlas would struggle with them. Daughter-in-law Nan Bevans, who is married to the Bevans’ youngest son, John, studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts in Boston, and she doesn’t like to relegate herself to the usual media such as canvas and paper.She uses them, but Nan enjoys playing with totally unexpected media as well, such as a piece of bowed wood that was originally a barrel stave, or a tin lid, or even house painters’ paint brushes that have been cleaned of their original residual paint and are now adorned by painted faces. You’ll also find portraits of a surprised deer, and crows cawing, and a dog panting from the heat, and a porcupine that is hardly pining away. You’ll find a contemporary portrait called “Covid Expressions,” and a timeless one called Roger, a gentle soul who was the mechanic who saved Nan and John’s car from the junk heap on a trip to Maine, and all of these in all manner of shapes including the usual squares and rectangles as well as ovals and circles and soft-edged right angles, and on and fascinating on. And Jane Bevans, widow of John’s older brother Bradford and mother of Lory, is another graduate of New York City’s High School of Music and Art, which is where she and Bradford, a fellow student there, met. After college but before law school, she studied at the Art Students League, with work in her early style that might be described as “post-Renaissance” or “neo-Impressionist,” styles that she is still experimenting with. Her work is in oils and acrylics and even Sumi ink, an art form that requires brushwork that goes from the intensest black to grays that are so pale as to be barely perceptible. Her work can be many layered, such as her mixed media “Hydranga,” or it can be just a few strokes of a brush. It can be molto serio or whimsical, even witty, such as a few of her chickens that are scratching around an imaginary barnyard. Glorious, all. The show will be on view until September 30. Open Thursday – Saturday 11-5 , Sunday 11-4 , and by appointment |
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Saturday November 30. 1-3 pm
Robert Adzema Water colors , Cornwall Covered Bridge & Barns Artist Reception at the Souterrain Gallery Robert Adzema is a painter and a sculptor who was born in and educated in the United States. He currently resides in West Cornwall, Connecticut. He first studied watercolor painting with John Pappas at Dumont High School. He received his Bachelor of Industrial Design from Pratt Institute and his Masters of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Indiana University. In 1978, Mr. Adzema co-authored with Mablen Jones “The Great Sundial Cutout Book“, both a teaching guide to sundial science and a practical guide for making one’s own accurate sundial models. Since that time he has made sundials an essential part of this sculptural work. He has created sundials and other sculpture for public plazas, schools, libraries, museums, memorials and gardens both public and private in the US and Europe. In 2001, he was awarded the Sawyer Dialing Prize from the North American Sundial Society. Mr. Adzema is a professional plein-air landscape watercolor painter. He feels that the freedom and immediacy of the watercolor medium is a perfect balance to the exactness and mathematical geometry of sundials. He has had numerous one person shows of his sundials and his watercolors. Adzema’s work is in the public collections of The City of New York, The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, The New York City Board of Education, the State of Connecticut and Rockland County in New York as well as numerous private collections. www.robertadzema.com |