Artists of Zea Mays
June 28 - July 27, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 28, 6 - 9 p.m.wünderarts, in association with Zea Mays Printmaking of Florence, MA, presents Artists of Zea Mays. The show, a survey of sixteen artists in the Zea Mays Flat File Project, opens with a reception from 6-9 p.m. on Saturday, June 28 and runs through July 27.
“We are very excited to work with Zea Mays Printmaking and their terrific member artists,” said wünderarts’ co-director Nora Maroulis. “Printmaking is a wonderfully varied medium and provides both new and experienced collectors with an affordable art buying option.”
The show features the work of Meredith Broberg, Victoria Burge, Liz Chalfin, Stephanie Cramer, Nancy Van Deren, Nancy Diessner, Joan Dix Blair, Anita S. Hunt, Louise Kohrman, Lillianna Pereira, Lynn Peterfreund, Susan Link Silverman, Joyce Silverstone, Claudia Sperry, Margaret Jean Taylor, and Diane Worth. Prints in the exhibition range from $70 – $900.
About Zea Mays Printmaking and the Flat File Project:
Zea Mays is a studio, workshop, educational facility and research center dedicated to new approaches in printmaking. Zea Mays honor the rich tradition of printmaking by exploring alternatives that are safe for artists and the environment.
Zea Mays is committed to bringing printmaking into the 21st century through research, education and collaboration and welcome all who want to share in this wonderful journey.
ZMP’s Flat File Project is a curated selection of work by Zea Mays members available to a larger audience of artists, curators and collectors. The drawers contain up to 10 prints by each of the 30 artists represented. For more information, please visit www.zeamaysprintmaking.com.
Meditation
Chris Page and Ali Moshiri
May 10 - June 15, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 10, 6 - 9 p.m.wünderarts is pleased to announce MEDITATION, an exhibition of the work of local artists Chris Page and Ali Moshiri. The exhibition features the artists’ meditative explorations of the natural and imagined worlds around them.
Chris Page
Born in Madrid to ex-pat, bohemian parents and raised in Boston by his maternal grandparents, Chris Page began seriously pursuing art after his graduation from high school and conversion to the Bahá’í faith in the early 1970s. Following studies in Colorado, and back in Boston at Northeastern, and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Page relocated to the Five College Area with his wife, Sarah. At UMass Amherst, Page studied painting with James Hendricks. However, he credits his primary training as a painter to a close association with Michael Phillips, now a professor of fine art at the College of South Carolina in Charlestown.
Page’s travels have had a strong influence on his work. In 1995, Page traveled to the northern part of Baffin Island landing in Pond Inlet, 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Influenced by the colors and profound openness of the Artic, Page’s painting became very focused on merging abstraction and landscape. Page has started to work from memory and knowledge of stream flow pattern in his most recent work, influenced and inspired by the power and intimacy of prayer and meditation experienced during a 2004 Bahá’í pilgrimage to Haifa, Israel.
His work has been exhibited since the 70s at venues such as the Herter Gallery at UMass, APE, and Haddad Lascano. Page and his wife Sarah live in Belchertown.
Ali Moshiri
Born in Iran, Ali Moshiri was educated in England and the US, returning to his native country for medical school. A young and untrained, but passionate, artist, Moshiri’s sketchbook was a constant companion in his spare time. After his residency in Cincinnati, Ohio, Moshiri worked at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts where he met his mentor, Leo Garel, who had been the artist in residence and a pioneer in art psychotherapy. After a period of painting on his own, Moshiri sought guidance and instruction from Garel, developing a relationship that lasted until Garel’s death in 1999.
Moshiri’s work is based on observations from nature, but primarily landscape. His work over the past 15 years, while still based on these observations, has veered toward abstraction, though he does not see it as such. “The ultimate result is that of the paint and the painted surface, in an attempt to capture its own nature without any hints or references to anything external to the painting,” says Moshiri about his work. “I feel music is the highest art form that stands on its own elements and capabilities. I strive to achieve that in painting. Within this framework I do not see my work as abstractions. They are what they are.”
Ali Moshiri has shown at the former Fauve Gallery in Amherst, Image Gallery in Stockbridge, and was represented by Ute Stebich Gallery in Lenox from 1991 until its closure in 2002. His paintings were in the set of Before and After, starring Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson. Moshiri and his family live in Amherst.
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Inside Looking Out
New Work by the Youth Action Coalition
May 1-4, 2008
Opening Reception: Amherst Art Walk Thursday, May 1, 5-8 pmYouth Action Coalition, in association with wünderarts and the Amherst Art Walk, is pleased to announce Inside Looking Out, an exhibition of new works by Youth Action Coalition members.
“We are very excited to work with Youth Action Coalition,” says Tony Maroulis, director of wünderarts. “Inside Looking Out allows to us to honor the artistic expression of the participating YAC members while simultaneously expanding their knowledge and understanding of what’s involved in mounting a gallery exhibition.”
Youth Action Coalition (YAC) is a community-based organization promoting youth empowerment through creative expression and social action projects. Made up of four distinct groups with complementary missions –GirlsEyeView Amherst, GirlsEyeView Ware, Get Up Get Down and Video Vanguards - YAC pairs intensive arts immersion with social justice education, working with youth to foster their natural talents as artists and build on their strengths as community leaders and agents of change.
The original art by YAC members covers a wide array of personal and universal topics. Among the themes in this exhibition:
- GirlsEyeView Ware members present photographs of what the world looks like – from the inside out, reflecting upon how feelings can be seen and represented in our surroundings.
- Amherst GirlsEyeView photographers will exhibit work based on their personal lives, intimate spaces and self-image.
- Through mask making, Get Up Get Down asks viewers to explore identity in different forms, with members creating work that represents them through different lenses – how they are seen by others and how they would want to be seen.
- Migration, homelessness, gender expression and interracial identity are just some of the issues that members of the Video Vanguards fall session explored in their video “Living in the Grey,” a title that refers to the borders and barriers that exist in today’s society and the hybrid identities in within which we all live.
Stacey Lennard, Executive Director of Youth Action Coalition comments, “The work by these artists is an extraordinary outpouring of their intimate entanglements with identity, self expression and personal politics. It is so inspiring to work among such articulate and thought-provoking young people. Prepare to be moved, in so many ways.”
Youth Action Coalition (YAC) is a non-profit organization based in Amherst and works with youth in Amherst, Ware and the surrounding communities. YAC promotes youth empowerment through progressive arts and social change initiatives.
GirlsEyeView empowers young women through photography, creative writing, leadership development, and community engagement. All of these activities raise self-esteem, build life-long skills and empower young women to tackle issues that are vital to their lives, and therefore to our communities.
Get Up Get Down supports youth activism through public art. Its core is a diverse group of 10-15 high school-aged youth, representing Amherst and its surrounding towns. Through public art projects the group aims to mobilize the broader community and provoke dialogue and consideration of the important issues that young people face.
Video Vanguards offers youth of color and their allies a space to understand their unique life situations and develop the language and skills necessary to articulate their concerns through socially conscious video making and community organizing.
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SPRING: Work by Sean Greene and Sloan Tomlinson
March 15- April 27, 2008
Opening Reception: March 15, 6-9 pmwünderarts is pleased to announce the opening of SPRING, an exhibition that is an explosion of sensual color and expression.
Thirty-five-year-old Sean Greene’s Calligraph paintings are rooted in the study of color with intervals calibrated to provoke the fleeting sensations of light animating a space. He develops form to support this intention, creating bands of color that become paths tracing motion: brush and arm and body or those leading the eye through a space and around a surface. The bands are Arabesque or graffiti-like, illegible but loaded with expressions of balance or instability, variation of speed, entanglement, congestion or comfort, fluidity or angularity. As Greene explains: “In this realm of color space and form, I am developing and exploring a language as well as a reality, that is perhaps, a parallel to my own.”
Sean Greene earned an MFA from UMass-Amherst and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. He has been awarded grants from the Northampton and Somerville arts councils and has had solo shows at APE Gallery in Northampton in 2004 and 2006. He exhibits regularly in shows in the Northeast and his work is included in the Neiman Marcus corporate collection as well as numerous private collections in the US and United Kingdom.
Sloan Tomlinson’s Lux Insum series is a rich exposition of color using organic forms as its subject matter and transforming them with breathtaking results. Seeing his work as an alternate method of viewing rather than photography, Tomlinson seeks to create a world beyond that we view in our everyday life, hoping to touch on the unusual and unique in what is normally recognizable. Using color as a tool of transformation, his work intends to pull the viewer into the image with a mixture of confusion and awe. Tomlinson’s technique is central to his presentation, as his photos are not altered digitally, but instead by damaging the film upon which they are captured through exposure to harsh extremes of temperature and chemicals.
Sloan Tomlinson has studied in the photography programs of both Michigan State University and UMass-Amherst. He has been featured in a number of group exhibitions both locally and in the Midwest.
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TRACES: Work by Taiga Ermansons and Chandra Meesig
January 25 - March 2, 2008
Opening Reception: January 25, 6-9 pmTRACES features the work of artists Taiga Ermansons of Northampton and Chandra Meesig of Granby. The exhibition features the artists’ distinct but complementary explorations of presence and possibility.
By means of commonplace methods and materials such as tape, Kleenex tissue, and scrap wood, Taiga Ermansons’ art uses marks as signs of presence. Her work is exact, without illusion or fuss.
A native New Yorker, Taiga Ermansons moved to Massachusetts in 1998. She studied art at the School of Visual Arts and The New School in New York City and holds a BA in studio art from Smith College. Her installation work has been shown at Open Square, Holyoke, MA, and the Oresmann Gallery at Smith College. Her drawings have been included in New York/New England/New Talent at Hampden Gallery, UMass-Amherst, Spencertown Academy Arts Center, NY, and the upcoming 2008 New England/New Talent exhibition at the Fitchburg Museum of Art.
Chandra J. Meesig is a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology, and received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2005. For four years, Meesig has been photographing the backs of photographs, scanning them into a computer, and making digital C-prints that reveal deterioration and human markings that result from the corrosive effects of time, handling, and storage. While the fronts once depicted people, places, or occasions of importance, the back is now the front of the photo, and the vehicle of specificity is denied. Meesig herself explains: “As the inherently indexical nature of the photograph becomes hungry for meaning, the connection between a past relationship with a person, place, and time is severed. As a result, present and future associations are full of possibility.” Meesig’s work with the backs of photographs is about the viewer observing what he/she sees, thinks, and feels when faced with the essence of an image and an absence of clear reference.
She has shown her work at a number of venues throughout the U.S. and has exhibited internationally in Lithuania, Greece, Poland, and India. She was an Honorable Mention recipient of the Pilsner Urquell International Photography Awards Competition 2006 Photographer of the Year Award._______________________________________________
small
20 artists x 2 square feet
December 1, 2007 - January 6, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday, December 1, 6 - 8 p.m.wünderarts presents its first group show featuring 20 artists working within the parameters of 2 square feet. The show seeks to prove that bigger is not always better (and that smaller is often much more affordable).
All exhibited work is priced at $500 or less - perfect for the new collector or for a holiday gift.
The show features the work of Susannah Auferoth, Mark Bodah, Dean Brown, Gene Butera, Liz Chalfin, Taiga Ermansons, Stephanie Geralimatos, Laurie Goddard, Raphy Griswold, Louise Kohrman, Louise Laplante, Jim Lumley, Chandra Meesig, Hilary Milens, Ali Moshiri, Derek Noble, Ali Osborn, Chris Page, Nuala Sawyer, and Sloan Tomlinson.
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Nicholas Hondrogen
Nicholas Hondrogen: Mumonkan Series 1996-1998
October 6 – November 25, 2007
wünderarts is pleased to present Nicholas Hondrogen: Mumonkan Series 1996-1998. The exhibition of 21 works is being shown for the first time and has been organized in association with the Nicholas Hondrogen Trust.
Nicholas Hondrogen (1952-2007) was a prolific painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. A part of the art-star generation of 1980s New York, Hondrogen had more in common and spirit with the Minimalists and Conceptualists of decades prior. The artist began his career in Paris in the early 1970s following an accelerated course of study at the Boston Museum School. Achieving almost immediate recognition in Europe, Hondrogen enjoyed numerous solo exhibitions and was collected by both individuals and notable public institutions. He returned to the U.S. in the early 1980s, settling in New York City where he founded a successful design and construction business and refocused his art toward filmmaking. Hondrogen’s award-winning 1997 film, Perfect Moment, created after his move to Los Angeles, documents the life-defining recollections of a wide-range of individuals both famous (Philip Glass, Vincent Gallo, Norman Lear) and unknown. Hondrogen was the recipient of two Pollack-Krasner grants in 2000 and 2005.
The series is based on the Zen concepts of Mumonkan or the “gateless gate.” Beginning in 1996 and continuing through 2000, Hondrogen painted over one hundred works on translucent mylar, hoping to photograph each painting and then enlarge them on Duratrans to the same size of the originals. These images were to then be displayed on lightboxes. The paintings were to be destroyed with the reproductions serving as the “original.” However, the work was never destroyed and reproduced as planned. In the spirit of the artist’s original intent, a reproduction of the painting “Negotiating/Desperation” will be presented in this manner. The corresponding original will also be on view.
The Nicholas Hondrogen Trust was formed in February 2007 at the time of the artist’s death. Hondrogen’s long time patron and supporter Jeff Vespa was chosen to chair the estate, with the artist’s brother John acting as a trustee. Mumonkan Series marks the Trust’s inaugural show. In conjunction with the show, the Trust will publish a 46-page color catalog.
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InsideOut
Inaugural Exhibition
Dean Brown and Derek Noble
August 4, 2007 - September 21, 2007For its inaugural exhibition, wünderarts is proud to present the first local gallery show for Amherst residents Dean Brown and Derek Noble: InsideOut.
Dean Brown
Dean Brown's exploration of the emotional and physical aspects of home, relocation, and family is the basis of the 15 drawings that make up his House series. After 20 years in Brooklyn, Brown, his wife, their 2 children, and an assortment of pets moved to Amherst. The basic outline of his house served as the template for his work.
Upon completion of the House series, struck by the raw and simple beauty of the silhouettes of newly barren trees behind his home, Brown began to photograph them on his walks. The photos helped him construct a new series of Tree Drawings, striking in his precision in rendering the natural form, and yet with an echo of abstraction. With the advent of spring, Brown has ventured into drawing trees with leaves.
Derek Noble
A practicing architect, Derek Noble uses formal and conceptual elements to make space. In his practice, Noble manipulates space through the use of the human body and movement, site and context, form and materials, believing that architecture is only truly understood while physically interacting with a space. His paintings seek to experiment with that interaction on a more personal scale without the programmatic and utilitarian structures of design; the form and space in his work implies movement and focus or the the first interaction between the body and mind.
His work treads along a consistent landscape theme (Out) to a new internal cellular form (Inside). The inner and external universes are marked by a tension represented in layers of color and texture. His paintings are bold proclamations, under which is a guarded and complicated imagination. It is that dynamic relationship of harmony and contrast which engages the viewer, stirring memory and emotion.
