2012

Estimated Distance
Seth Ellis

October 5 – December 15, 2012
Opening Reception October 5, 7-10 PM
Main Gallery

Estimated Distance is a exhibition of recent work exploring the relationship between narrative, space, and text. Installations and objects tease out the stories inherent in maps, horoscopes, personal narration, sound effects, and non vocal exclamations. How do written stories alter with physical experience? How does the medium generate and shape the stories that get told? The stories are fragmented narratives of urban history, and personal stories of confusion, loss, and potential happiness; the objects that tell them are sometimes oblique, sometimes direct. The exhibition as a whole is in part a transformation of the gallery into a playful narrative space, and in part an exploration of the difficulties and promise of real communication between each other.

My work largely addresses structure and narrative, and situational text. How does the medium change textual meaning? How do written stories alter with media? How does the media generate and shape the stories that get told? In prints, books, and screen-based projects, I explore the ways that fictional personal narrative meet and mingle with the context in which they are experienced. The final form of projects are often static, but they are generated using computer-based generative applications that I write for the purpose.

In these works, I have been strongly influenced by medieval allegory and the idea of instrumental language. Allegory and magical language are ways of structuring language in order not just to reflect, but to have a reciprocal effect on the world outside the artist; in this narrow sense, computer programming is the ultimate magical language. This idea has shaped both the structures I use, and the fictions I write for them.

Seth Ellis is a designer and artist; he teaches at the School of the Art and Design at the University of Michigan, and lives down the road in Ypsilanti, MI. His narrative, interactive work has been shown all over America and Europe, and at several points in the Atlantic Ocean. He likes maps, comic books, encyclopedias, and graph paper.



Newark Scene and Heard: Narratives of an Artist’s Community
Curated by Bianca Monet

October 5 – December 15, 2012
Opening Reception October 5, 7-10 PM
New Media Room

Artists: Élan, leon anthony james, Bianca Monet, Shani Peters,  Nia I’man Smith

Newark Scene and Heard is a mixed-media exhibit curated by Bianca Monet that fuses together artist’s audio recordings with music, photography, video, and painting, to create a capstone of an artist community often forgotten. This intergenerational endeavor involves participation from emerging and established artists representing a myriad of personal truths. Audio recordings feature conversations with Eleta J. Caldwell, Kevin Darmanie, Gladys Barker Grauer, Steve Green, Mansa K. Mussa, Nettie Forné Thomas, Bisa W. Washington, and Noelle Lorraine Williams.  The project creates a tapestry of ideals illuminating Newark’s cultural, social economic and artistic histories.

Newark Scene and Heard: Narratives of an Artist’s Community serves as the first public display for the The Newark Black Artists (NBA) Oral History Project which is dedicated to collecting and preserving first-hand narratives of Black visual artists from and/or currently located in the City of Newark, New Jersey.  

Newark Black Artists Oral History Project needs your donations! –http://bit.ly/K4X8vx 




Sidewalk Alchemy
Steve Rossi

October 5 – December 15, 2012
Opening Reception October 5, 7-10 PM
Project Room

The Sidewalk Alchemy Project, which involves using photography to document random patterns created by chewing gum on heavily trafficked Newark sidewalks, re-examining familiar and overlooked relationships between social interactions and physical spaces. Gold leaf has been applied by hand, to each print, bringing attention to the less visible chewing gum remnants—memorializing these varied and complex examples of collective mark-making while raising questions about what has intrinsic worth and what is discarded, both materially and personally, in contemporary culture.

Steve Rossi’s work incorporates sculpture, installations, photography, and video while addressing issues and ideas related to American cultural identity and consumer identity, the hand-made verses the mass-produced, permanence verses ephemerality, and notions of community and shared experience in contemporary culture. He received his BFA from Pratt Institute in 2000 and his MFA from the State University of New York at New Paltz in 2006. Working as a welder and machinist in art casting foundries in the Hudson Valley he has been involved in the fabrication of work for artists including Richard Prince, Louise Bourgeois, and Tom Otterness among others. Currently he is a teaching artist in the New York City Public Schools as well as an adjunct professor at SUNY New Paltz; he grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and now lives in Beacon, New York.


What Persists (Lillian)
Lane Cooper

October 5 – December 15, 2012
Opening Reception October 5, 7-10 PM
Liminal Space

Lane Cooper will offer “readings” of gallery visitors at the opening reception.

That which resists erasure are the frail fragments of what is left to us once lived moments. We are immediately consigned to the ravages of imperfect memory, knit these fragments together in order to construct some understanding of what is real, what is meaningful.

This exhibition will deal with the residue of these frail fragments through layers of experience. Utilizing a variety of approaches including Painting, Video, Text, and Sound. Each approach employs a strategy of abstraction and fragmentation. The link between these works is an interest in a kind of metaphysics that does not deal with a theology but rather with the matter and conditions which underlie meaning and “truth”. I am interested in the substance of an experience and how we re-imagine that experience to give it meaning. I am exploring the exchange between the external and the internal; and the material and the immaterial.

Lane Cooper is an artist working through painting, sound, video, text and performance. Originally from the Northwest corner of Alabama, her work reflects her background in that it is a place where language is material and experience is primary. Blended into this is a deep interest in ideas of the trace and ghosts.

Her work has been presented in venues ranging from Birmingham, Alabama to Madrid, Spain. In 2009 she participated in a Residency at The Banff Centre located in Alberta, Canada and in the fall of 2010 she was an Artist-in-Residence at Gallery Aferro in Newark, New Jersey. Since the spring of 2001 she has taught fulltime at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Ms. Cooper currently serves as the Chair of the Painting program there.


Identity Blueprint in Angels and Tomboys
September 12, 2012-January 6, 2013
Opening Reception September 12
Newark Museum

Artists: Yasmine Bacon, Zhana Renee Caldwell, Imani Cortez, Eyanjem Etta-Ashu, Keyla Nunez, Britney Payton,
Nathalie Rodriguez, Hilda Saladin, Isabel Santos, Bryanca Wilson, Priscilla Zambrano

Teaching artists: Lisa Elmaleh, Ann LePore

Student artwork from Identity Blueprint 2012 will be on display in an ‘interpretive center’ within the Museum’s special exhibition, Angels and Tomboys: Girlhood in 19th-Century American Art. At the center, visitors to the exhibition will be able to view artwork by the contemporary counterparts of the exhibition’s 19th century subjects, and appreciate youth remixes of history and its relevance to young women’s life in Newark today.

In the Spring of 2012, Gallery Aferro partnered with the Newark Museum. Their program for young women, Identity Blueprint, was engaged to connect the creation of artwork with the Museum’s upcoming exhibition, which examines 19th-century depictions of girls in paintings,sculpture, prints and photographs. Featuring approximately 80 masterworks by John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Cecilia Beaux and William Merritt Chase, the exhibition will analyze the myriad ways that artists vigorously participated in the artistic and social construction of girlhood while also revealing the hopes and fears that adults had for their children.

Students worked with their teaching artists to create cyanotype prints and videos that are in ‘dialogue’ with select artworks. Many of the pieces they created reflect a contemporary view of female identity issues. The young women’s creative output was first exhibited at Gallery Aferro from May 5-June 1, 2012.

One of the earliest and most prolific cyanotypists was Anna Atkins, a pioneering British photographer active in the
1840-50’s. Students collaged their own imagery with elements from selected paintings, exploring issues connected with self-presentation and norms of beauty. Students learned from Curator Holly Connor how symbols were
used in 19th century artworks from Angels and Tomboys, and began to remix, interpret and react to selected artworks, using both cyanotypeand video processes. Students created experimental stop motion video based on their analysis of artworks. One of the most critical differences between then and now is that in 21st century Identity Blueprint young women act as not only subject but creator, with agency to control their own representation and create alternatives to how women are depicted in existing media, whether commercial or fine art.

Voting as a group, students selected paintings to deconstruct and remake for digital video capture using stop motion approaches, harkening back to film’s earliest origins with the 19th century invention of the mutoscope. Using contemporary software, students then edit their work into video works that constitute a dialogue across the
centuries.   

The paintings selected for remix include:
Abbott Handerson Thayer
Angel, 1887

Edward Lamson Henry
Kept In, 1889

Cecelia Beaux
Dorothea in the Woods, 1897

 


Peekskill Project V
September 2012-July 2013
Opening Weekend September 29-30, 2012
Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art


Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art (HVCCA) is pleased to announce Peekskill Project V: a citywide art festival devoted to bringing cutting edge contemporary art out of the museum and into the community. Using the city as a stage, Peekskill Project activates the urban environment and its inhabitants through site-specific art exhibitions, performances and screenings sited in multiple venues throughout Peekskill.

Artists associated with Gallery Aferro selected for inclusion are: Ben Altman, Katarina  Jerninic, Nadja Marcin,
Kai Vierstra, Anonda Bell, Katrina Bello, Marcy Chevali, Maria McMahon

Peekskill Project V is a departure from previous installments of the project, which were limited to a weekend of events and exhibitions. This year’s festival begins with an exciting opening weekend on September 29th & 30th, 2012. Related events will continue through the end of July 2013. Programming occurs on the second Sunday of each month, October 2012 – July 2013.

This year’s festival features a wide variety of painting, sculpture, photography, installation, video, film, sound, and performance art by over 75 emerging and established artists currently living and working in Peekskill, the Hudson Valley and the Greater New York City region. The Project calls upon artists to reinterpret the contemporary landscape and the urban and suburban condition. These works aim to deconstruct ideas of home, history and place in the context of the modern age of technology, information and mobility.

Artists’ installations, exhibitions, performances and screenings will be held in venues throughout the city, with HVCCA as the main hub of the project. Venues include parks, local businesses, former industrial spaces, vacant lots and storefronts.

Peekskill Project V artists were selected by a team of curators: Cristina Arnold, Paul Clay, Kari Conte, Kerry Cox, Evonne M. Davis, Marcy B. Freedman, Matthew Leonard, Cheryl McGinnis, Wilfredo Morel, Lise Prown, Alix Sloan, Livia Straus, Lilly Wei and Emma Wilcox.  


 The 4th Annual Benefit Art Auction and PartyJune 16, 2012 7-10 PM

Advance Tickets on sale now online/by mail**

Regular Tickets are $20 now or $25 at the door
*VIP* Tickets are $100 now or $150 at the door.
*VIP* Tickets include advanced preview and auction bidding options, free hand delivery within the tri-state area of artwork purchases over $200, and private tour of Gallery Aferro studio resident’s studios.

Gallery Aferro is delighted to announce that our 4th annual silent auction and unsilent party, with live jazz by William
Spaulding Quartet, will be held on June 16th. This festive event, quickly becoming a local tradition, features hundreds of artworks for bid, novel entertainments, yummy foodstuffs and strong signature cocktails as well as icy beer from Hunterdon Brewery.

All proceeds make possible Gallery Aferro’s year-round exhibitions, award-winning artist residencies, publications and expanding education program. More than 80 local, national and international artists have donated artworks and experiences, including a custom 140-character letterpress “tweet,” a USB drive of sound art from Finland, artist-led tours from Iron Maiden Artist Tours and other offerings impossible to classify but sure to thrill. 

Gallery Aferro has exhibited over 500 local, national and international artists, granted workspace to more than 60 artists,
created 19 publications including a sound art CD and feminist art history handouts, collaborated with dozens of other community-based organizations, hosted and created talks, screenings and demonstrations for high schools, colleges, universities, professional and senior groups, created off-site exhibition opportunities for NJ artists and expand our education program connecting Newark’s young women with creative experiences and computer literacy. Work by Gallery Aferro students will be included in the Newark Museum’s major exhibition, “Angels and Tomboys: Girlhood in 19th Century American Art,” on view in September 2012.

Donating artists:

Alicia Ackerman
Josef Albers
Ben Altman
Ruby Amanze
Kenseth Armstead
Les Ayre
Raymond Bally
Anonda Bell
Katrina Bello
Gianluca Bianchino
Terry Boddie
Sam Bornstein
Justin Borucki
Nicole Helen Brunner
Maria Buyondo
Karlos Carcamo
Patricia Cazorla
Marcy Chevali
Lane Cooper
Christine DaCruz
Kevin Darmanie
Andrew Demirjian
Florine Demosthene
Dahlia Elsayed
Alyssa Fanning
Jerry Gant
Doron Gild
Tai Hwa Goh
Allan Gorman
Christopher Guerra
Malik Hardaway-Whitaker
Christine Heller
Daniel Patrick  Helmstetter
James Horner
Lisa Iglesias
Joe  Iurato
Darren Jones
Mona Kamal
Suzanne Kammin
Hiroshi Kumagai
Rob Lach
Valeri Larko
JC  Lenochan
Ann LePore
Laura Lou Levy

Nancy Mahl
Nadja Marcin
Karen Margolis
Anne McKeown
Maria Driscoll  McMahon
Bud  McNichol
Vikki Michalios
Geoffrey Owen Miller
Naomi Miller
Traci Molloy
Alex Morel
Kate  Okeson
Marshall Okin
Yoko Ono
Nell Painter
Meera Lee Patel
Sarah Nicole Phillips

Jon Rappleye
Ryan Roa
Angela Rossi
Steve Rossi
Seth Ruggles Hiler-Destino

Henry G. Sanchez
Liz Sales
Tania Sen
Lee Sherry
Abigail Simon
Laurinda Stockwell
Stan Sudol
Calla Thompson
Kai Vierstra
Christine Wagner
Joe Waks
Barbara Wallace
Emma Wilcox
Andrew Wilkinson
Bahar Yurukoglu
Polina Zaitseva

Sponsors:

Hell’s Kitchen Lounge
Hunterdon Brewery
Jerry’s Artist Outlet
Krug’s Tavern
Robert’s Pizzeria
Seton Hall University
Spanish Tavern
StepOn To Design LLC

*Please send checks to PO Box 5668 Newark NJ 07105 


Through You Into Action
Center for Contemporary Art
April 16 – June 9, 2012
Opening Reception April 21, 6-8 PM

Gallery Aferro
May 5 – June 1, 2012
Opening Reception May 5, 7-10 PM

Main Gallery

The Center for Contemporary Art and Gallery Aferro are excited to present Through You Into Action, a major multi-site exhibition and accompanying publication of the same name, commemorating the first 5 years of Gallery Aferro’s award-winning studio residency program. The publication will be available for sale on site at each venue starting April 16. The exhibitions, curated by gallery co-founders Evonne M. Davis and Emma Wilcox, present an expansive and highly diverse cross-section of contemporary art practice, encompassing sculpture, printmaking, painting, installation, video and performance by 30 alumni of the program, which takes place in Gallery Aferro’s 20,000 sq ft building.

Connecting Bedminster (Somerset County) and Newark (Essex County) and featuring site-specific installations, Through You Into Actionpresents the artistic vibrancy of the region, and the important role that workspace programs and art centers play in placemaking and the free exchange of ideas.

Exhibiting artists: Anonda Bell, Katrina Bello, Gianluca Bianchino, Patricia Cazorla, Marcy Chevali, Lane Cooper, Kevin Darmanie, Don Edler, Dahlia Elsayed, Nadja Frank, Jerry Gant, Tai Hwa Goh, Hiroshi Kumagai, Norene Leddy, Ann LePore, Caroline Mak,
Vikki Michalios, Margaret Murphy, Kathryn Okeson, Alison Owen, Peter Owen, Nell Painter, Ryan Roa, Steve Rossi, Irys Schenker, Ryan Schroeder, Jomar Statkun, Calla Thompson, Barbara Wallace, Ken Weathersby, Sara Wolfe

The residency program brings together 10-12 local, national and international artists each year to work on ambitious projects. Each artist receives 24/7 access to a large studio, career support, studio visits from curators, the opportunity to participate in public events such as artist talks and open studios, a culminating solo exhibition, inclusion in a publication and the chance to document their experiences on the studio blog. With an ever-expanding alumni network of almost 60 artists, there are ongoing opportunities for collaboration and fellowship.

Gallery Aferro and the Center for Contemporary Art are both creative hubs where art is not only shown but made. The exhibitions as well as the accompanying publication allow the public to learn much about process: how and why each piece was conceived, worked upon, and fully realized. The fully illustrated catalog, No. 19 in Gallery Aferro’s publication line of artist books, catalogs, essays and sound art CD’s, features writing from each artist illuminating their concepts as well as their experiences in the program.

Over the past five years, artists from NJ as well as nationwide have written about the program’s signature mix of convivial community and necessary solitude. Kate Okeson writes, “My time at Gallery Aferro afforded me physical and psychological space in which to lay out ideas – end to end – so as to see what kind of real estate my ideas had. I had the ability to be an observer of other artists’ processes, and by watching their progression; I was able to draw some conclusions about paths taken in the process of artmaking. I formulated a wider view of myself as an artmaker.” Now, we invite the public to formulate this wider view of artmaking!

The Center for Contemporary Art is a vital regional art center with a comprehensive studio art program, professional exhibition program and important community outreach component. The mission of The Center is to provide a vibrant, contemporary cultural center through arts education, exhibitions and community outreach that will inspire creativity and enhance people’s lives.


Impromptu Portrait of NewarkPatricia Cazorla
May 5 – June 1, 2012
Opening Reception May 5, 7-10 PM
Liminal Space


The inspiration for Impromptu Portrait of Newark was the amazing 19th and 20th Century architecture of Newark’s neighborhood. I approached the subject as portraiture in a variety of media. Focusing in drawing from large to small formats, I used hand-dye canvas and paper for surface; and oil paint, watercolor, charcoal, and ballpoint pen as a way of expression.

Patricia Cazorla is a visual artist working with performance, video, installation, painting, drawing and printmaking. Her work focuses on ideas of solitude, introspection and perception of details within the daily interactions in life. Cultures and migration are also recent themes incorporated into her work. Cazorla has participated in museums exhibitions such as El Museo del Barrio’s 4th Biennal / The (S) Files, New York, El Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan, El Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas and next year The Hammond Museum and Japenese Scroll Garden, Westchester. Her work has been included in national and international venues such as Gallery R31, Berlin; Fashion Center Space for Public Art, NY; Praxis International Art, NY; Esther Klein Art Gallery, Philadelphia; Williamsburg Art & Historical Center, Brooklyn; Long Beach Island Foundation for the Arts and Sciences, NJ and Galeria 39, Caracas – among others Cazorla’s work has been reviewed at NY Arts Magazine, Arte Al Dia, El Diario-La Prensa, El Nacional, El Universal, CNN Mexico, Daily News Special Issue and Art Nexus. She is a former artist-in-residence at Gallery Aferro, Newark, NJ. She studied at the Art Students League and Pratt Institute and was born in Lima, Perú and raised in Caracas, Venezuela.


Gravitations
Don Edler

May 5 – June 1, 2012
Opening Reception May 5, 7-10 PM
Project Room

Sculptor Don Edler will exhibit a series of works based on investigations of the American housing industry, deep space spectrograph imagery and art history. Don combines various commercial building materials (lumber, drywall, plastics), organic matter (lawn grass) and found objects(shipping pallets) to create sculptural objects and installation. This show combines new and old sculpture created over the past two years.

“What do we know about the universe, and how do we know it? Where did the universe come from, and where is it going? Did the universe have a beginning, and if so, what happened before then? What is the nature of time? Will it ever come to an end?”
-Stephen W. Hawking

“There is a playful futility in my work. Stemming from a long-standing interest in cosmology and structural systems, my work deals with trying to understand the architecture(s) of the universe. As an artist I investigate the structural systems that may never be known. I combine on-going research and exploration of contemporary physics with my own imaginations; creating works that exist outside of the strict confines of pure science. My work aims to encourage a personal understanding of the universe and relies on intuitions and imaginations where measurements and mathematics have failed.

As my practice moves forward I have become interested in an ever-growing range of themes and subject matter. Much of my work continues to be grounded on ideas I first developed while studying Physics and Cosmology but at the same time it continues to grow in exciting new directions. Recently my work has begun to focus on environmental politics and contextualizing growing forms within larger systems.”

Born in Bremen, Germany, Don Edler is a sculpture and installation artist who creates large-scale sculptures made of commercial construction materials, reclaimed lumber and organic matter. Inspired by physics and cosmology, Don emphasizes the importance of the imagination and poetics as he investigates issues such as the overall form of the universe, the contemporary housing industry and energy politics. Don lives and works in Brooklyn.


Identity Blueprint 2012
May 5 – June 1, 2012
Opening Reception May 5, 7-10 PM
Main Gallery

Artists: Yasmine Bacon, Zhana Renee Caldwell, Imani Cortez, Eyanjem Etta-Ashu, Keyla Nunez, Britney Payton,
Nathalie Rodriguez, Hilda Saladin, Isabel Santos, Bryanca Wilson, Priscilla Zambrano

Teaching artists: Lisa Elmaleh, Ann LePore

Students from high schools across Newark present cyanotypes and video created as part of the 2012 Identity Blueprint program.

Identity Blueprint is an 8 week arts program for young women in their sophomore, junior or senior year of high school in Newark, NJ. Each student learns how to create an original body of artwork using cyanotype photography (also called “blueprints” or “sunprints”) and digital video techniques.

The program is structured around artist taught Saturday workshops, studio visits, and field trips. Identity Blueprint culminates in a professional-level exhibition of student artwork at Gallery Aferro. A collaboratively edited blog will be created by students and their teaching artists and will function as a social-network styled, teenager-friendly point of access for the curricula, comments and ideas of the group, and will be available to participant alumni permanently for keeping in contact, developing mentorships, sharing resources and revisiting workshop skills.

Visits to artist’s studios and access to talks by female working artists stimulate excitement and combat disempowering feelings by providing visual and conceptual ideas to build off of in workshop time, and allowing opportunities for dialogue. The experience of full, dynamic participation in a professionally realized exhibition reinforces a sense of real possibility and momentum that can be fuel for nearly any subsequent endeavor.

The cumulative impact of the program is to: 1) enable each young women’s sense of a competent, expressive self that can be connected meaningfully to liberatory art movements of the last 50 years, 2) model a purposeful, supportive community of young women, and 3) offer examples of success to pattern from through access to working artists representing a diverse range of age, race, strategy, temperament and practice. 

Collaborators for the 2012 program are: The Newark Museum, the Montclair Art Museum, and Parsons, The New School. Use of the Digital Media Lab at the Montclair Art Museum made possible by the Iverson Fund.


Femlink
May 5 – June 1, 2012
Opening Reception May 5, 7-10 PM
Main Gallery 

The idea for FemLink, the “international video-collage,” was born between two artists, Véronique Sapin (France) and C.M. Judge (USA) in 2005. Their wish was to build a link throughout the world between women video artists and their work. Since 2006, they have curated 8 thematic video compilations featuring 149 artists from 64 countries, which have been screened across the globe. Each week, a new video compilation will be screened at Gallery Aferro:

The themes: 

Resistance/Preoccupation/Fragility/Male


 Sandra Stephens

Skin Hides
2×2 Collective: Ben Altman, Christine Heller, Maria Driscoll McMahon, Sandra Stephens
Main Gallery and New Media Room

March 10 – April 14, 2012
Opening Reception March 10, 7-10 PM

From nameless nudes to portraits of monarchs, the figure in art has served to codify power. So have art objects, splitting viewer from viewed. Our figures have agency. Our work empowers viewers as complicit participants, as centers of process and experience. We complicate and push against dichotomies and hierarchies: self/other, rural/urban, black/white, perpetrator/victim, family/stranger, performer/observer. We are four artists who met through NYFA’s MARK program. We quickly found common ground in our disparate uses of the figure at intersections of the social/political/personal.

Our collaboration will create environments, inside Gallery Aferro and spilling out of the white box – into the surrounding neighborhood and over the internet. The show will evolve as the viewer becomes art-maker.

Christine Heller of Cooperstown, NY is a painter and installation artist. Her anti-war installations, suspended shroud-like figures of cut, twisted, and knotted muslin and wire were shown at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, John Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY and Sanctuary for Independent Media, in Troy, NY.

Maria Driscoll McMahon of Lockwood, NY explores rural stereotypes in her small town with wearable sculpture – body-suits of aggressive burdock burrs – video, and drawings. Venues: Brooklyn, Berlin, Binghamton.

Sandra Stephens of Utica, NY uses videos and video installations to explore internal and external constructions of identity. Her work has been exhibited in various locations including Utica, NY, the Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY, Madrid, Barcelona and Berlin.


The Other Ken Weathersby
Project Room

March 10 – April 14, 2012
Opening Reception March 10, 7-10 PM

Ken Weathersby’s exhibition includes easel-sized, patterned abstract paintings, photographic works, and several wall-mounted boxes containing tiny, crafted objects resembling miniature paintings.

The works in the show shuffle the traditional given stuff of pictures and picture-making. The paintings are subtly pulled apart, or have pieces cut out and removed, or their painted faces refuse to be seen. The wall-mounted boxes may be mere models for groupings of larger works, or may be works in themselves. This intentional ambiguity extends to photographs included in the show, paired portraits, where false resemblance and mistaken identity might seriously undermine what a profile picture is supposed to do

Ken Weathersby’s paintings were seen in 2011 in Time Is the Diamond, at Some Walls in Oakland, California, and a 2010 solo exhibition, Perfect Mismatch, at Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn. Group shows that exhibited his works in 2011 took place at the art galleries of the University of Maryland, Kent State University, University of Delaware, University of Dayton, and the College of St. Elizabeth. His paintingswere shown in the National Academy of Art Museum’s 183rd Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of
Contemporary American Art in New York, and in the exhibition Continuing Color Abstraction at The Painting Center in New York. He is the recipient of a Mid-Atlantic Arts / New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Painting and a Gallery Aferro Studio Residency.

Weathersby received an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art and has lived in or near New York City since 1990.



Ann LePore
Mapping for Empathy (The Landscape is Deadly)
Liminal Space

March 10 – April 14, 2012
Opening Reception March 10, 7-10 PM

March 10 – April 14, 2012
Opening Reception March 10, 7-10 PM

Social activism, American history, and a love of technology and science collide in the exhibit Mapping For Empathy (The Landscape Is Deadly). I used to think that landscape images were innocuous, boring even, until I was 16 and had re- occurring nightmares about being trapped inside a Wyeth painting. Now during my research trips to historical societies, environmental research centers and even aboard the research vessel SeaWolf, I keep one eye on the landscape, looking for correlations between my findings and their immediate natural surroundings.

I have been conducting historical research for the past few years at WWII POW sites in New York and New Jersey. At these locations I have examined photographs, recorded statements, and diaries or other ephemera from the prisoners at these camps and from residents of the communities that these camps were in. One of the highlights of this research is a piece of historical fiction from author Natalie Kinsey-Warnock about a camp where the prisoners and the townspeople worked together to save a flock of Scarlet Tanagers from a spring ice storm.

There are often subtle indicators in our landscape which can be interpreted to reveal what divides or unifies us. In the series Due North, I reflect on my time as an artist in residence at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin home in Wisconsin. While there I found myself a part of two communities at odds with each other: the utopian Fellowship made of up Mr. Wright’s apprentices and their architecture school, and the nearby town of Spring Green, whose elders could still recall in great detail the unpaid debts and bad behavior Mr. Wright left in his wake. I couldn’t help but be influenced by this divide in the maps I created this past year which were made from interviews with Fellowship members and other videos I created during my stay.

With the Mapping Toxins series, a work in progress, I’m especially interested in how the landfills that are being closed impact the immediate surrounding area of the Meadowlands Environmental Center. In this project I use environmental data collected by MERI scientists and other researchers to create unusual maps. In some cases, the color keys or lack thereof obscure actual sensitive data,
which is still hinted at through the maps’ titles and color associations.

Ann LePore (b.1974) was raised in the garage under her father’s car and continued tinkering with analog video and kinetics in Western New York and later with computer- driven electronics and animation in New York City.

A New Leonardo artist (2003) and Geraldine R Dodge Foundation grant recipient, (2002) Ann has exhibited at events such as Digital Salon, the Free Biennial, and La Superette, in New York City and Internationally. She has completed residencies at Engine 27 Sound Space (2003), the Taliesin Artist Residency Program (2006, 2007) and was awarded a year-long studio residency at Gallery Aferro in Newark (2010-2011).

Recent projects include Metanoia, a three-story time-lapse projection of chrysalis hatching on the outside of the Museo de las Casas Reales in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Water Projector, an electronic device built project water on the outside of the Pequannock Gate in Newark, NJ, Expanding Animation, an exhibition of animation and interactive work curated for the Pascal Gallery at Ramapo College, and Due North, a large-scale projected video in partnership with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation at Taliesin in Wisconsin.

The images and installations she creates as a result of her tinkering are heavily influenced by her experiences not just as an artist, but as a member of several communities that are defined by the physical assertions and limitations of a very specific environment.

Ann received her BFA from Alfred University and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts. She is currently Assistant Professor of 3D Design and Animation at Ramapo College of New Jersey.