Tuesday-Thursday, Sunday: 2-10pm
Friday-Saturday: 2-11pm
Closed Mondays
Gallery Admission:
$3 Suggested Donation
Free for Members and Cinema Ticketholders
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Daxin Wu
Daxin Wu
"Currency Portraits"
Opens Thursday, June 19 at Creative Cocktail Hour Through July 13
"Currency Portraits," features close-up photographs of the faces of heads of state from around the world ‹ the United Kingdom, United States, Israel, Japan, India, and China ‹ as depicted on their national currency.
After Wu photographs these portraits, he enlarges them and suspends the photos in blocks of ice. Cracks and hazy shafts of bubbles take shape as the ice freezes, blurring and distorting the images that had originally been rendered with care and respect by the currency engravers.
Thus transformed, the once exacting portraits look wispy, almost ghostly, and thereby visually strip the leaders of the very power their presence on money is intended to convey.
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Sam McKinniss
"True Love"
ARTIST TALK AT 3PM
On view through Sunday, August 24
“True Love” is a series of portraits of the artist’s own friends, acquaintances and lovers.
“The name, ‘True Love,’ is sort of tongue-in-cheek,” McKinniss says. “Actually, I could have called this collection ‘Perfect Failure,’ because each painting is a record of a failed attempt at true love, a failed attempt at capturing a moving, changing subject.”
McKinniss, who lives in Hartford, attempts to create in the viewer an intense sense of desire for the person portrayed.
“In traditional portraiture, the artist gazes lovingly upon his subject,” he says. “In fact, there’s a sordid history of artists taking advantage of their subjects. Klimt, for example, had his subjects pose nude, and painted clothing on them later.”
“I flip that the other way,” he continues, “by requesting that the subject gaze at me as if seducing me.”
“I want viewers to experience this seduction, too,” McKinniss adds, “and to desire these paintings intensely. In that way, the viewer and I connect in our experience of the subject.”
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David Politzer
ARTIST TALK AT 3PM
On view through Sunday, August 24
Presented on flat screen monitors and suspended televisions, Politzer’s wry videos tackle subjects as diverse as the self-help industry and cowboys as an icon of American masculinity.
Hanging Baggage is a video sculpture that features two wooden cabinet style televisions that hang from the ceiling via a series of ropes, pulleys and cables. Politzer, performs two separate characters the two screens. One is a guilt-absolving self-help expert, the other a 20-something male who is racked with guilt.
“I find the self-help industry both fascinating and repulsive,” Politzer says. “On the one hand, there’s this sort of absurd idea that if you practice some awesome affirmation from a so-called expert, you can become a changed person overnight.”
“On the other hand,” he continues, “we all look for someone to help us find answers. Self-help is like a secularized form of religion.”
Inspired by John Ford’s classic westerns and Politzer’s current hometown of Roswell, NM, the single channel video, Rio Macho, is shot on location in Monument Valley and various other iconic sights (both sophisticated and kitsch) of the Great American West. Politzer carries a TV through the entire video. On the TV is a pre-recorded cowboy version of himself who engages “the real” Politzer in conversation about the virtues of being a cowboy.
“This video reconciles my own fascination with the iconography of cowboys as a universal symbol of the true American man,” Politzer says, “with the fact that I’m an East Coast guy who’ll never be able to attain that level of manliness.”
Also included in the exhibition are several photo-collages on paper. Here too Politzer is the subject and performer, experimenting with ideas for future sculptures and performances.)
Corinne Rae Beardsley
ARTIST TALK AT 3PM
On view through Sunday, August 24
Beardsley's ceramic and multimedia female nudes seem conscious of their nudity, and often appear to make sensuous ey contact with the viewer. Their dreamlike eyes offer tenderness, though, more than overt sexuality.
"Corinne's installations are vulnerable yet powerful," Kristina Newman-Scott says. "Herein lies their disconcertin beauty."
"These ladies have a daydream-like, romantic ideal," Beardsley says, "an exposing this in public makes them vulnerable, and makes the audience feel vulnerable as well."
Links coming soon
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Seated Figure with Yellow Flowers (detail). 2007, 20” x 14” framed (oval), watercolor and acrylic on paper
Go - an open call for emerging artists
A series of up to six solo exhibitions, open to emerging artists living in New York or New England.
Congratulations to this year's chosen artists:
Corinne Beardsley, Providence, Rhode Island
WonJung Choi, New York, New York
Gautam Kansara, Brooklyn, New York
Sam McKinniss, Hartford, Connecticut
David Politzer, Syracuse, New York
Ellen Shattuck, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts
Over 230 artists applied for the GO exhibitions series. Six artists were selected by jurors: Derrick Adams, (Curatorial Director, Rush Arts Gallery and Resource Center, NY); Jane Philbrick, (Artist, CT); Olu Oguibe, (Visual Artist, Writer, Scholar, Curator and Associate Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Connecticut, CT).
GO is made possible with the generous support of our Members, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alexander A. Goldfarb Memorial Trust, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
