Events & Exhibits

Total Eclipse
Works of Shungo Shimizu
Bridging Art & Ability

Opening Reception for all Mar. 10, 4-6 P.M.

TOTAL ECLIPSE, March 10th thru April 1, 2001
2nd Floor main Gallery

An exhibition of paintings by Naoki Iwakawa, Rodney Dickson, Debbie Davies, and Gail Mitchell
This is a group of "Tactile" artists who have related techniques such as tossing paint, pigment, dirt & ash, glass, string & wire, cutting through the canvas, etc. The large canvases evoke the primitive power of the archeological artifact, the meaning of which has to be deciphered.

Naoki Iwakawa is famous in Williamsburg Brooklyn for operating the CAVE Gallery. He creates "happenings" in which he produces action paintings on the spot to live music, lashing canvas to tree branches, tossing paint, cutting, sometimes using fire and wax. It is an underground art scene which is rarely seen in Manhattan any more, which has opted for a sterile and indifferent type of art and presentation.
Rodney DicksonRodney Dickson has just returned from three months in Hanoi, Vietnam where he produced a new set of paintings. This body of work is an investigation into Vietnamese culture, and focuses on the stiring sense of spirituality in ancestor worship. He collaborated with Vietnamese writers, artists, actors, musicians, and composers in making the work. On his huge canvases he leaves the surfaces blackened as if seared, scorched tar, distressed, hacked at, savaged & ravaged, streaked over the red of roses and of blood.

Gail Mitchell uses fabric, sewn clothes, wax, paint, shellac, seeds, rubber, paper, wood, metal & wire on her canvases.

Debbie Davies' latest series of abstract paintings reflect her appreciation of color. The paint is spread & manipulated, one color overlaying another. Cross hatching is carved into the paint with crude instruments revealing colors beneath. Pastels are then smeared and blended into each other over the dried paint, giving depth & tactile quality.

All of these artists have shown extensively and are highly regarded career professionals.

MULTIMEDIA WORKS OF SHUNGO SHIMIZU
2nd Floor Small Gallery

"'I believe what I want to believe with no basis in reality. But when truth smacks me in face and it hurts.' Then she kept talking, 'feeling pain in the heart means not only emotionally but also physically. Heartaches is actual pain, and it really hurts.'"

"And now I am looking at my worn out shirt hanging from the wall, and thinking the relationship between me and the shirt, the aura of me in the shirt but based on Anonymity. And then suddenly, I am curiously drawn to the shirt. I sketch it and realize that i am trying to develop something invisible -- anonymity with no basis in reality beyond the shirt."

---The truth is always simple, yet invisible around us. The truth might be a dream thread that sews pain onto reality.

Shungo Shimizu

BRIDGING ART & ABILITY
An Exhibition of Artists with Disabilities

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes...but in having new eyes..." Marcel Proust

Artists: Minta Ali, Raynes E. Birkbeck, Dee Dee Brower, Gilbert Gonzalez, Issa Ibrahim, Edwin Lacend, Norman Messiah, John Ray, Thomas Schneider, Marlane Stokes-Gonzalez, Teriananda, Richard J. Treitner, Linda vi Vona, Bruce Volpone, Brom Wikstrom