UNFAMILIAR DESTINATIONS
Landscapes as Geographies of the Abstract
FEBRUARY 12 – MARCH 6, 2005
with "Traveling Landscapes," Kathleen Vance
The public is invited to an
opening reception with the artists,
Saturday, February 12, 4:00 to 7:00 pm.
Kevin Archer • Roxanne
Bohana • David Di Pasquale • Michael Flynn • Shelley
Haven • Seren Morey
Bill Nogosek • Jorge Posada • Leah Stuhltrager •
Marsha Trattner • Kathleen Vance • Dolores Wesnak • Marcia
Widenor
“ The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes, but in having new eyes . . . ”
--Marcel Proust
|
|
 David
DiPasquale |
Dolores
Wesnak, "Catskill
Memory" |
Shelley
Haven, "Belle
Creek IV"
Roxanne Bohana, "Slate Stone"All genuine art is the result of living experience
. . . and the art of landscape painting can be no exception to
the rule.
UNFAMILIAR
DESTINATIONS is an exhibition of artists in tune with the demands
of non-representational painting and sculpture. Through that creative
process these artists will explore nature as empathetic states
of mind, balancing chaos with beauty in an artistic space abandoned
to visual poetry: contemplative and ecstatic visions as embodiments
of meaningful sensations.
UNFAMILIAR DESTINATIONS recognizes Abstract Expressionism as the
touchstone of this exhibition, circumventing the traditional rules
of landscape art by emphasizing a detachment from the real, material
world, and examining the merits of the work as a spiritual, poetical
communication rather than a strictly imitative treatment of visible
nature. Directly affecting, informal, and emotional in character,
these works are reductive, street-wise, and painterly explorations
in the unfamiliar terrain of such issues as scale, color, surface,
and technical innovations of the creative vocabulary: distillation,
compression, and extraction. The artists of UNFAMILIAR DESTINATIONS
validate their personal voices against more conservative notions
of “what art is about,” through understanding that
the real subject of their work is in the rigor and focus of the
painting itself: an explicit presentation of a dynamic and highly
intuitive point of view in which physical nature and the human
spirit are united in a single expression of truth, rewarding the
mind as well as the eye.
James Pinney, Curator