September 16 - October 11 2016

John Brattin | Linda Leslie Brown | James Montford | Dana Ellyn | Matt Sesow | Bebe Beard | Richard Fishman

Opening Reception: Friday, September 16, 6-9 pm.

John Brattin

Drawings for a Film

“All of my drawings are rooted in the idea of the storyboard, expanding this form so that individual works can stand alone, but cumulatively serve to build narratives, locations, and character studies. They are working drawings functioning as a script.

In my films, Victorian era gothic tales collide with disconcerting horror genre masterpieces. Miniature sculptures and tabletop models were utilized as imaginary settings in my previous work, whose stories were told via voiceover. In 1998, “The Season of Sadness” deployed a 3/4 scale set façade constructed in my studio on the Lower East side. More recent films have furthered this controlled spatial trajectory. “The Triumph of Night” (2006), and “Eros is Sick” (2008) both utilized an exhibition space to create a series of fragmented theatrical sets as well my foray into synch sound, thus allowing me to progressively expand my interest in artifice through more elaborate theatrical settings.”

John Brattin is a New York-based visual artist and filmmaker whose work elaborates haunting mental locations through a variety of mediums beginning primarily with drawings, which are then utilized as a basis for experimental film works. These settings present a departure from the ordinary world to a place existing mostly in darkness. Drawings are the basis of his uncanny dream worlds in which artifice and the unconscious seem to merge. Often, idyllic childlike settings seamlessly curdle into unsavory nightmares, evoking fear, disorientation, and ultimately loss. His current body of work, over 200 drawings, forms the basis of “A Year Unimportant,” an imagined experimental film.

Exhibitions include, “Untitled” Art fair 2012, Miami with Participant Inc; “Nobody gets to see the Wizard not nobody not no how”, 2010, Anna Kustera NY; “Technically Sweet”, 2008, Overgaden, Copenhagen, DK; “Half Forgotten”, 2007, Autoversion, NY; “The Triumph of Night”, 2006, Participant Inc., NY.

His work has been screened internationally, including “Melodrama”, Sara Meltzer NY; “Greatest Hits”, Wayward Canon, London, 2006; “Film Society”, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA, 2006; “The Fruit Farm Film Festival”, McMinnville, OR, 2002; “Promises, Promises”, Gallery Union Screen and Art, Vienna, Austria, 2001; “The American Century”, The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, 2000; “Warhol’s Grave”, Mecano Amsterdam, 1999.

Brattin was the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Artists Grant, 2006, and Harvestworks Artists in Residence, 2007 and the recipient of a film commission from The Danish Council of Arts, 2007.

Linda Leslie Brown

More Holes

“The sensing, sensitive imprint of (Linda L. Brown’s) fingers is everywhere evident, and in this digital era the primal language of human touch-warmth and caring-invites the viewer into the dialogue while offering recalcitrant opposition to a clinically scientific approach to the issues she investigates.” – Mary Bucci McCoy”

“My recent sculptural work engages the interdependent relationships between nature, objects and viewers’ creative perception. These pieces are intimate in scale, no larger than the size of your head, and they are emphatically hand made. My work is biased toward process: growth, change, and falling apart. I am immersed in the language of making, thoroughly engaged with tactile, phenomenological experience while creating work that merges the somatic and mental imaginations.

I am interested in materiality, and in what makes objects carry meaning. Archaeologist Tim Ingold’s work has been influential where he examines the fluxing, transformational nature of forms within their surrounding environments. Ingold points out that things appear to have agency because of the way they are “caught up in the currents of the lifeworld.” This quality of being always in relationship to mind and culture, and in transition both physically and metaphorically, is an important property of all my work.

These pieces explore a morphogenic vocabulary of layered masses, planes and openings. The forms are packed together, both additive and layered yet also porous and eroded. They are multicolored and crenellated like a coral reef. Materials are varied: I use metal, wood, plastic, metal, paper clay, plaster, pigments, glass, concrete, rubber, shell and stone. Simultaneously bold and vulnerable, these works are half created and half destroyed. Holes penetrate the surfaces. Many pieces are bored completely through, revealing a hollow center like a vessel. The yielding texture of the paper clay retains the traces of making and indicates a haptic language of emotion.

My works are rife with allusions to the body. At the same time, they suggest the plastic, provisional, and uncertain world of a new and transgenic nature, where corporeal and mechanical entities recombine. And because they are small, they invite viewers to an intimate examination that is both delightful and disturbing.

Revealing geologic strata, and appearing to have been retrieved after a long immersion in the earth or the ocean, my sculptures seem to be plastiglomerate relics of this damaged planets' Anthropocene era. There is a concern for relationship: between these discarded materials and their cultural or natural origins, between their literal and symbolic meanings, and in the way they stand for human presence in the environment. The prefiguration of catastrophe, or what the writer Marianne Templeton calls “future ruin,” seems to live within their celebratory gestures and colors, while breaks, cracking and abrasion on their surfaces belie the works’ insouciant attitude. Alternately funny, unsettling, obvious and obscure, my sculptures are made with force, joy and care.”

Linda Leslie Brown’s work incorporates a variety of practices, including sculpture, installation, painting and video/sound. Her work engages the interdependent relationships between nature, objects and human creative perception. Brown's recent multi-media sculptural works are rife with allusions to the body. At the same time, they suggest the plastic, provisional, and uncertain world of a new and transgenic nature, where corporeal and mechanical entities recombine.

Brown has exhibited her work regionally and nationally. Recent exhibitions include Popop Studios Gallery, Nassau Bahamas, Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham MA, AMP Gallery, Provincetown MA, Bannister Gallery, Rhode Island College, Providence RI and Vessels Gallery, Boston MA. She is the recipient of grants and fellowship residencies from The Artists’ Resource Trust of the Berkshire Taconic Foundation, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Travelling Fellowship, Suffolk University, St. Botolph Club Foundation, FPAC, Popop Studios International Artists’ Residency, Women’s Studio Center, Hambidge Center for the Arts, and I-Park among others. She is represented by Kingston Gallery, Boston, MA.

She is a Professor and the Program Director of Foundation Studies at NESAD Suffolk University in Boston MA.

James Montford

From the Planetarium of Black Indian Constellations

“I have developed a series of narrative text panels as part of an ongoing discourse with audience, a discourse that also utilizes painting, performance, video, installation and sculptural, ephemeral and archival materials. Text panels, which were printed in large scale and included in “James Montford: Persuasions 1990-2015”, have been reconfigured from earlier iterations commencing in the late 1990s, and are now part of the larger discussion related to my installation-based work entitled “The Planetarium of Black Indian Constellations”. In 2015, the narrative work was further animated by the use of an audio guide component.

This additional didactic imagery is intended to serve as a catalyst, offering a script or passageway for contemplation. The development of a mythology of “constellation,” in its broadest expression, is the foundation for the social narrative of my studio practice. The examination of microaggressions and their relationship to holocaust connects to Goya’s “Third of May”.

The work seeks at this juncture to continue its discourse of social engagement with aesthetic and formal juxtapositions in contrast to majority cultural models. Diaspora representations become the pyridine for the discourse.”

James Montford is a multi-media artist, whose work ranges from photography and collage to performance art. He works between his studios in Providence, RI and Boston, MA. For over thirty years, his career has allowed him to exhibit his work nationally, curate exhibitions and educate a variety of students crossing disciplines and media. Graduating with Honors in Fine Arts at Brandeis University, he was awarded the Rosland W. Levine Award for outstanding Achievement in Fine Arts and served on the Advisory Committee to the Dean of the College. He went on to receive his MA in Art and Education at Columbia University and MFA at the Hoffberger School of Painting, Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Montford’s numerous residencies include several Yaddo Residency Fellowships in Saratoga Springs, NY, the Art Matters Inc. NYC Individual Artist Fellowship and a VT Studio Residency Grant. He has pursued opportunities to study and work under great artists such as painter Robert Colescott, architect Paolo Soleri, painter Grace Hartigan and painter Joseph Stefanelli. Montford received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship and was twice awarded the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant to Support Independent Work. In 2005, Montford was appointed Director of the Edward M. Bannister Gallery at Rhode Island College, where he is a Professor in the Art Department, and curates thought-provoking exhibitions by both regional and national artists.

Dana Ellyn

Some Animals are More Equal Than Others

Dana Ellyn is a full-time painter living and working in Washington DC. She has been a vegetarian at heart since childhood, in practice since 2002 and a vegan since 2013. This evolution has had a tremendous influence on the paintings she creates. After a shy and quiet childhood and young adulthood, Ellyn has now found her voice and is making up for lost time. She creates hard-hitting paintings that have stories to tell and opinions to express. Her animal-themed paintings strike a chord, creatively posing the question: why do we love some animals and eat others?

Ellyn has exhibited extensively both in the US and internationally. In 2015-2016, she had solo exhibits in Washington DC, Provincetown MA, Rehoboth DE, Gold Coast Australia, and Barcelona Spain. Her most recent exhibitions, “Bycatch By Hand” at the P Street Gallerie in Georgetown, DC and Moda 360 in Los Angeles, were collaborations with fashion designer Tammam. The exhibitions focused on industry fusion in a sustainable and cruelty-free context.

Matt Sesow

Wild Things

“I have always enjoyed painting a variety of creatures and the way they interact with us humans. For my 2016 and fourth exhibit of paintings at AMP, I will be focusing on imagery and iconography as it relates to the theme of pets, imaginary creatures, and other wild things.”

Matt Sesow is a Washington, DC-based artist who began painting in 1994. Matt’s raw style of painting has gained a significant following. He currently has a solo exhibition of over 150 of his paintings at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, MD, which runs through June 2017.

In 2001, after establishing himself within the art community as a diverse and independent painter, Matt Sesow began pursuing his art full-time. With the ability to focus entirely on his painting, Sesow exhibited and traveled across the United States while also securing new collectors internationally, including significant exhibitions in Barcelona Spain, several cities and towns in France, Australia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and Bologna, Italy. In addition, Matt was honored by having one of his paintings made into a United Nations stamp. It was released in September 2013.