October 12 - December 31 2016

Susan Bernstein | Terry Boutelle | Karen Cappotto | Barbara Cohen | Barbara Hadden | Megan Hinton | Marsha Lieberman | Nancy Marks | Jeannie Motherwell | Judith Motzkin | Marian Roth | Barbara Solomon | Adele Travisano | Champa Vaid

Opening Reception: Friday, October 14, 6-9 pm.

Susan Bernstein

The Red Thread

“This piece is an exploration of, musing about, surmising on the theme of attachment. I made two forms equal in stature, standing on their own, a palpable red thread enduring even with movement. We all have deep associations on the meaning of ‘attachment’. I wanted to make a very distilled representation, paired down to essential elements. This way the viewer can experience the piece in the broadest possible way.

I am drawn to work that is spacious enough to make room for questions and paradox. The extricable connection of all things and yet the human persistent experience of separateness. The duality that makes attachment both unbreakable and fragile.

In our culture, words usually dominate the areas of intellect, emotional fluency, even spiritual questing. In connecting our hands to clay, there is the opportunity to bypass the mind and linear thinking. We can link to an ancient human craft that transcends time and space. This is the landscape I am most at home in, where touch is the primary language and knowledge and memory resides in the fingertips.”

Susan Bernstein's' work is all hand built, using coils of clay or slab to build up the piece. She is inspired by looking at books and films of potters around the world from South Africa, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Ghana, Mexico, India, Korea - watching their hands work the soft clay and recognizing a kinship in this common craft language.

She lives in Cambridge and Truro, MA, and is a resident artist in Studio 13 at Mudflat Pottery in Somerville.

Terry Boutelle

Groves

“The Forest represents for me the interior life. My work explores the contradictory feelings evoked by the image of the forest: mystery, expectation, danger, protection, terror, peacefulness, freedom, confinement. Color plays a part in creating the mood of the forest image. To emphasize the spatial depth that can draw one into such spaces, I work with layers of matte medium and acrylic paint, creating a palpable sense of depth and distance. Within a dark forest, a light source can draw the viewer in further, evoking a feeling of mystery and longing.”

Terry Boutelle is a Boston-based artist and teacher, recently completing an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design low residency program at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Exhibits include: “Counting Breaths” at the Koussevitzky Art Gallery at Berkshire Community College, “Remembrance” at Andover Newton Theological School, “A Forest in Mind” at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, and “Treescapes” at VCC Gallery at Bentley College.

Karen Cappotto

Grey Honey

Karen Cappotto is inspired by evidence of the handmade in a world where technology prevails. She is known for her distinct way of combining vintage materials. Her collage works are, in part, a meditation on the tension between the artisanal and earlier articulations of mass production. Using a palette comprised of vintage periodicals, maps, ledgers, and antique papers, she recalibrates and reframes the sites of a previous authorship into a newly imagined terrain. Karen studied at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown MA, Boston College, and Manchester College at Oxford University.

Cappotto’s work is in various museums and collections, and she has received multiple awards for her mixed media constructions. One of her collage pieces was awarded joint first prize in the 2010 International Picture Works Competition, the prize also including a national poster/postcard blitz worth over 25,000 euros. She has also been included in the Land and Sea Contemporary Artists, by Deborah Forman published Spring 2013. Cappotto exhibits regularly in Provincetown, Palm Beach, and Charlotte, NC. In 2015, she completed a six-week residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Cappotto’s paintings particularly came on the radar after winning the Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Grant for painting, and having two successful Museum shows.

Barbara Cohen

Displacement/Refuge

“Barbara is currently devoted to capturing personal and universal experiences caused by loss and daily survival. Repeated shapes of the square and circle hold fast in Barbara’s work: the form of a haven, a homeland, a structure, a container for displacement...camps destroyed by war or natural catastrophe. Rimless tires, random as weights above tin, pleated rooftops suggest protection.

Lives change in an instant, cloud-like containers holding the raining skies. These paintings as fleeting moments: strips of land fall, dust and devastation permeates as war blows, destroys and sweeps. The artist standing alone: seeking refuge, sorting, waiting, swimming, floating, and finally buoyant. Observing this new meadow, these new structures, its hazy frame a ceaseless cycle, destroyed down to the bone, hoisted and carried on her back.” – Susan Rand Brown

Barbara Cohen received a B.F.A. from Tufts University and the School of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with earlier studies in art history at Oxford University. Awarded grants include: The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Artists Foundation Mass Fellowship Program, Polaroid Artist Support Program, and Blanche E. Colman Award, as well as artist residencies from The Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Barbara has exhibited her paintings and sculpture in numerous galleries and museums across the country. She is the author of eight published books including, Venezia: Essenze, New York Love Affair, Dog in the Dunes, and Provincetown ‘East West’. She lives and works in New York and Provincetown.

Barbara Hadden

Mid-day/Midnight

"When a painting or a photograph works, I feel a wonder about where it came from, what has intervened to make it happen, as I do with leaf patterns or graffiti or cave paintings in France. Science and guesswork still can’t tell us who made the cave paintings or when. At the base of some of them are scratch marks, not made by human hands (perhaps by bears), which to me are the most interesting. Yes, this is a bison, and this is a human hand, but what are these scratches?

I’ve spent years in the darkroom making photographs and then in the studio making paintings, observing strict rules about keeping the two activities separate. Now I am combining the material and tools of paint with the figuration and tools of photography, and the ability of both media to evoke and abstract. I use tape, trowels, scrapers, rags, and brushes, and also overhead and slide projectors.

Most of the time it takes months to resolve an image and I don’t always know when it is right. Sometimes others have to tell me. The process mirrors how I live and make sense of life: I make mistakes, struggle with communication, get into trouble. Sometimes I feel that rightness, that wonder, as though a member of some other species made that scratch, left that trace."

Barbara Hadden is a visual artist who explores the intersections of film, photography, and painting. Her work has appeared in two exhibits this year, one at the Hampton Gallery at UMass Amherst, and the other at the Oxbow Gallery in Northampton, MA. In 2012 her films were featured in the 25th New York Queer Experimental Film Festival. Hadden studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which awarded her an Alumni Traveling Fellowship for her work in photography. Hadden was a finalist in the Regional Fellowships for Visual Arts, awarded through the New England Foundation for the Arts.

Megan Hinton

Free Trap

“My paintings begin with observation--looking at the landscapes, objects and figures I see on a daily basis in my North Atlantic coastal surroundings. Nautical structure, geography, and wildlife serve as jumping points for exploring abstraction. Paintings emerge as a midland between reality and imagination.

My process is intuitive and non-mechanical. I favor spontaneous mark making without planned consequence. For me the process of panting is as important as subject. Consequently, process becomes subject. I investigate harmonic color relationships-how colors interact on the surface; I am less concerned with how colors appear in reality.

The painters who have most intrigued and influenced me demonstrate versatility in approach and subject matter. Pierre Bonnard, Nicolas DeStaël, Biala, Philip Guston, Frank Auerbach, Susan Rothenberg, and Amy Sillman are examples. I enjoy looking, photographing, drawing, painting, reworking, and reimagining a painted image. My training, ongoing study, daily practice, and subconscious inform the alchemy that becomes my work.”

Megan Hinton has been exhibiting her work in New England and beyond for over fifteen years. Hinton holds degrees from Ohio Wesleyan University, The School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and New York University. Hinton has been awarded artist residencies from The Women’s Studio Workshop, The Vermont Studio Center, Nantucket Island School of Design, and Les Amis de la Grande Vigne in Brittany, France. She has been the recipient of three local Massachusetts Cultural Council grants for recent exhibitions in Wellfleet, Massachusetts at Preservation Hall and The Harbor Stage Company. Her paintings are included in the permanent collections of The Cape Cod Museum of Art, The Provincetown Art Association and Museum, and The Artists Association of Nantucket. Megan is a published art writer, art educator, and avid traveler. She lives in Wellfleet, MA.

Marsha Lieberman

Sand Paintings

"Sand Paintings are a large series of paintings and mixed media works.

My subject is at once specific and vast, and aims to capture particular atmospheres. The point of view is that of a place remembered, and as in memory, distinctions between elements are blurry. More than pictures of known places they are pictures of changing conditions.

Making an ephemeral atmosphere the subject of the work allows me to express an experience of transience and impermanence."

Marsha Lieberman studied both painting and dance as a child and returned to visual media after a nearly three decade-long career as a dancer. That career left her with a lasting interest in pattern and in the structure of space.

Her work has been exhibited and reviewed in regional and national juried shows, galleries in Western New England, France, and Turkey. She is currently represented by Gallery 37 in Milford, DE, and AMP Gallery in Provincetown.

Nancy Marks

Chalk Lines

“As a painter and mixed media artist with extensive background in printmaking, my current work explores two different narratives unified by my art-making techniques. “Urban Abstraction” represents a body of work that explores the city, steeped in its aesthetic and social paradoxes. I am drawn by the complex contradictions of the urban environment. How does constructed space separate or bring people together? What makes community and what tears it apart? This interest in the power of place can be traced back to my New York roots.

“Dialogue and Interpretation” grows out of my connections with nature and with my abstract emotional world. This work uses similar art-making approaches as my other work but is different in objective, process and vision. It represents my enduring respect for the human spirit, as it engages in the profound and complex process of healing.“

Nancy Marks has been a Boston-based printmaker and painter for over 25 years. In addition to solo exhibitions at Tufts University and Fitchburg State University, her work has been displayed in galleries, corporate settings and civic venues. She is currently on the Steering Committee of the Jamaica Plain Artist Association, as well as teaches art for those engaged in creative aging. As an artist with a background in public health, she is uses art to support personal healing and community dialogue on death and grief. This focus is embodied in her project: “The Intimacy of Memory Initiative: The Art of Loss, Love and Remembrance.”

Jeannie Motherwell

Sanctioned Spaces

“In my work, I continue to be amazed with the images and mysteries of creations — like the oceans and skies in changing weather, Hubble-type images of the universe, and my own physicality during the painting process. It is the space that I seek to capture and the three-dimensional energy that defines it. This requires the eye moving off the edges of my canvas while bouncing back through its surface. My pictures explore a complex space which yields marvelous surprises that carry me in directions I cannot anticipate. It is like a dance with a creative partner gently leading me into moves I have not yet experienced.”

Jeannie Motherwell, born and raised in New York City, inherited a love of painting from her father, Robert Motherwell, and stepmother, Helen Frankenthaler, two pillars of mid-century abstraction. She studied painting at Bard College and the Art Students League in New York. Continuing with her art after college, she became active in arts education at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT, until relocating to Cambridge, MA, where she worked at Boston University for the graduate program in Arts Administration from 2002 to 2015. Her work has been featured in such publications as Hamptons Cottages and Gardens, Avenue, Home & Design, Provincetown Arts Magazine, and Provincetown Magazine and is in public and private collections throughout the US and abroad.

Jeannie's studio is in Somerville, MA. She is represented by Lynne Scalo in Greenwich, CT. This is her first exhibition at AMP Gallery.

Judith Motzkin

Weight, Gather, Sort

“I repurpose, create, and combine in a search for affinities among objects that together come to speak of something more. I experiment with geologic processes to tumble clay shards with sand and water. These small stone-like forms, inspired by those the sea turns up, led me to contrasting big flat clay stones that, when strung together, came to speak of weight. With found block and tackle we are able to experience that weight. Forms left from the production of one thing are gathered to find form together or are sorted in invented taxonomy. The installations are responses to the physical nature of these parts--the weight of the clay, the natural way a pile of arcs forms and falls, the way objects speak to each other.”

Judith Motzkin studied Asian Studies at Cornell University ’76, focused on Asian Art, History, and Chinese. It was there that she began working with clay while studying the history of ceramics in Asia. Influenced by travels to Mexico and China, while at Clay Dragon Studios (1977-1985), she began to experiment with smoke and fire on polished classical, sensual clay forms. She went on to establish her own studio in an old stable next to her Cambridge home. Over time, her work has expanded to include mixed media, assemblage, installations and photography.

Judy has had several solo shows and her work included in gallery and museum exhibits nationally and internationally. She was founding director of the original Cambridge Artists Open Studios (CAOS), one of the first neighborhood based open studios events, carrying on a tradition of inviting people into the working studio begun at Clay Dragon. She curated “Smooth and Smoky” (2009) an international exhibit of pit, smoke, and saggar fired ceramics at Vessels Gallery, Boston, and co-curated the exhibit “Legacy of Fire: Clay Dragon Studios Revisited” (2015) at Fuller Craft Museum. Her saggar fired work is in permanent collections including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Crocker Museum of Art, and Jingdezhen Ceramics Museum in China. She has taught at MIT, Harvard, and Castle Hill Center for the Arts, as well as other workshop venues.

Marian Roth

Time and the Town

"Time and the Town is the title of a wonderful book about Provincetown written in 1942 by Mary Heaton Vorse. I have always loved this title because it comes close to summarizing a body of work I’ve created here over the last thirty years. My visual work, be it camera obscura or painting or lithography, has centered on my fascination with time. It is the same with Provincetown: a continuous fascination with the feelings of village, community, and incredible beauty. Even though the town has changed much in the 34 years since I came here, its landscape and seascape and art seem to embody and hold the past. The present and the past are woven into the fabric of life here. Looking at my own work, I can see both a feeling of joy and a sense of quiet melancholy or yearning. Like Chagall (an inspiration for some of the work in this exhibit), I find the joy of life, and the mysteries of time in the spirit of my village.”

Marian Roth, well known for her camera obscura imagery, is also a painter and printmaker. She received a Pollock Krasner grant this year and a Guggenheim in 2000. She has been awarded grants by the Mass Cultural Council and C-Scape. This past spring Marian received a medal for lifetime achievement in the arts from the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Her work has appeared in Eric Renner’s classic “Pinhole Photography”, in various magazines and journals, and a folio of her work was highlighted in “Adventures with Pinhole and Home-Made Cameras” by John Evans. Marian has exhibited internationally and taught widely.

Barbara Solomon

Baskets

My baskets are a product of who I am. They are containers for my soul. The sculptures become a recorded history of my inner life. As containers they hold my secrets and my vulnerabilities, which I am often not able or willing to reveal to my conscious self or to others.

I see myself as an artist and sculptor communicating both a personal and universal message. It is not important that the viewer know or understanding the message. What is important is that others can relate to my work in their own way. Ultimately, it is vital that the viewer be able to have a quiet intimate dialogue with the pieces.

Barbara Solomon: "As a young child my mother took my twin sister and I for art lessons at the Wadsworth Atheneum Art Museum in Hartford, Connecticut. Her intention was for us to be able to successfully draw the microscopic images in biology class. From those beginnings my love for art continued, and inspired by my enthusiasm my parents sent me for private art instruction.

At Russell Sage College in Troy, New York, I chose to major in Fine Arts. Upon graduation I continued my study of painting and sculpture in the MFA program at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York. I was fortunate to study under the tutelage of two outstanding arts and educators, George McNeil and Calvin Albert.

After graduation, I acquired certification and completed the Master of Art Education at Hartford Art School of the University of Hartford, Hartford, Connecticut. I began teaching public school art in Glastonbury, Connecticut. With summers available I began traveling and studying all over the world. I focused most of the workshops classes on printmaking and fiber arts. Continuing my desire for artistic knowledge I then earned an EdD in Art Education from Teachers College of Columbia University, New York, New York.

Since the seventies my artistic focus has been creating sculptural baskets in the form of female figures and, as an adjunct professor, teaching printmaking at Manchester Community College, Manchester, Connecticut. I have pursued exhibition opportunities in juried and invitational shows and have had some gallery representation throughout the United States."

Adele Travisano

Sea Bricks

“A few years ago I discovered a deteriorating sea wall during low tide at the very end of Provincetown Bay. There were huge roundish chunks of brick and mortar, each looking like a marvelously strange giant waffle. I fell in love. I made a painting of one en plein air, but it didn't work. So I poked around and soon individual bricks called out to me as if asking to have their portraits done. Therein is the first interpretation of the sea brick paintings: portraits.

On another level, the bricks themselves are manifestations of time and natural forces coming together to mix with civilization. It takes time and tide to wear away these bricks, to deposit sea animal and plant life on them. The bricks themselves are products of civilization, but the sea, over time, has honed each one to its own individuality.

Lastly, there is an ontological meaning here which really hits home for me. We are all energy - all matter is energy. I am exhilarated by this understanding and at the same time uneasy about it too. And so I paint these bricks in order to state that they are here, as am I, whole, visible, with weight and mass, grounded to this earth.”

Adele Travisano received an MFA from Pratt Institute in 1968 after studying with George McNeil, who, in turn, was a student of Hans Hofmann. Therefore, she considers herself a direct descendant of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. Thus, of course, whatever else may come into play, her work is always about the paint, specifically about the paint bringing the artwork into being.

Over the past fifty years, among the many places Adele's artwork has been exhibited are: The Cherrystone Gallery, The Provincetown Art Association and Museum, and Acme Fine Art. Collections include Graham Gund, Jim Bennette, and David Cowen. Awards include Silvermine.

She has maintained studios in Manhattan's Soho, Vernon Street Studios in Somerville MA, and at Eddie and Frances Euler's studios in Provincetown. Currently her studio is in Medford MA in the summer kitchen of her family's 19th century farmhouse.

Champa Vaid

New York Series, excerpts

"I started writing poetry at the age of 60, at a time when most people stop. I could tell you that I started writing late because an Indian woman of my generation with kids raised them until they were done with their studies, and had no time. That is a convenient explanation. But the fact is that creativity has its own clock. It does not see age, or being overworked, or not getting enough time to be with oneself. When it comes, it comes.

Thus I came to painting very late in life, at the age of 76. The reason was, ironically, my declining health. I could not think or write, so I started drawing on paper. In our family, nobody was a painter. But I had the urge to create, so I took to colors and paper, and then to canvas. Though I had no formal training, I spent a lifetime seeing art and artists. My husband is also a writer and our passions have always involved art, music, literature, dance and the world of ideas. Our closest friends are poets, writers, artists, dancers and playwrights. I think that context of friendships, exhibitions, museums, readings, concerts and support informs my work.

Today, I am still painting, I breathe through them, continuing to produce a lot of work. There is something that pushes me through to keep going regardless of age. I call it a dialogue with myself. First, it was with words, and now, it is with colors. Colors are my best friends. I talk to them in their language before they become one with me during the time I am working. They remain with me in my dreams also. And I want to share my enthusiasm and the language of colors with others. Whenever I get waves of energy, I immediately transfer them to my painting. The choice of the colors becomes automatic. They surprise me in the end. I do not want to say much about my own work except that it gives me a reason to live and happiness."

Champa Vaid is an abstract painter and poet who lives and works in Texas. Born in 1930 in India, she started painting in 2006, at the age of 76. Her bold and confident acrylic based paintings are characterized by energetic strokes, experimental style, and a unique blend of color, texture and emotion. Vaid’s paintings were featured in three group shows held in New Delhi in 2007. She has had four solo exhibitions in India, two in Delhi at India International Centre and Ekatra 2008; one at the Alliance Francais in Bhopal 2009, one at Indore sponsored by Sanskriti Prashad, also in 2009. The AMP Gallery exhibition was her first solo show in the United States in July 2012. Champa has since exhibited her work at AMP each year since.

Champa Vaid is the author of five books, including four collections of poetry in Hindi and one collection in English titled, “The Music of Bones” (New Delhi: Vani Prakashan 2011). Educated in India (M.A. in Hindi from Panjab University) and the U.S. (M.Ed. from Boston University), she is a mother and grandmother, and married to the Hindi writer Krishna Baldev Vaid.

A LIVE GALLERY SPACE