September 8 - September 20 2017

SUSAN BEE | JOSEPH BONGIOVANNI | MARY DEANGELIS | KATRINA DEL MAR | ROSE DESMITH GREENMAN | MIMI GROSS | CJ MAZZALUPO | JADE MCGLEUGHLIN | DEB MELL | CHRISTOPHER TANNER

Opening Reception: Friday, September 8, 6-8 pm

Susan Bee

Dark Matter

Susan Bee has been a member of A.I.R. Gallery in New York for twenty years. This past Spring she had her eighth solo exhibition at A.I.R. Her solo show, “Monster Mitt: Paintings from the 1990s” was at the Lisa Cooley Gallery, NY, in 2016. Bee’s “Photograms and Altered Photos from the 1970s” were at Southfirst Gallery, Brooklyn, in 2015. Her solo show, “Paintings from the Early 1980s,” was at A.I.R. in 2014 and she had a solo painting show at Accola Griefen Gallery in NY in 2013.

Bee has also had solo shows at the University of Pennsylvania, Kenyon College, Columbia University, William Paterson College, the New York Public Library, and Virginia Lust Gallery, and her work has been included in numerous group shows. She has a BA from Barnard College and a MA in Art from Hunter College. Her artwork is in many public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Princeton University Library, Getty Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, Clark Art Institute, and Harvard University Library.

Bee has published sixteen artist’s books. She has collaborated with poets including: Johanna Drucker, Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, and Jerome Rothenberg. Bee is the coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artist's Writings, Theory, and Criticism, Duke University Press, 2000, and the coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online. Her artist’s book archive and the M/E/A/N/I/N/G Archive are at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Bee’s work has been reviewed in: Art in America, The New York Times, The New Yorker, ArtNews, The Brooklyn Rail, Artcritical, ArtSlant, The Forward, Huffington Post, Art Papers, and Hyperallergic. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts in 2014 and has had fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo.

Bee teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Brooklyn. This will be her first show at AMP Gallery in Provincetown.

Joseph Bongiovanni

Provincetown’s Beloved Library Cupola: Dis-assemblage in D Minor

“All of my work, through no intention of my own, seems to have a whimsical, enchanting, and magical feel to it. The fun comes from creating, but the real joy for me is seeing the finished piece and then watching someone view my work, feel the fun in it and begin to smile or laugh out loud.

I chose the second part of this title because it is interactively musical which you see in the video (but keep in mind there are other little surprises but I didn’t want to give it all away!), and I used “dis-assemblage” because there’s a chaos within its presentation, however there is also a divine order within as well...is it coming together or falling apart? I always want my whimsical pieces of art to have the sensibility of a broken children’s toy someone found in their grandmother’s attic, and this piece encapsulates this is spades. The cupola is dissected and when turned 180 degrees one sees the proscenium arch as in the theater and inside is an enchanting musical scene. At the heart of the scene is a real disco ball dripping in wax, nail polish and lipstick. The cupola itself is capped off with an elvish woman in an elegant red dress holding a crystal ball and having broken mirror pieces for wings. Antlers are construed from delicate tree branches.”

Joseph Bongiovanni was born and raised in Fairfield Country, Connecticut and graduated magna cum laude from Hunter College in Manhattan with a B.A. in English and a concentration in creative writing. He began coming to Provincetown in the mid-80s while in college to spend summers writing and expressing his creativity. After living in Manhattan for 20 years, he chose to move to Provincetown where he had lived year-round for almost 10 years.

Joseph’s work has been exhibited here in Provincetown over the last 10 years with his work being published in local publications. He has shown at TJ Walton Gallery, Spiritus, Outer Cape Auctions, and this year at AMP Gallery. Joseph is honored to have a work of his as part of the permanent collection at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. He has, over the years, garnered many local and international notable collectors that include local artists TJ Walton, John Dowd, the late Ray Nolan, the late David Jones, Terry Catalano and gallery owners Julie Heller, Jim Bakker, and Bill Jorgensen, as well as Rhoda Rossmoore and The White Horse Inn; with several collectors owning more than one piece of his work. He coined the phrase “assemblage vivante” which means assemblage as living art that depict scenes that tell stories and that come alive.

Mary Deangelis

Portraits

Mary Deangelis has been a clothing designer for over 26 years. Her paintings and drawings are delicate and intuitive, and have their own primitive organic language. Her focus on the small things, that may perhaps go unnoticed, is somehow always just enough. A drawing of a skirt on a hanger, or the portrait of a chair signals the possibility and breadth of a single life. In that vein, a rendering of a one house seems to convey the life of an entire community.

Katrina del Mar

Black Velvet, Paintings and Drawings

Katrina del Mar, known primarily as a photographer and filmmaker, returns to her roots as a visual artist with this show, making drawings on black paper and paintings on black velvet. In this playful conversation with negative space in a positive light; an exploration of extremes occurs. Keeping a foot planted firmly in pop culture and kitsch, in line with her gang girl B-Movie world and fantastic, intentionally half-realized pulp fiction paperbacks of 2013, the work utilizes a layering of media, in effect a echoic, distorted, amplified mirroring. These black paper drawings and black velvet paintings depict hard-femme selfies, parties in cars, women in heavy metal or punk t-shirts. An obsessive, participatory exploration into the potentiality of feminist expression. Citing the oft-repeated photographers complaint that “everybody is a photographer,” these works formulate a push against and answer to the instantaneously made and shared photos of the digital age. The implied mirror or screen, a disrupted transmissive surface for exploring known and newly discovered selves via queer selfie drawings and filmed portraits, challenge accepted norms of representation.

Katrina del Mar is a New York-based photographer, video artist, writer, and award- winning film director. Katrina del Mar is perhaps best known for her decades-long work in video and photography, chronicling the reality and illusion of her Lower East Side friends and lovers as punk heroines; or within her girl gang movie world of strictly female population. Creating a family tree indebted equally to B-movies and diaristic photography, del Mar’s defiantly queer photographs and videos are iconic alternatives to the cultural status quo, offering an exuberant, hyper-stylized sexuality, an unapologetic feminist voice, and often guerilla-style production tactics. Her solo exhibition GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS was presented in January 2013 at Participant Inc. in New York, and at AMP Gallery in Provincetown. Del Mar has shown her critically acclaimed “Girl Gang Trilogy” of films internationally, including venues such as the Museum for Contemporary Art (CAPC), Bordeaux, France, the Fringe Film Festival, London, UK, 2012; the MoMA Dome 2 in Rockaway Beach. Del Mar’s work has garnered numerous awards including a fellowship in video from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Rose deSmith Greenman

Garden Gates, Rose Bouquets, and Birds that Flew Away

"Rose deSmith Greenman was born in Boston in 1898, but she didn't begin creating art until after she retired in 1969. Orphaned at at a young age. deSmith Greenman was raised by her extended family and graduated from Boston's High School of Practical Arts, in 1916, where she displayed a natural aptitude for the arts. In 1927 she married Maurice Greenman, a pharmacist; they had one daughter, Betty. When her husband died suddenly in 1956, deSmith Greenman became a clerk in the Mass Division of Banking and Insurance wher she worked until her retirement.

In the mid 1970's deSmith Greenman was diagnosed with Altzheimer's Disease. From 1970 to 1977, while struggling with the disease, she produced a staggering number of drawings. Spending most hours alone, she drew obsessively. Working with pencils, pens, crayons, and markers, deSmith Greenman interpreted the world of her imagination. Other favorite subjects included vases of flowers, fruit bowls, and television sets broadcasting invented programs. Her images frequently involve transformations; a familiar table or paper weight will often reappear with a new identity.

Despite suffering from headaches, sleeplessness, disorientation and memory loss, deSmith Greenman's remarkable creative output continued to accelerate. Drawing consumed her life. She meticulously signed and dated almost every drawing, labeling many of the imaginative sketches or doodles. In 1977 Rose deSmith Greenman abruptly stoped creating art." - Betty Greenman Avruch, November 2004

Mimi Gross

Travel

“My work initiates with drawing, and for me drawing is an extension of my arm. I’m interested in what I see, surrounding atmospheres of everyday life, and the macroscopic worlds within. mixed mediums, mixed scales, all are of interest.”

Mimi Gross is a painter, set and costume designer for dance, teacher, and maker of interior and exterior installations. She has had several international exhibitions, including work at the Salander O’ Reilly Galleries, and the Ruth Siegel Gallery, New York City, the Inax Gallery, in Ginza, Tokyo, and Galerie Lara Vincey, in Paris. She has also shown work at the Municipal Art Society and at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York. Her anatomically-themed artwork is on permanent display, courtesy the New York City Parks Department, at the Robert Venable Park in East New York.

Her work is included in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, The Brooklyn Museum, the Jewish Museum, le Musee des Art Decoratifs in Paris, the Nagoya Museum of Art, the Onasch Collection in Berlin and the Lannon Foundation, as well as the Fukuoko Bank in Japan and New York’s Bellevue Hospital.

Recent and current exhibitions and lectures include: “Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965”, Grey Gallery, NYU, NYC, Jan-April 2017; Derek Eller Gallery, NYC, March-April, 2017; Brooklyn Museum, NY, “Macquette for Coney Island”(Stephen Powers, “Coney Island is Still Dreamland”); AMP Gallery, Provincetown, 2016/2017; Brattleboro Museum of Art, Brattleboro, Vermont, “After Old Masters”, Summer 2016, “Triumph of Pan, after Nicholas Poussin”; drawings in April 2016, “Brooklyn Rail”, Anne Waldman, visiting critic; lecture: “Evolving Collaborations”, “Sundays on Broadway” with Douglas Dunn, choreographer and dancer, May 22, 2016/ St. Mark’s Church, NYC, 2017; set for “Solos”, Douglas Dunn studio, May 31-June 5, 2016; teaching: Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY, Workshop with graduate theater students, April 2016; mural for University of Kentucky Medical School, summer 2016. Recent articles include: Art in America, February 2017; “Art Project “for College Art Association magazine, spring 2017.

Gross has been the recipient of countless awards and grants including from the New York State Council on the Arts, twice from the National Endowment for Visual Arts, the American Academy & Institute of Arts and Letters, and a “Bessie” for sets and costumes. She held the McMillan/Stewart Endowed Chair in Painting at the Maryland College of Art in 2010-2011, and has taught at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Penland School of Crafts, Syracuse University, SUNY Purchase, as well as other universities and educational institutions, giving workshops and advising students, as a visiting artist.

From 1960-1976 Gross collaborated with Red Grooms on many large, multidimensional installations, including the fabled “Ruckus Manhattan”. Since 1979, she has collaborated in a fruitful and on-going partnership with the dancer Douglas Dunn and his company, designing sets and costumes for his performances. She also collaborated with the poet Charles Bernstein. Her on-site drawings of the World Trade Center from 9/11 and after are included in the volume, “Some of These Daze”, published by Granary Books.

Mimi has been a summer resident of Provincetown since 1944. She showed at the Sun Gallery in Provincetown in the 1950’s, and has had solo exhibitions at The Provincetown Art Association & Museum, the David Brown Gallery, and at the Rising Tide Gallery.

www.mimigross.com

CJ Mazzalupo

The Theory of Everything

CJ Mazzalupo's work researches ancient civilizations, incorporates categorization and data collection, studies humanity's fixation on time and endings, honors influential humans and heroes, and employs various philosophical, psychological and political theories; all of which speak to humanity's (and her own) search for meaning.

With an attempt to create meaning, often through locating ourselves in our relationships and environments, CJ investigates the importance we place on everyday moments, even the banal. Ultimately, CJ's interest lies in rectifying our individual relationships with the unknown and finding comfort through connection. CJ's work hovers where the micro and the macro overlap and intersect.

CJ's pull to psychology, trauma studies, neurobiology, and Buddhist philosophy grew through her study and practice of clinical social work. These interests converge in her 2017 series entitled Thank You for Breaking My Heart. In this new body of work, CJ reflects on her personal experiences as well as those of her clients through these lenses. On the whole, the works report the challenges we face as beings striving to maintain autonomy and emotional stability while intimately connecting and disconnecting with others. CJ explores the overlaps of temporality, attachment theory, avoidance strategies, brain chemistry, loss, grief, and healing.

CJ Mazzalupo earned an MFA from New York University in 1998. Upon graduation, CJ had a solo exhibition (White Room) at White Columns Gallery in NYC. Her work was exhibited at Mixed Greens Gallery in New York City from 2000-2013. CJ has had over 5 solo exhibitions and taken part in numerous group shows in the U.S. and abroad. Publications include the New York Times, Zing Magazine, Art Actuel (France), Art21, Hyperallergic, Gothamist, and others. The Museum of Modern Art, the School of Visual Arts, and Massachusetts College of Art have all presented CJ's work. Collections include The Corel Corporation, General Electric World Headquarters, and The West Collection. CJ was the lead singer and played guitar in the NYC queercore band Triple Creme from 1998-2008. The band toured in the U.S and produced three full-length albums of original material, winning an OUTMusic award for recording of the year in 2005.

In 2008, CJ was diagnosed with Optic Neuropathy. Due to the possibility of complete vision loss, she embarked on a path that was less dependent on sight, but brought her closer to some of the subjects explored in her art. As her vision continued to decline, CJ earned a Masters in Clinical Social Work from Fordham University. Upon graduating, after 20 years in New York City, she relocated to Massachusetts to begin her new career. CJ stepped away from her artistic pursuits as she transitioned from being a fully sighted person to one with low vision, decreased visual acuity, and color vision loss. In time, newly learned visual accommodations have allowed CJ to return to her creative endeavors.

Jade McGleughlin

Something Over There, Inside of Us

“This body of work called “Something Over There, Inside of Us” represents the opposite of clear sight.

A few years ago, I began to paint for the first time. In my one and only drawing class, the teacher reminded me a box is made up of straight lines. Those are my straightest lines I quipped - even with a ruler. Representational oil painting seemed like a stretch. Yet something in my work as a psychoanalyst had prepared me. Not just long hours of observation of people, but being immersed in the heart of what makes us people; an experience of the enigmatic message of the other living in each of us.

What then is the enigmatic message? In the LaPlanchian sense, an enigmatic message is something installed in the infant’s body from the illegible trace of the sexual unconscious of the adult caretaker. The message inscribes itself in us and can never be represented and is always in-excess of our understanding. The very constituting of our subjectivity comes from the effort of translating that message. It is from that labor that interiority and unconscious fantasy are built. Yet, the idea of this message lodged in each of us alerts us to our inevitable nonsovereignty, the implantation of the other. And its presence is a breach in our continuity of being, suggesting a loss – the inevitable unknowableness of the other inside us. The enigmatic message in our bodies, some important aspects of our sensibility does not, cannot yield. Something runs through us. In other words, we can’t and don’t make sense to ourselves, yet the elsewhere inside of us is a potent force that drives our momentum.

In 2015, I began a group of portraits of models in class, family members and people I had seen in the New York Times. Now, looking at them, I see unconsciously I have created in each portrait something of the enigmatic I find in treatment. The faces are bold, but in each person, unbeknownst to me, often one eye is glancing forward in focus and the other glancing just slightly to the side, suggesting both the enigmatic in me, and the subjects’ struggle to translate something of the enigmatic lodged inside of them. Bold faces do not give rise to vivid clear portraits but hold the tension of something unconscious, unknowable, seeking translation but never translatable.”

Jade McGleughlin is a psychoanalyst and painter. Her work with the visual began in her use of certain artists’ work both in her psychoanalytic sessions and papers that help captured states of mind not easily represented in words or psychoanalytic writing. Her papers include works by photographer Francesca Woodman, painter Marlene Dumas and painter Agnes Martin to narrate states of liminality, racism and alienation and the non-sovereignty of both analyst and patient.

Becoming a maker of oil portraits came more recently with attempts to play with the dialectical of bold portraiture and relationship to the enigmatic.

Deb Mell

Mounds

“My work has always been about process. I’ve always enjoyed the process almost as much as the creation itself. Finding the physical aspects of the constructionare as important as the creative ones. For the last couple of years,I have been telling stories through my art, stories,that were passed on to me by my Grandfather.He used to say we were both natural collectors and builders. I wanted to make these stories as vivid for my children as they were for me at my Grandfathers side. In my art making today, I follow this philosophy of creating anything out of anything found using other people’s cast offs to make something new.”“My work has always been about process. I’ve always enjoyed the process almost as much as the creation itself. Finding the physical aspects of the constructionare as important as the creative ones. For the last couple of years,I have been telling stories through my art, stories,that were passed on to me by my Grandfather.He used to say we were both natural collectors and builders. I wanted to make these stories as vivid for my children as they were for me at my Grandfathers side. In my art making today, I follow this philosophy of creating anything out of anything found using other people’s cast offs to make something new.”

Deb Mell attended the Brooklyn Museum Art School, Brooklyn, NY – Max Beckmann Memorial Scholar: Illinois State University, Bloomington/Normal, IL BS in Art, one Scholarship, magna cum laude; and Atlier Garrigues, Garrigues France Printmaking Workshop. She has been the recipient of numerous awards,, residencies, and has exhibited her work in solo and group shows both nationally and internationally.

Christopher Tanner

A Flower is a Lovesome Thing

“I get my inspiration from many places — light and sparkle, longing, The Golden Age of Hollywood, films, glamour, gay history, burlesque history, war, and seduction are all very close to me. I love to find the beauty in the grotesque, the light in the dark, order in chaos, and to share that experience with my audience. I enjoy having a constant dialog with my art, both physically and mentally. When passing in front of one of my glitter pieces, the light continues to move and change bringing new vitality to the work while also keeping my environment alive.

Collecting materials that are precious and have a sense of historical context is very exciting for me. I encourage my audience, and myself to make a journey of discovery with the work I create. I am always looking to uncover secrets from the past, present and future. I find I am most successful when I am truly relaxed, working with no agenda, and in the zone. It’s then that the magic comes.”

Christopher Tanner attended the San Francisco Academy of Art, and graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in 1978. In 2008 he was Artist in Residence at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY. Over the years he has had numerous solo national exhibitions, recently including: 2015, “Eye of the Heart”, La MaMa Galleria, NYC; 2013, “Treasure”, Smart Clothes Gallery, NYC; 2010, “The Queen of Hell & the Horn of Plenty”, Pavel Zoubok Gallery, NYC; 2008, “Give Me the Cobra Jewel”, Atrium Gallery, St. Louis, MO; “Off the Yellow Brick Cliff: Paintings, Drawings & Collages”, Carl Solway Gallery, Cincinnati, OH; 2007, “How High the Moon”, Pavel Zoubok Gallery, NYC; 2005, “Ravaged by Romance”, Pavel Zoubok Gallery, NYC; 2004, “Christopher Tanner”, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, CO. He has also participated in many group shows both nationally and internationally.

As a performing artist Tanner has worked with Cyndi Lauper, Penny Arcade, Everett Quinton, Bloolips, Mabou Mines, The Wooster Group, David Lynch, Karen Finley, and The New Stage Theatre Company.

“Christopher Tanner—also a set designer, actor and downtown cabaret singer in drag—that old modernist dictum “less is more” has rarely carried much weight. Rather, his motivating mantra has long been “more is more.” Over the years, Tanner’s aesthetic outlook and art-making efforts have focused on the value of meticulous craftsmanship, the meaning and nature of glamour, and an unabashed celebration of beauty. More recently, the artist has said, he’s become interested in “succulence, abundance, bounty and the life force that flows through nature and the human body.” Best known for spectacular, mixed-medium “paintings”—luxurious, canvas-mounted assemblages of such humble materials as big shiny sequins, colored sand, shells, stones and fabric scraps—Tanner is also a capable draftsman who routinely draws from live models, and sinuous lines derived from his drawings often make their way into his compositions in other mediums. Lately, Tanner has taken a break from his brightly colored, thickly encrusted paintings, experimenting instead with more pointedly three-dimensional, wall-mounted and freestanding sculptures.” — Edward M. Gómez, Art in America