June 29 - July 11 2018

LARRY COLLINS | FRANK MULLANEY | FORREST WILLIAMS | RICK WRIGLEY

Opening Reception: Friday, June 29, 6-9 pm

Larry Collins

Poems of the Body and Soul

"Life drawing has been a regular practice for me since I was a teenager, and it is perhaps my purest form of self-expression. Each drawing is different and has its own surprises. The poet Walt Whitman sang of "the body electric,” and he ecstatically equated body and soul. Whitman declared that simply watching a body pass by is better than the best poem."

Larry Collins was born in Spokane, Washington, in 1945 and raised in Del City, Oklahoma. His artistic career began at age 17 when Dorothy Miller, former curator at MoMA in New York, selected one of his abstract paintings for an important regional exhibition at the Oklahoma Art Center. After receiving his BFA from the University of Oklahoma in 1967 he was drafted into the Army and sent to Vietnam. During the war he served as an infantryman and a combat illustrator.

Collins received his MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 1980. He has exhibited internationally, and his paintings, drawings, photographs, and artist's books are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, International Center of Photography, New York Public Library, Sheldon Museum of Art, Wadsworth Atheneum, Worcester Art Museum, PAAM, Amarillo Museum of Art, and others. He has collaborated on limited-edition books with poets Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Eileen Myles.

In 2010 he was honored with a career retrospective exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, "Larry R. Collins: Finding Light.” In 2017 the Amarillo Museum of Art presented a retrospective exhibition of his Vietnam War photography and paintings.

Frank Mullaney

Wallpaper Saints

"The “Saints” project was originally inspired by the holy prayer cards I collected during my Catholic youth. As an altar boy, I used them to pray against the dawning awareness of my homosexuality. Yet the sight of all the flesh and the homoeroticism of many of the religious images only exacerbated my confusion, causing me to careen from shame to lust and back again. I have worked to reject the self-shaming associations I had with these religious images while simultaneously acknowledging their erotic charge. With this series, I am photographing only gay and trans men and women, each seemingly lost in a moment of transcendence, possibly one of a spiritual nature, possibly one of self-acceptance. Perhaps it’s just a memory.

Each person is photographed in from of a unique background and by having the model avoid addressing the lens directly, it allows the viewer a passage into the portrait, without confrontation, and become, I have been told, a meditative moment unto itself."

Frank Mullaney was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1957 and moved to New York City in August of 1977, the same week Elvis Presley died and Son of Sam was apprehended.

Movies and photography shaped his early years and gave him a way to make sense of his world. He spent his weekends watching Hammer Studio horror films at the Capital Theater and picked up his first camera at nine years old, a Kodak 110 Instamatic. A year later he owned a Polaroid Swinger that he took with him everywhere.

In 2006 he began a formal education in photography at The International Center of Photography with Amy Arbus, Shauna Church, Billy Cunningham, Carol Dragon, Frank Franco, Per Gylfe, Bruce Katz and Barry Stone.

His work has been exhibited in New York City; Provincetown; Los Angeles; the California Museum of Photography in Riverside, CA; the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colorado; and numerous galleries in the Catskills.

He divides his time between Manhattan and Livingston Manor, NY.

Forrest Williams

Evening

"Painting is an intensely personal vision that comes from some inner core of yourself. It is intuitive and its meaning can be elusive, sometimes even to the painter. Each painting is like a piece of something that you spend a lifetime trying to figure out. It is a revelation of the unseen, the hidden.

My work is about relationships—and about separateness—but fundamentally the paintings are about the self. I'm interested in that place of tension between the containment and the expression of feeling, and in how to portray that visually.

The paintings depict individual men, but they aren't portraits. The men inhabit a particular place, but it isn't real. It's an ambiguous, interior territory, where things are and are not what they seem. The paintings are like stages upon which dramas play out—theatrical moments—and the men who inhabit them are the actors. The reality lies in the emotional core of this world, intensely felt but highly contained. My model Lorenzo called it "emotional purgatory." For me the paintings are often as much about what isn't seen as what is.

Although they're a group of anonymous men, they're at the same time self-portraits in their way. Perhaps these are worlds of their own making—worlds with outsides and edges and unknown terrains beyond, just out of reach. This is the region where desire and doubt, longing and reticence, intimacy and uncertainty coexist. It speaks of absence as much as presence."

Forrest Williams has shown his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the US and Canada. Current solo exhibitions include: 2017 “Ghosts”, 2016 “Lowlands” and 2014 “Arrival” AMP, Provincetown, MA; 2010 “Crossways” Marx & Zavattero, San Francisco, CA; 2007 “Porches” Heather Marx Gallery, San Francisco, CA; 2005 “Passage” Heather Marx Gallery, San Francisco, CA. Recent group exhibitions include: 2013-14 “Hello, Goodbye” Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco, CA; 2012 “Two Loves – Sex, Art, and the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name” Kymara Gallery, Biddeford, ME; 2012 “SEEN” Visual Aid Gallery, San Francisco, CA; 2012 “New York Academy of Art Sixth Annual Summer Exhibition” Flowers, New York, NY; 2011 “Sea Change” Marx & Zavattero, San Francisco, CA; 2011 “The Elegance of Refusal” Gensler, San Francisco, CA; 2009 “Seldom Seen” Leslie/Lohman Foundation; New York, NY; 2009 “Figuratively Speaking” Lyons Wier Gallery, New York, NY; 2008 “Color Key” The Painting Center, New York, NY.

Rick Wrigley

Sculptures No. 2 & 6

"After 25 years as an art-furniture-maker and over 10 years designing and building houses, I am now finding new inspiration as a sculptor. Prior to this career change, my creative process involved working within the tight constraints set by the function of the object or building I was designing. For instance, a successful design for a chair, a table, or especially a house, must meet a very particular set of functional criteria. In the case of a commission, the needs and desires of the client as well as the budget add further constraints.

For many years I enjoyed the challenge of solving aesthetic problems within these types of strict parameters. The work required a discipline I was comfortable with — a discipline that, with time, became automatic for me. But I now feel drawn to move beyond the functional limits inherent in architectural and furniture design. Exploring new aesthetic challenges as a sculptor has become my current focus.

Authenticity is far more important to me than the concerns of formal development. While I would not discourage intellectual reflection as part of the viewer’s experience with my work, I hope “thinking” is secondary to “feeling” and “sensing.” Toward the aim of evoking an emotional and sensory response in the viewer, I make intuitive choices regarding materials, the use of texture, color, and asymmetry. The archetypal spiral form often appears in my work, as does an irregular hand-drawn line.

I bring decades of experience as an art-furniture maker and designer to my practice as a sculptor. My work is informed by a concern for craftsmanship and an intimate knowledge of how to shape and manipulate my materials. As the craft of what I do is now second nature, I am free to watch for the visual surprises that often occur as a sculpture evolves from sketch to mock-up, to the actual making of the final work. It is in these discoveries that I find opportunities for an authentic artistic expression to emerge."

Rick Wrigley's work has evolved across disciplines: First as an Art Furniture-Maker, then as a designer and builder of houses, and currently as a sculptor.

His career began with an apprenticeship to a classically trained British cabinetmaker. He then received a B.F.A. from the School for American Craftsmen, R.I.T., Rochester, NY.

Recognized as an important figure in the Studio Furniture movement, Rick received a New England Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and participated in invitational exhibitions at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Montreal, and The Silvermine Gallery in New Canaan.

He won a Connecticut Commission on the Arts competition to design and make 44 large hearing room doors for the Legislative Office Building, Hartford. A pair of these doors was subsequently exhibited at the American Craft Museum, NYC.

Rick's work is in the permanent collection of the Renwick Gallery.

In addition to his studio practice, Rick has worked as an architectural designer/builder completing six houses in Provincetown MA.

His most current work is as a sculptor. His sculpture has been exhibited at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. He is represented by AMP Gallery in Provincetown where he shows regularly.

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