August 10 - August 22 2018

CINDY SHERMAN BISHOP | KAREN CAPPOTTO | ZAMMY MIGDAL | MARC VAN CAUWENBERGH

Opening Reception: Friday, August 10, 6-9 pm

Cindy Sherman Bishop

Garden of Digital Delights

As children, we imitate what we experience to comprehend the world. As adults, our comprehension and mirroring of the world grows more sophisticated, yet often is still a limited understanding of physical phenomena. For example, trees are fascinating conduits of sunlight, oxygen, and nutrients, and provide inspiration for human created communication channels, especially those of a digital nature. The term ‘branching,’ an everyday term in algorithms, is a clear example as is the term ’root node.’ In fact the roots of trees and the surrounding fungus, aka mycellium, intersect together in arguably the first ‘neural net.’ However, Tim Ingold would argue that without inherent flexibility and growth, our re-creations are but hollow fossils, shallow imitations of the rich and fascinating world around us. Hence, our digital creations and conveyances are usually limited to that which the author was capable of imagining. This means they are by nature brittle and static where they should be dynamic and flexible. William Kentridge laments, "that we, as human creators, start out with a blank canvas yet always end up creating the same ‘coffee pot.’"

Garden of Digital Delights is a garden of human construction, suspended in cyberspace, forever unable to root. Branches are hollow and segmented for convenient re-assemblage and threading. Yielded fruits are tools of mediation and must be used to create rather than directly by hand. Electronic transmissions mimics conveyance of nutrients, yet nothing may grow from such transmissions, they may only light the way.

Cindy Sherman Bishop is an innovative multimedia artist and creative coder. She has created interactive installations for galleries and museums, as well as software for enterprise applications, but is sometimes happier just making good old fashioned tangible art. Hence, she often looks for ways to pull the nuances of analog creation into the digital world and vice versa. With her fellowship at the MIT Open Doc lab, she has authored several tools for storytelling in webVR, the primary being VRDoodler, a web-based 3D drawing program that renders in virtual and augmented reality. She is currently on board at the MIT Civic Media Lab on the Media Cloud team, building the next generation of web-based tools for journalists, researchers and media-makers.

Karen Cappotto

Summer Dreams

Karen Cappotto is inspired by evidence of the handmade in a world where technology prevails and is known for her distinct palette and combination of medium.

Cappotto’s work is in PAAM’s Permanent collection and she has received multiple awards and prizes for her mixed media constructions. In 2011, her company Peg+Dick was launched when Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams asked her to produce their decoupage accessories. Her work has been seen in Elle Decor, The Washington Post, Provincetown Arts, and This Old House.

Cappotto is a founding member of the non-profit group Provincetown Commons, dedicated to developing a sustainable creative economy in the place that continues to inspire her work.

Cappotto is represented by AMP Gallery.

Zammy Migdal

Levitation

“My series “Levitation” had its origin in my interest in suspending objects against gravity. Levitation, from the Latin levitas or lightness, is the process by which an object is suspended in space. The illusion of levitation is created by the relationship among metal foregrounds, attaching pins, spaces, light and shadows. The work is inspired by colors, experiences and imagination, as much as by the spaces and the meaning of places for which they were created.

My work can be characterized by continuity and discontinuity: the continuity is reflected in the repeating qualities of the forms while the discontinuity reflects the variability shaped by my momentary experience. No two elements are ever the same. Slowly the ingredients, metal and movement, pins and paint, imagination, lights and shadows, come together to create a splash of color that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

I express myself in metal, mostly steel and aluminum. For my twisted metal elements, I place one end of the metal in a vise while sliding the other end through a slit in the lower end of a “T” shaped primitive instrument that I built. I achieve the form of each element by using the power of my full body on the upper arms of the “T”, pushing and pulling against the inner strength of the metal. Mostly my strength overcomes the inner tension of the metal. Occasionally the strength of the metal wins in this game of arm wrestling, creating the unexpected ripples of the element that speak to the quality of the medium.

Often my patterns are soft, contrasting the hardness of the metals; pleasing and agreeable to the senses they soothe their surroundings. This softness raises doubt about the hardness of the metal. Organic finishes, while exposing the true nature of the metal, create delicate silk-like ribbons. A recent piece, Order out of Chaos, was largely defined by the nature of the work of a national logistics company that receives containers of a product such as soap or cereal, and distributes them across the world to match orders. On the other hand, my piece Zandrian, was inspired by the play of colors of the work of Mondrian and responded only to my whim. The Cosmo Wave represents the playful stream of humanity that meets at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas to enjoy the elegant thrill of uncertainty and possibilities. The Wave is comprised of 380 unique elements; each unique and different like the people who are transported daily between gambling and conventioning. Like life, The Cosmo Wave, undulates to the rhythm of our breath.”

Creating in three dimensions is a challenge that always interested Zammy. Working with raw metal, he brings life and motion to the new and recycled metal. His work does not intend to express a vision of the world, nor specific concepts. Rather they represent images that form in his imagination, which he wants to share with others. Forms connect to each other in space or in their relationship in space. Elements and their finished texture are manipulated to reflect the inner world of fertile and vital imagination.

Zammy Migdal's work is found in private collections throughout the world and Art in Public places. He has had several gallery and museum exhibitions, including at the Armory Art Centerand at the Galerie Bernd A. Lausberg - Düsseldorf.

Marc Van Cauwenbergh

Beyond the Shore

Van Cauwenbergh’s works are resolutely abstract, and much of their success lies therein. These paintings work as pure paintings, which do not require references to the world outside of the picture -say to landscape, or to the body- in order to succeed. These paintings work because of the sureness of hand with which the medium is wiped onto the support, while leaving just the right amount of space for accidents to occur, the sureness of taste in the juxtaposition of colors and tones, and the artist’s expert editing skills. For Van Cauwenbergh knows when to stop, and he knows what works to eliminate from his oeuvre -for not all of these process-oriented paintings can achieve the right balance between tension and the sense of release, or relaxation.

(Fragment from essay “Veils of Paint”, Michaël Amy, Ph.D, 2015)

Marc Van Cauwenbergh was born in Ninove, Belgium and lives and works in New York since 1994. He studied printmaking at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts Sint-Lucas in Ghent and holds an MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY while on a Fulbright-Hays grant.

He has exhibited internationally since 1984 and his work is in private, public and corporate collections such as Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art (NY), Collection of the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Brussels, BE), Centre de la Gravure et de l’Image Imprimée (La Louvière, BE), Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, NY), EBES (Ghent, BE), St-Lucas (Ghent, BE).

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