September 20 - October 2019

MIDGE BATTELLE | JAMIE CASERTANO | TED CHAPIN | LARRY COLLINS | ANNE CORRSIN | M P LANDIS | SUSAN LYMAN | JUDITH TREPP | FORREST WILLIAMS

Opening Reception: Friday, September 20, 6-9 pm

Midge Battelle

The Poet's Chamber

Midge Battelle is a photographer, painter , curator, and teacher living and working year round in Provincetown,Ma.

In 2019, Battelle is dividing her focus between painting, mainly during the winter months, as well as working this summer on a body of Cyanotype photographic work to be exhibited at The Provincetown Art Association and Museum(PAAM) in 2020. Her work in both painting, photography, and Cyanotypes is connected by a similar visual aesthetic and poetic subtext. Expressing beauty and emotion through the simplicity of form and the subtle play of light and color , Battelle is possessed of a uniquely romantic minimalist vision.

Battelle is a graduate of Greenfield Community College with a concentration on photography with directed studies under the mentorship of photographer Tom Young, and strong focus on graphic arts, studying color theory, design, and printmaking with Margaret Stein. Midge is also a graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, Ma. continuing in photography with Laura McPhee and Abelardo Morrell, while also working in mixed media and maintaining critical studies in art history.

Battelle’s paintings and photographs are in both private and museum collections. Her work is currently exhibited at The AMP Gallery, and has been in various gallery exhibits over the past 30 plus years, as well as in many group exhibits at PAAM, where she also served on the Exhibition Committee.

Jamie Casertano

Photographs

Jamie Casertano was born in Brooklyn, New York on Christmas Day in 1972. His discovery of photography occurred in his father’s basement darkroom. He did then, and still now, loves the dark. The urge to take photographs soon followed and later led him to study photography. He lives primarily in Provincetown, frequenting New York City where he once lived and began taking photographs. He seeks images in both the elusive dark corners and brightly lit stages of personality. Drawn to a diverse array of subject matter, his photographs vary from quiet to loud aesthetically, veiled to brazen in content and distant to intimate emotionally. The works of artists Diane Arbus, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Peter Hujar, Kembra Pfahler, Yasumasa Morimura and Martin Parr are of great influence, to name a few. Casertano studied photography with Mark Asnin, among others, at the School of Visual Arts in New York. At that time, he was paired with and mentored by noted photographer Bill Jacobson. He has had multiple solo [and group] exhibits at A Gallery Art, the Fine Arts Work Center and currently at AMP Gallery, each in Provincetown. His work has been published in Provincetown Arts Magazine, The Boston Globe, Simon & Schuster and on multiple websites in the U.S., Sweden and London. His photographs are in the collections of the Provincetown Museum and The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City.

Ted Chapin

Trump/Superman, series

“Man will lose control over his machines. My work foreshadows this eventuality.

Over the course of the roughly 200,000 years of human existence the sophistication of man’s tools has been accelerating. The dawn of the Electronic Age in the 20th century radically increased the rate of acceleration. Now in the 21st century the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning point towards a future at some point before the end of this century when man’s machines will rule over mankind.

The Electronic Age, exemplified by computer-guided equipment informed by data stored in electronic clouds, offers few visual clues of the impending machine ascendency. Thus to illustrate the man vs. machine dynamics we face today my sculpture employs tangible machine parts, such a typewriter pieces, from the recently ended Mechanical Age. The human element within my sculpture appears either overtly with two-dimensional images of people mounted and placed within the sculptural space or more abstractly with three-dimensional forms such as crystals or organic matter. Implied gestural motion expresses the human/machine interaction. These “operations”, though ultimately illogical and non-kinetic, seem just mechanically logical enough to hint that a mysterious sentient force somewhere within the piece of art may be controlling them. Adding ambiguity to the issue of control, I often add handles, levers, buttons, etc. to suggest that the viewer of the art is also able to manipulate the performance of the machinery. This seeming mystery of mechanical control represents the ever-increasing incomprehension most of us experience of how our electronically guided devices and systems, omnipresent in our lives today, actually operate and whether or not man is still fully in charge of them.

The physical construction of my sculptural assemblages is purposely complex so as to augment the mystery of the implied mechanical functions. For all my structural attachments my pieces depend on torqued connections using either nuts and bolts or screws. The torquing allows for a very high degree of precision in the positioning of objects relative to each other. Positional precision is necessary to sustain the illusion that one element of the sculpture is directly affecting another mechanically. In addition to the structural compression inherent in torqued connections, my recent work has also included springs and turnbuckles to connect elements with structural tension.

My two-dimensional collages follow the same themes as my sculptures, but more abstractly since I rarely use images of machinery. In the two-dimensional collages of the Borden series, for instance, mankind is represented by bovine cartoon characters and the activating “machinery” that controls the characters is derived from the shapes and movement inherent in giant images of orchids cut from 1950’s magazines.”

Ted Chapin studied architecture and art history at Yale University, graduating in 1972, and received a graduate degree in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1975. From 1975 until 2003 Ted practiced architecture with a series of large firms in Philadelphia, San Francisco and then in Boston, where he was a Vice President of Elkus/Manfredi Architects. Starting in 2003 Ted has been a full-time artist, with art studios in both Provincetown and New York City. Ted has exhibited his work in Provincetown at the Esmond-Wright Gallery, Art Current Gallery, Gallery4Pearl and at numerous juried shows at PAAM. In New York Ted has shown his work at TheaterLab and at his Madison Avenue studio. From 2012 until 2017 Ted was President of the Board of the Fine Arts Work Center.

Larry Collins

Never Forever

"Classical sculpture has long been a passion for me. The magnificent marbles and bronzes of the ancient world inspire awe, infused as they are with timeless, yet human qualities. It is in paintings however, destined as they are to disintegrate, that analogous expressions of our temporal lives may be found."

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.

Anne Corrsin

Directions and Diversions

“I work in a variety of materials, and currently I am constructing sculptures of wood (with color). It’s a return of sorts, having made some of my earliest pieces in this material. As I build these objects I use the addition of color as a layer and a dimensional marker. Architecture is a reference in my work: dwellings with their roofs, doorways and windows are an inspiration. The foremost idea is that a structure must be viewed from different vantage points to see its angles and details.”

Anne Corrsin is a visual artist based in Boston, Ma. She received a BFA in Sculpture from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts (Boston). Grants and Fellowships include an Artist Grant (Individual) from the Mass Cultural Council (Somerville Arts Council), and a Travel Grant (study of glassmaking/design in Copenhagen and Ebeltoft, Denmark) from the Boston Athenaeum. She was also awarded a Fellowship for a residency at the Vermont Studio Center.

Anne’s work is held in a number of private collections. She has exhibited at the Krakow/Witkin Gallery (Boston), BF Annex (Boston), Real Art Ways (Hartford, Ct.), Chandler Gallery (Cambridge, Ma.), Luhring/Augustine Gallery (NYC) and AMP Gallery.

M P Landis

Caller

“The circle as guitar sound hole, as record, as atom, planet, donut hole, of nothingness, signifying everything and everything left behind. In my work I have always been pulled towards making it, often unconsciously, eye hole, mouth hole, angry cry for help.”

“Guitar is a caller. It brings forth emotions you didn’t know you had.” - John Fahey

M P Landis has been working in various visual media since childhood. In 1989 he moved to Provincetown, MA to concentrate on painting and began exhibiting almost immediately in galleries there and was awarded a solo exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in 1996. Soon after he moved to Brooklyn, NY where he lived and worked until 2015 when he and his family moved to Portland, Maine. Since 1990 he has been in over 30 solo exhibitions and many 2-person and group exhibits and is included in many public and private collections.

Susan Lyman and Alison Deming

Words to Wood/Wood to Words

In an interactive collaboration, sculptor Susan Lyman and poet Alison Hawthorne Deming explore the plastic relationship between wood and words as the material of their artistic practice. They take their cue from John Fowles' The Tree: "the real subject of this arboreal excursion is not the trees at all, but the importance in art of the unpredictable, the unaccountable, the intuitive, the not discernibly useful." Trees here serve as found material, metaphor and means of being present.

Alison Hawthorne Deming and Susan Lyman have been friends since the early 1980s, when they both were Fellows at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. In this collaboration they followed John Fowles prompt to look at how trees had inspired them, and how their work might align spatially and in formal play. Some pieces began with the words and some with wood. In all cases the idea of salvage seemed central.

Both Lyman and Deming are frequent walkers in their respective locales, whether the North woods, the coastal beaches of Maine or the Outer Cape, or the Sonoran Desert. Lyman, started this collaboration with a walk and Alison’s poems in her pocket. She scavenged for fallen wood or washashore parts of trees with the imprint of wind, water, or fire, some with evidence of animal survival activity – the teeth marks of a beaver cutting down a tree or the drilling of a yellow-bellied sapsucker. The “making” in the studio is then a collaboration between word and wood, giving life, even breath, to the salvaged.

Alison Deming is the author of five books of poems, most recently Stairway to Heaven (Penguin, 2016) and four books of essays including Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit (Milkweed, 2014). She is Regents' Professor and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona.

Susan Lyman is a sculptor, painter and teacher who has made her home and raised her family in Provincetown MA since her fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in 1981. She is represented by AMP Gallery in Provincetown, and Boston Sculptors Gallery, where she recently had her third solo show, “Sculpture in the Unmaking”.

Judith Trepp

Engagement

“An artwork is undeniably the product of the creator and, at the same time, is most definitely an entity in its own right. The drawings that I make in ink, acrylic or egg tempera are the result of inner focusing – concentration and crystallization of thought, feeling, and idea that has been coursing, growing, and developing within me – and, in the motion of my hand come to fruition. This new entity is the finished work. It stands on its own, independent. The work which faces the viewer asks, suggests, or demands contact; which may occur or not. This drawing is now a separate and complete being: separate from its creator, separate from its viewers—and ready to engage.”

Judith Trepp a native New Yorker, has lived in Zurich, Switzerland, the major part of each year since 1970. From 1974-85 she also lived in Tuscany, Italy, and since 1990 has maintained an atelier in Provincetown, Massachusetts, USA, where she had a one-person show at the Provincetown Art Museum (PAAM) in 2011. In addition, Trepp has traveled extensively in various regions of India and Japan as well as in Europe. These diverse enlargements of vision — intellectually and culturally — resonate in her work. For further information regarding Trepp’s background, publications, and exhibitions please go to the website judithtrepp.net.

Forrest Williams

Silent Noon/Paintings

"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." Perhaps these are worlds of their own making—worlds with edges and outsides and unknown terrains beyond, just out of reach. 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 in some way self-portraits. 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.

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