June 26 - July 8, 2020

JAY CRITCHLEY | KAREN CAPPOTTO | ANNE CORRSIN | BARBARA HADDEN | JACKIE LIPTON | ZAMMY MIGDAL | LORI SWARTZ | FORREST WILLIAMS | RICK WRIGLEY

Opening Reception: Friday, June 26, 6-8 pm (only 4 to 6 masked people at a time)

Jay Critchley

Democracy of the Land – the Moo Moo World 1620

Edition of 35 unique archival prints with found colored sands, 30” H X 23” W, Funk & Shuster Fine Art Printing, 2020.

Cows are as ubiquitous to the New England landscape as rolling forests, pastures and fall foliage, languishing on their bucolic fields, holding the land, owning the land.

This iconic tableau has affirmed itself over the four centuries since the Puritan Separatists first implanted themselves on North American soil in 1620. They had hoped to land in Virginia, where one year earlier some twenty slaves arrived at Point Comfort aboard the White Lion, a link to the long established African slave trade.

At the time Europeons called this the “New World,” a mythological reverie of an undiscovered, pristine Garden of Eden of valuable un-extracted commodities such as beaver, sassafras, timber and white pine (Biblical Trees of Life), but we now know that it was misnamed. Revisionist historians now more accurately call the “New World” the “Moo Moo World”.

Barnyard animals, cows, pigs and horses – our familiar Beasts of Burden – have gotten too little credit for the ecological catastrophe they and their masters propagated on the Americas – all invasive species. It’s common knowledge that these disease-ridden creatures did not exist in the Western Hemisphere until Columbus and the Spanish Conquistadors, themselves immune, paraded their horses and pigs off the boats with arrogant fanfare, a caravan of aliens Moo Mooing and Oinking.

These imperial soldiers, not far removed in time from the Black Plague and the rise of white nationalism in Europe, marauding Crusaders and ecological disorder on the Continent were on a clear Christian mission of “discovery,” recruitment and enslavement. In fact, thousands of indigenous people were captured and shipped off to the Caribbean and Europe.

What about all that pristine, “unproductive virgin land” waiting to be civilized, commodified and cowsplained? After all, there were no fences or rigid enclosures so familiar to the English landscape. By the 1530s Europeans were reading about the Noble Savage, “gentle as cows,” with no history, living in a limitless nature and prelapsarian innocence, these creatures were merely waiting for Christianity to save and civilize them.

Credit: Except from Provincetown Arts 2020 issue

Jay Critchley is a longtime resident of Provincetown and the shifting dunes, landscape and the sea are his palette. He has utilized sand, Christmas trees, fish skins, plastic tampon applicators washed up on beaches, pre-demolition buildings and selected sites in his work. He is a conceptual and multi-media artist, writer and activist whose work has traversed the globe, showing across the US and in Argentina, Japan, England, Spain, France, Holland, Ireland, Germany and Columbia.

He recently gave a TEDx Talk: Portrait of the artist as a corporation.

At Jay’s two-month residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute in 2017, he created, The Whiteness House: tarred & feathered, about race, ethnicity and whiteness Other residencies include Fundacion Valparaiso, Mojacar, Andalucia, Spain, CAMAC, Marnay-sur-Seine, France, and Harvard University where he has also lectured.

His movie, Toilet Treatments, won an HBO Award and his 2015 survey show at the Provincetown Art Association & Museum traveled to Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, FL. He has received awards from the Boston Society of Architects and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in NYC for his environmental projects.

Jay was honored in 2012 by the Massachusetts State Legislature as an artist and founder and director of the Provincetown Community Compact, producer of the Swim for Life, which raises funds for AIDS and women’s health and the community. The 2020 fundraiser is a “Swimming in Place Challenge - our place, your place”, summerlong through September 12 - for a virtual event (swim4life.org).

During the pandemic he is working on a major project about pathogens with recycled, plastic, Commercial Street promotional banners, and, a performance installation project, “36 Solar Lights: reflections on nature and civic society”.

He is grateful, along with the town, that Debbie is keeping the lights on this season.

Karen Cappotto

Paintings

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.

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.

Barbara Hadden

Paintings

“The two parts of this title are stolen from texts written two hundred years apart. Title IX was first written into law in 1972 as an offshoot of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was part of US Educational Amendments and mostly concerned giving women equal access to sports programs in high school and college. Barach Obama added sexual orientation, gender identity, mental and physical handicap concerns to this law, as well as protection from sexual harassment and violence at schools, but President Trump removed these elements. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters is the title of a book Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in 1787, encouraging educators and parents to teach independence, self sufficiency, and the intellectual skills needed for women to gain a foothold professionally in the world. When I think about these two in tandem, it makes both become three dimensional in my head, and I feel that while much has changed for humans during the last two hundred years, relative to equal opportunities between different folks, not much has changed at all.

Initially I began these paintings as a way to get into figurative work more, as in the human figure. Particularly in relation to figure ground, as in a person in a landscape. I played around with using photographs as a starting point, my own as well as images from advertisements. While the paintings took shape, I realized that my attraction to a certain type of image had meaning in relation to my experience as a person living here. In this landscape.”

Barbara Hadden was born in 1955 in Hamburg, Germany, and spent her childhood in Europe and the Middle East. She studied painting, photography and filmmaking at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She was awarded an Alumni Traveling Fellowship from that school 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, and has also been awarded a Fund for Individuals by the Berkshire Taconic Artist’s Resource Trust. In the last decade, she regularly attended artist residency programs, which have deepened her commitment to landscape-based painting and photography. She lives in western Massachusetts.

Jackie Lipton

In Order to See

"My paintings give you permission. They are a simple or complicated language. Color poems, poetry by color. Trying to speak to you.

I paint to talk about things, to tell the things that matter. It’s my way of being in deep with you, it’s a heart to heart. I said that."

Jackie Lipton has an active career spanning decades. She has received grants and awards for painting and drawing, from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, granted three times, and from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation's special funds. She received a NYFA boot camp award, and earlier a NYFAI collaborative arts award, among others. Her fellowships and residencies include the MacDowell Colony, the Cummington Community of the Arts (no longer there), and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; in Iceland, she was awarded a grant at a small residency program from the Gallery Boreas, of a studio and apartment in Reykjavik.

Selected exhibitions include ARC at the Whitney Museum, the Art Resources Center of the Whitney Museum’s Gallery, the Aldrich Museum, Condeso/Lawler Gallery, WARM Gallery, the Art Resources Transfer Gallery, Gale/Martin Gallery, Gallery Boreas, Corinne Robbins Gallery, Life on Mars Gallery and Westbeth Gallery in NYC; the Schoolhouse Gallery and AMP Gallery in Provincetown, Mass. She is currently showing work at AMP Gallery in May and early August 2019. Lipton works in her studio in Chelsea and lives in Westbeth Artist Housing in NYC.

Zammy Migdal

Forever Foliage

"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.

Lori Swartz

Paintings

"Lie in the grass or on a sidewalk or on your roof. Look at the sky. Feel your boots laced tight around your calves.

Pile rocks. Get dirty. Take the t.v. antenna off your forehead. Be where you are, even for a snap.

We are lured by the fastest, cheapest, biggest. We forget about authenticity. Art takes time.

We are taught that there is value in canned, pre-packaged, foil-wrapped and zip-locked. There are too many plastic things marketed as originals. We all have stories to tell. Use this work as a prompt for your own story. Be present and see. Be curious."

Lori Swartz began as a metal smith, creating sculpture, furniture and jewelry. She is also a painter, writer and a performer of circus arts (acrobatics, aerial fabric and aerial chain). Working as a multi-media artist has allowed her to express herself in ways that are both private and public. She does not have divided loyalties. She has one loyalty (art), with multiple expressions. Her work can currently be seen in galleries and boutiques across the country, on her website www.loriMetals.com and at her home studio in Madrid, NM.

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.

Rick Wrigley

Sculpture No. 4

"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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