July 10 - July 29, 2020

SUSAN BERNSTEIN | KAREN CAPPOTTO | MARC VAN CAUWENBERGH | JACKIE LIPTON | FORREST WILLIAMS | RICK WRIGLEY

Opening Reception: Friday, July 31, 6-8 pm (only 4 to 6 masked people at a time)

Susan Bernstein

Empty

“Since the day of the 2016 election, in the ceramics classes I teach, we all made a pact to not discuss the news. It can take up all the oxygen in the room. There has to be someplace that is protected. In that free space, these two huge bowls were made. I had intended to narrow them in at the top, but the rim kept widening, like outstretched arms, as far as it could reach.

Only when I set out to write this statement did I understand what these two pieces are about. The Chinese Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu wrote, “We mould clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that makes the vessel useful.” The usefulness of a pot is not the part we can see, its purpose is in the emptiness. What is the importance of emptiness? It is the space of potential.

These pieces are an act of rebellion. They are a bold reclaiming of creative space in the face of the degradation in the past two years. Everything of value feels endangered, the daily discourse compressing and potentially consuming all our vital energies. This is what compels me, not just to make beautiful objects, but to make something that carves out a space for emptiness, a living breathing parenthesis for potentiality. Here are two radically generous offerings of nothing.”

Susan Bernstein’s work is all hand built, using coils of clay or slab to build up the piece. Her ceramics speak to the time and place where they are made. This is made relevant in the work by her keen awareness and intimate connection to eve-ryday life, yet it can also reveal what it means to be human. “I am inspired by look-ing at images and films of potters around the world from South Africa, Burkina Fa-so, Nigeria, Ghana, Mexico, India, Korea. Even within widely diverse cultures, there is an inextricable kinship within a common craft language. I am in love with the dense physicality and pure nature of clay in all its stages. However, my great-est artistic challenge and passion lies not just with clay and ceramic form but its capacity to transcend its physical state and touch something deeper about our shared humanity.”

Bernstein is a resident studio ceramic artist and teacher at Mudflat Studio in Somerville, MA. She has exhibited her work at AMP Gallery since 2013.

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 currently represented by AMP Gallery.

Marc Van Cauwenbergh

Paintings

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), AMP Gallery (Provincetown, MA), and most recently at the Jason McCoy Gallery (New York, NY - online exhibition)

Jackie Lipton

Paintings

"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.

Forrest Williams

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

"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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