Second Floor Gallery, Sept. 6 – November 30, 2019 Opening Reception Friday, Sept. 6th, 3-8pm
Laura Gans has an eye for structure. While her subjects
range from architecture to the natural world, her compositions are
unequivocally clean and graphic, focusing on details that articulate solid
forms. Her stark, direct approach sheds new light on forms that are relatively
ordinary – a flower or the side of a building. Many of Gans’ images, some taken
years apart, have an uncanny compositional resonance with each other that
brings out new meanings – whether it’s the rational, architectural quality of
pine needles or the elegance and grace of a bird and a parachute in flight. The
weight of spaces in her photographs draws in the air around them. Looking at
them is almost an experience of sculpture.
First Floor Gallery, Sept 6 – November 30, 2019 Opening Reception September 6, 3-8 pm
Chris Jeffrey’s work will make your brain vibrate. He works
primarily with perception – of light, line, color and form – to create
instability between what you see and what you think you should be seeing. His
mirror boxes create tiny and infinite alien worlds that you can peer into but
not quite enter. The wall-based works use line – both painted and delineated –
to create uncertainty in space. Precise and frenetic, Jeffrey’s pieces play
with the quality of intensity, seeming to create pressure and relief depending
on where you rest your eye. They are fascinating in the oldest sense of the
word – you can’t really look away.
Second Floor Gallery, July 11 – August 30, 2019 Opening Reception July 11, 5-7 pm
Many of Marilyn Maddison’s abstract photographs originate
with ice. Instead of viewing the landscape at a distance, she explores the
spaces within it – spaces filled with light, fractures, and refractions.
Recognizable crystalline structures or bubbles seem to place the viewer within these
icy formations. And yet, many of Maddison’s images are not taken from nature,
but made from expertly constructed and photographed still-lifes. She uses
motion, lighting, and technique to create a sense of light falling through ice
or water – tiny dioramas become vast caverns haunted by rainbows.
First Floor Gallery, July 11 – August 30, 2019 Opening Reception July 11, 5-7 pm
Alana LaPoint’s collaged monoprints manage to channel the
power and drama of teenage angst into intricate, layered compositions. Her
varied techniques include writing directly on printing plates and painting with
the bottom of a paint bottle, and then printing, cutting, and collaging images
to form works that are prints, drawings, and sculptures all at once. Her
carefully composed rage doesn’t need to explain itself, conveying both the organic
physicality of bodies and the stark, graphic quality of a breakup through
abstraction. These pieces tell you everything you need to know – but you don’t
get to know her.
The Center for Arts and Learning is pleased to be part of ArtsFest, presented by Montpelier Alive, on June 6th from 4-9 pm. See works throughout the building by over 25 local artists and performers.
ArtsFest is an city-wide explosion of arts and creativity taking place throughout Montpelier on June 5th and 6th – for more on the larger event, check out the ArtsFest page.
6:45 pm – Informational Tour of Center for Arts and Learning with Executive Director Alice Dodge – meet at the CAL sign out front
7:15 pm – DIORAMA: Room to Play – a collaborative performance with Dancer Alana Rancourt Phinney, Flutest Lisa Carlson, and horn soloist Lisa Lowery Busler
Throughout the evening:
Alex Forbes Mobile Woodworking Studio (in front of building)
Trajectory of Color, an Exhibition of works from the Helen Day Center (second floor)
Installation by Chris Jeffrey (third floor)
Installation by Michael Kuk (third floor)
Lake Champlain Rock Art Workshop with Susan Aronoff (basement)
Intuitive Tarot Readings by Sherri Glebus (third floor)
First Floor Gallery, Center for Arts and Learning, May 3 – July 6, 2019 Receptions May 3rd, 4-8pm and June 6th, 4-9pm
Ned Richardson, untitled [glass micro jan31_2300]
Ned Richardson’s work explores landscape – envisioning the
natural world as it connects and intersects with the digital landscape we now
inhabit. Both have a presence in Richardson’s paintings and drawings, as do
both traditional and extremely non-traditional art processes.
For his glass micro paintings, Richardson experimented with
Generative Adversarial Networks. A GAN is a neural network-based ‘deep
learning’ system, with open-source code widely available on the internet; these
are systems set up in pairs to learn to identify and generate specific kinds of
images through input of a massive data set. The networks work off of each other
to ‘learn’ to generate their own versions of the images fed to them – for
example, making their own image that looks like a landscape – based on feedback
and critique from a second network. Here, Richardson input several of his own
images and had the system generate work ‘like’ his to use as source material
for the paintings (which are then manipulated not through Photoshop, but painstakingly
by hand).
Richardson’s series of mesh-dot drawings explore imaginary
datasets, drawn by hand. If you can describe a landscape scientifically through
an accumulation of data points, a drawing of that data is, in a sense, a
description of the imagined world it measures. These very analog pen-and-ink
drawings are abstract, but suggest the emergent mathematical patterns in a
flock of birds or the growth of wildflowers.
Ned Richardson lives and works in Moretown, and his work can regularly be seen at the Front gallery in Montpelier. He has been making art since the 1990s, and has explored media ranging from egg tempera painting to digital and video-based work influenced by conceptual art.
Second Floor Gallery, Center for Arts and Learning, May 3 – July 6, 2019
Receptions May 3rd, 4-8pm and June 6th, 4-9pm
Noam Hessler, The Lonely Spirit
Noam Hessler’s intricate, beautiful and grotesque creatures
provoke empathy and introspection by inviting viewers to engage with a world
that may at first seem alien. Eyeballs, teeth, and hair form creations like bezoars,
repugnant because they are familiar but monstrous. Hessler asks the viewer
instead to expand their view of what is beautiful, and to consciously seek
connection and understanding with that which seems off-putting. On closer
inspection, these creatures tell complicated stories. The intricate nuance and
attention with which they’re rendered show that they are, above all, deeply
loved.
Noam Hessler has been drawing for the past fourteen years,
since he was one year old. His work has been largely influenced by his
fascination with creatures of all sorts, from microorganisms to mythical
beasts. He often creates stories or loose narratives with his drawings, and has
also been exploring writing and sculpture. He has exhibited his work at Studio Place
Arts, VCFA, and the Myles Court Barber Shop.
This year, the New England Foundation for the Arts is holding its Creative Communities Exchange conference in Montpelier – and we want to showcase excellent art from around the region while they’re here. Montpelier Alive is sponsoring an ArtsFest during the conference on Thursday, June 6th – an expanded version of Art Walk.
Thanks to everyone who has let us know they’re interested – we’ll be posting more info, including a full artist list, just as soon as we confirm everyone. See you June 6th!
First Floor Gallery, Center for Arts and Learning, Feb. 1 – Apr. 27, 2019 Reception during Feb. 1st Art Walk, 4-8 pm
Mindy Fisher, Squid and Bunnies
Mindy Fisher calls her series of fantastically loud,
cataclysmically calligraphic abstract paintings ‘ornaglyphs’. As the name
suggests, there is an almost-language of symbolic characters in them – her
marks seem like a system of writing lost to the world, and her colors suggest
the chaos of a jungle of birds taking off all at once. They are abstract, but
funny and full of personality, an all-over pattern that refuses to stay still.
They call to mind the garish palette and crazy aliens of late-night cartoons,
but when you look at them the colors create unlikely sophisticated harmonies.
Mindy describes them as battle scenes, but not from earthly wars: these are how
a bubbly six-year old, armed with a golden cape and a pink sword, might imagine
her path to glory.
Mindy Fisher grew up in a small town in New Hampshire. In 1998 she moved to Chicago to study set design at Columbia College. She stayed in Chicago and focused on painting, cartooning, and self-taught animation. She taught at Right Brained Studio in Oak Park, Il. She now lives and works in Vermont. She has shown work all over the country, including Chicago, Cincinnati, Portland (Oregon), and Rutland, Vermont. Last year she participated in Vermont Studio Center’s Vermont Artists Week residency program.
