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| 127 S Sixteenth Street | ||
| Philadelphia, PA 19102 | ||
| 215-665-8138 | ||
Current Exhibitions |
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Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to announce Flight Patterns, gallery artist Trudy Kraft’s fourth solo exhibition. The show will run from May 1 – 31 with an opening reception on Friday, May 3 from 5 – 7.
Kraft’s imagery contains forms derived from the patterns and cultural signs of folk, aboriginal, and Far Eastern art that the artist was exposed to during her upbringing in the Southwest and a life spent living in and traveling to exotic places. The underlying universal symbols challenge the viewer to experience her paintings for both their decorative and meditative properties.
Kraft says of her current exhibit:
In recent years I have become increasingly interested in the relation between movement and stillness. We know that everything changes, yet we also experience moments of deep stillness. Birds achieve both with apparent ease — they are unfettered in flight and unruffled in repose. The circular forms in these paintings sometimes allude to mandalas, the symbolic diagrams of Hinduism and Buddhism. If you trace a geometric circle back to the point where you started, movement returns to stillness. As for method, I begin with water color, freely painted. I create the next dimension of pattern by marking the surface with frisket, a masking fluid. Further rounds of paint and frisket follow. Then I use gouache to augment and adorn.
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Roberta Fallon, art critic, discusses the intricate formal and technical aspects of Kraft’s paintings in Fallon and Rosof’s Artblog, “Overall, [Kraft’s] designs imply windows, lace, carpets, tapestries. What makes them unique is the incredible embellishment of the underlying pattern with a repertoire of dots and lines and more washes of color….The finished piece is a riot of microcosmic patterning, all hand-made, sitting on a larger, macro-cosmic design.”
Kraft received her BA from Hamilton College, and studied at Moore College of Art in Philadelphia and at the Arts Students League in New York City.
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Memory, Place, and Identity as Filter: Streams of Painted Consciousness
Featuring Works By: Amanda Bush Joan Turner Leigh Werrell
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to present Memory, Place, and Identity as Filter: Streams of Painted Consciousness featuring works by Amanda Bush, Joan Turner, and Leigh Werrell. The show runs from May 1 - May 31, 2013. There will be an opening reception for the artists on Friday, May 3, 5 - 7 pm.
Why do some experiences keep their vivid quality while others change and fade? To consider memory, place, and identity, one can only surmise that they are not fixed points. To recall these experiences is to realize their elastic quality which at times eludes objectivity. When the beholder is confronted with a representational and or abstract painting, meaning can sometimes be a hard thing to pin down. Signification can lead the spectator to some basic assumptions about the picture such as subject matter or the style of painting; is the painting representational, an impression, or is it abstract? Sometimes there are no obvious signifiers. When this happens the viewer has to stretch beyond the indoctrination of hard facts to ponder the space between what is known and what is imagined. |
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Amanda Bush is a painter who uses her memories of the southern Mississippi landscape to create abstract paintings. Bush's memories of past events in specific landscapes take on a different appearance as the act of remembering obscures the original source material. The abstract painter changes the way places and objects are represented. New forms emerge - their manifestation coming through the manipulation of paint through a variety of marks, stains, and palette-knifed scrapes. Bush's activation of the painting surface allows her to bring the spectator into her world without relying on direct depiction.
Joan Turner explores the implications of multiple realities of cultural identity. In Turner's paintings, there is an uneasy relationship established among mythological, religious, and cultural imagery that teeters on fantasy and the romantic. The painted marks suggest a stream of consciousness that defies and prevents specific identification of representational elements and abstracted forms. The result of this uncanny amalgamation is ambiguity in the interpretation of shifting signifiers, allowing for multiple interpretations of Turner's work.
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