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Overview Artists   Schedule 

Multisensory Overview (page 1) martin brief, alison safford, gary duehr, catherine bowen
Multisensory Page 2 joanna astor, mary dondero, joyce utting schutter, kathy halamka, colleen healy, jeff hesser, ellen peckham
Multisensory Page 3 cynthia hellyer heinz, francoise mcaree, colette copeland, denis sargent, andy messerschmidt
Multisensory Page 4 susan werner, craig dongoski, amy ruedinger, mara metcalf, jeffrey scanlan, monika malewska
Multisensory 5 jan arabas, eric lintala, kathleen beausoleil, beverly rippel, karen norton
Multisensory Page 6 bill leete, cara tomlinson, andrew malcolm, stefanie klavens

at right: Colleen Healy

Overview

Multisensory: Visual Responses to Memory and Synesthesia
19 April - 24 May, 2003
Reception: Saturday, April 19, 5-7 PM
Reading: Saturday, April 19, 4 PM, Patricia Duffy, Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens
Screening: Thursday, May 1, 7 PM, Sheri Wills, Nocturnes Nos. 1 & 2 (*screening held at Kingston Free Library)
Gallery Talk, Sunday, May 4, 1 PM: Jan Arabas, Kathy Halamka, Jeff Hesser

Juried by Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, Director of Curatorial Affairs, DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA, this exhibition will investigate visual artworks that incorporate information received from more than one sense into their work. How do visual artists represent sounds or music? How does a sculptor, painter, printmaker, or digital artist represent sensations of touch, taste, or smell? An artist who works from memory asserts that his or her own process of art-making is both more unified and more accurate than directly observed, purely visual reality.


At Right: Martin Brief, Untitled, Gelatin Silver Print, 30" x 45"

"The goal of this exhibition is to discover many unexpected ways in which artists chose to synthesize a range of perceived information in their art in order to create a unified and perhaps more explicit worldview than would otherwise be possible. The nature of the topic--which is certainly not limited to expressions in the visual arts or to those in a traditional gallery setting-- prompted us to add other components to the program, including the reading by Duffy and screening by Wills, as well as a gallery talk," says Director Katherine Veneman.


Artists

Paintings, drawings, video works, photographs, collages, prints, and sculptures were chosen from thirty one artists from Rhode Island to California. Artists from sixteen states, with works of seventeen New England artists, are represented in the show.

Participating artists are: Jan Arabas (Massachusetts), Joanna Astor (New York), Kathleen Beausoleil (Montana), Catherine Bowen (Massachusetts), Martin Brief (Virginia), Colette Copeland (Pennsylvania), Mary Dondero (Rhode Island), Craig Dongoski (Georgia), Gary Duehr (Massachusetts), Kathy Halamka (Massachusetts), Colleen Healy (New York), Cynthhia Hellyer Heinz (Illinois), Jeff Hesser (Rhode Island), Stefanie Klavens (Massachusetts), William Leete (Rhode Island), Eric Lintala (Massachusetts), Andrew Malcolm (Ohio), Monika Malewska (Connecticut), Francoise McAree Rhode Island), Andy Messerschmidt (Minnesota), Mara Metcalf Rhode Island), Karen Norton (Indiana), Ellen Peckham (New York), Beverly Rippel (Massachusetts), Amy Ruedinger (Oregon), Alison Safford (Massachusetts), Denis Sargent (Wisconsin), Jeffrey Scanlan (California), Cara Tomlinson (Pennsylvania), Joyce Utting Schutter (Massachusetts), Susan Werner (Rhode Island). All participating artists' works are featured on the website, go back to top for links.


Above: Alison Safford, Freeze, Cast Glass, each funnel 5" x 4" x 4"

Three local artists who were selected to receive an honorarium and to give a gallery talk are: Massachusetts printmaker Jan Arabas, Providence sculptor Jeff Hesser, and Massachusetts photographer Kathy Halamka. (See features of these artists below).


REPRESENTING Synesthesia and Multisensory Experiences


Since Modernists began to search for an autonomous pictorial language, many artists have represented an individual synthesis of experience. New technologies and media allow contemporary artists to interpret their experience by incorporating elements of time and space, further broadening the tools to express a unified experience. Whether using new technologies or choosing to work with traditional media, artists in this exhibition are involved in both blurring and defining the boundaries between art and life experience. Above: Gary Duehr, Liminalities, inkjet print.

Since Modernists began to search for an autonomous pictorial language, many artists have represented an individual synthesis of experience. New technologies and media allow contemporary artists to interpret their experience by incorporating elements of time and space, further broadening the tools to express a unified experience. Whether using new technologies or choosing to work with traditional media, artists in this exhibition are involved in both blurring and defining the boundaries between art and life experience.

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PROFILE OF THREE ARTISTS SCHEDULED TO PARTICIPATE IN GALLERY TALKS.... please watch this space for additional profiles.....

Jan Arabas: Fleshing Out Empirical Reality, Seeking the Intersection of Inner & Outward Perception
Massachusetts printmaker Jan Arabas' monotypes and digitals prints illustrate the natural world, invoked through time, memory, as well as through her technique, which leaves visible evidence to viewers and creates a tangible reality separate from the imagery. Her richly textured work in this exhibition, Mr. Stubb's Horse, consists of several prints on two sheets of paper to depict a multipaneled, life sized, prancing horse. Each section contributes an aspect to the horse and its shallow background, inviting viewers to look slowly, piece by piece, as well as at the whole form. The horse is furthered distinguished from the surrounding space by the use of a final layer of wax paper which Arabas irons on to the ppaper beneath it Sources for her imagery are the artist's memory of her experience riding and caring for horses as well as a print of a particular racehorse.


Arabas was trained as a painter at Binghampton University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; she is a self-taught experimental printmaker who is a founding member of the Brickbottom Artist's Building in Somerville, Massachusetts. She has received an Artist's Foundation Fellowship as well as an Artist's Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, among others. She has exhibited widely throughout New England and is affiliated with the Drawing Center in New York, NY; Midtown Payson Galleries, New York, New York; K & Lionheart Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts; and Hobson Gallery in Ipswich, Massachusetts. Her work is in numerous public and private collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Boston Public Library, and the DeCordova Museum, in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Kathy Halamka: Mysteries of In-Between States and Spaces
Boston area artist Kathy Halamka's multilayered photographs, Boundary I and Boundary II bypass the depiction of a singular image to suggest quick glimpses of scenes that are infused with the memory of a more complex sensory experience than is a purely optical memory. In these works, shadowy forms of people and objects hover over flat, pock-marked terrains or slide across flat yet vertiginous planes, stacked in a disorienting montage. Broad, late afternoon or early morning light uncovers uneven, mysterious surfaces.


She says, "The liminal world shaped in my work reveals the texture and staccato echo of danger, beauty and dislocation in our rapidly accelerating culture. I assemble images resonating with the intrigue of brief glimpses from the corner of the eye by layering photomontage, xerography, and digital noise. Within these in-between moments I explore not only what is seen, but also the perfume and remembered appearance of these things."


Halamka is currently a candidate for her Master of Fine Arts degree from Tufts University/School of the Museum of fine Arts, Boston. She holds a Post Baccalaureate Certificate from the same program, as well as a BA in Studio Art from Stanford University, Stanford, California. Her work has appeared in numerous exhibitions throughout the nation, and she has several exhibitions planned for 2003 in Massachusetts, Florida, Texas, Wisconsin, and Maine. Locally her 2003 schedule includes: Western Art, the Chinese American Fine Arts Society, Boston, Massachusetts; The Boston Printmakers' 2003 North American Print Biennial, 808 Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts; Small, Smaller, Smallest, Bromfield Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts; and Recent Work, Museum of Fine Arts, Education Foyers, Boston, Massachusetts.


Jeff Hesser: Collisions of Certainty and Doubt, Presence and Absence
Providence sculptor Jeff Hesser constructed and displays his Self-Portrait by using both traditional and nontraditional modes of representation as well as experimental techniques to house contemporary ideas of time, memory, and identity. This sculpture is made of cast heads of little boys, modeled after Hesser's own likeness in the mirror as well as from photographs of himself as a child. The rows of heads and busts are then displayed on shelves in an antique cabinet, which despite the process used to make the portraits, gives the viewer a sensation of viewing valued artifacts that are dissociated from the present moment and have been instead recovered from a distant past.


Hesser explains his motivations, "By inserting the forms of my adult body into the image of my childhood body, I impose myself into the past just as the past so often imposes itself on the present."


He says, "Through this process, moments of certainty are called into question or doubt, an states of being in which a human presence is on the verge of emerging continually slip away from complete manifestation.


Currently residing in Providence, Hesser holds an MFA in Sculpture from SUNY at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York; an MFA in Figurative Studies from New York Academy of Art, New York; and a BA in Humanities from the University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Hesser teaches at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island as well as at the New York Academy of Art, New York, New York. He has exhibited widely in New York and Rhode Island, with recent exhibits at the Faculty show at the Rhode Island School of Design's Illustration Department in Providence, Rhode Island; the Faculty Show at Rhode Island College, Providence, Rhode Island, and Bush Gallery, Providence, Rhode Island.

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Patricia Lynne Duffy Documenting synesthesia

In journalist Patricia Duffy's reading of Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens: How Synesthetes Color Their Worlds she will illuminate "a world in which words have colors and sounds have tastes." According to her book jacket, Duffy's work "draws from her own struggles and breakthroughs with synesthesia to help us better understand the condition, while explicating some of the major theories surrounding it."

According to her book jacket, Duffy's work "draws from her own struggles and breakthroughs with synesthesia to help us better understand the condition, while explicating some of the major theories surrounding it."

Duffy has been interviewed about her book, Blue Cats and about the phenomenon of synesthesia on numerous radio programs including National Public Radio and BBC radio. She has also been interviewed for television on the Discovery Channel and for publications including the New York Times, Discovery Magazine, and Smithsonian Magazine. Her book was excerpted pre-publication in 'Vogue Magazine'. Her articles have appeared in numerous publications including 'The Boston Globe', 'The San Francisco Chronicle', 'New York Newsday' and 'The Village Voice'. She is also an officer of the United Nations Society of Writers. She is a co-founder of the American Synesthesia Association. Please refer to her website at www.bluecats.info for more information.

Since Modernists began to search for an autonomous pictorial language, many artists have been interested in representing an individual synthesis of experience. New technologies and media have rapidly developed, allowing artists to interpret their experience using a broader sensory range. Whether using new technologies or choosing to work with traditional media, artists today are increasingly involved in both blurring and defining the boundaries between art and life experience.

At Right: Catherine Bowen, Untitled, Gouache on Rice Paper, 10" x 10"

Juror

The juror for this exhibition is Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, Director of Curatorial Affairs, DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA.

About Us

Founded in 1974, Hera Gallery is a non-profit, artist run organization in Wakefield, Rhode Island, about 30 miles south of Providence. Hera's mission is to provide a forum for contemporary artists whose works explore social, aesthetic, and political issues. In addition to displaying about ten exhibitions per year, Hera hosts programs such as lectures, artists talks, symposia, student exhibitions, and performances. Directions to Hera.

Schedule

  • Friday, April 11: Shipped, ready to hang artworks must be received by 5 PM. Send your artworks insured, via Fed Ex (air or ground) or USPS. Return shipping must be pre-paid.

  • Saturday, April 12: Artworks must be dropped off in person at the gallery between 10 AM-4 PM; artworks may be dropped off prior to this date during gallery hours

  • Saturday, April 19: Opening reception, 5-7 PM. Reading, Patricia Duffy, from Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens, 4 PM

  • Thursday, May 1: Screening, Sheri Wills, Nocturnes No. 1 & 2, Kingston Free Library, 7 PM. Call 401.783.8254 for directions.

  • Sunday, May 4: Gallery Talk, Jan Arabas, Kathy Halamka, Jeff Hesser, 1 PM.

  • Saturday, May 24: Last day of exhibition. Artists who dropped off works in person must pick up artworks on Saturday, May 24 between 4-6 PM, or on Sunday, May 25, from 12-4 PM.


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