|
Five
Gallery Artists, Alison
Horvitz, Jill McLaughlin, Jonathan
McPhillips, Brian O'Malley, Maira
Reinbergs
Dates:
September 8-29, 2001
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 8, 5-7 PM
To
launch the fall season, Hera Gallery presents Five Gallery
Artists, featuring Alison Horvitz, Jill McLaughlin, Jonathan
McPhillips, Brian O'Malley, and Maira Reinbergs. Working in
paint, photography, and mixed media, these artists display
an exhibition that is wide-ranging in imagery.
North
Kingstown painter Jonathan McPhillips
holds a BA from Connecticut College and has exhibited extensively
in local galleries such as the South County Art Association,
the Newport Art Museum, and Newport's Island Arts. Made with
either acrylic paint on canvas or mixed media on paper, McPhillip's
paintings chart the imaginative realm between abstraction
and figuration. To the viewer's perception, McPhillip's compositions
inhabit a grey area between the concrete and the undefined;
his open-ended forms challenge viewers to find personal associations
to the imagery. McPhillips asserts that every individual mark
on a painting's surface represents "a slice of my life,
a depiction of a day, a moment... or an encompassing reflection
of my attitudes and emotions."
Born
in Riga, Latvia, Maira Reinbergs
works out of Attleboro, MA and will exhibit paintings from
Windows, an ongoing series that she has developed throughout
her career. Like McPhillips, Reinbergs deals with imagery
that is suggestive of the natural realm yet remains rooted
in abstraction. Particularly, Reinbergs is interested in exploring
the limitless potential of color in her luminous canvases,
which contain large, frontally-viewed rectangles embedded
in shallow layers of space. Reinberg's paintings express the
symbolic nature of both color and of iconic window forms.
Her artist's statement reveals that the core of her interest
in windows lies in their symbolic meaning as "passageways
to emotions, memories and dreams." In order to express
her vision of "tranquility and the ephemeral," Reinbergs
uses numerous layers of transparent and translucent washes
to arrive at a subtle and diaphonous quality." Reinbergs
has exhibited her work nationally and holds a BFA from the
Massachusetts College of Art.
Back
to Top
|
Image
at Right: Maira Reinbergs, Windows
|
|
|
|
Recently
connecting to Hera Gallery is Providence painter Brian
O'Malley, a University of Rhode Island graduate
who also holds a MFA from the University of Miami and
currently teaches at URI. Thematically, O'Malley's works
relate to what he calls "survival strategies,"
ie the personal choices that we all make as we attempt
to navigate society.
|
|
|
An immaculate
draftsman in both his paintings and pencil drawings,
O'Malley's obsessive attention to detail and mark-making
forces the viewer into an intimate dialogue with his
mysterious, often whimsical narratives. Swathed by broad,
undefined areas of opaque or brightly colored space,
O'Malley's characters exist in what is clearly an imagined
world. Usually engaged in extremely focused, often strife-filled
situations or confrontations, O'Malley's characters
express a tenuous connection to and a profound ambiguity
about their surroundings.
Poignantly, these characters seem ill equipped to face
scenarios that are either perilous or uncertain, and
it is clear to the viewer that ingenuity alone will
lead the way towards safer ground.
Since 1997 Jill McLaughlin
has exhibited her multi-media, photo-based 2D works
at Hera. The South Kingstown artist has exhibited throughout
the region at venues including the Newport Art Museum,
Wickford Art Festival, and the South County Art Association
among others. McLaughlin's work is driven by the flexibility
of photographic media, which she irreverently but subtly
alters through the manipulation of materials outside
of the darkroom. For instance, she often hand colors
black and white photos using transparent oil paint,
which she applies with cotton until it permeates the
photo's surface. Interested in texture, McLaughlin pushes
her process by addiing collage and sewing elelments
to the photos as well. By combining these processes
to produce unique objects from infiniely reproducible
ones, the artist strives to connect the natural to the
manmade.
Painter Alison Horvitz
displays paintings from her new series of images of
barns. Her oils are the result of an investigative process
in which the artist applies several layers of paint.
Horvitz studied painting at Boston University and Rhode
Island School of Design. Her paintings are in private
collections throughout the Northeast as well as in Toronto,
Canada. She is a past recipient of three Massachusetts
Cultural Council grants and artist stipends. She currently
resides in Somerset, MA.
Back
to Top
|
|
