Amy Soczka

 

"I am interested in creating work that is like a memory of a landscape or a garden that you dreamed about. I like to experience art up-close, to study the marks and the hand of the artist. When I paint, I want to be inside of the canvas, in between the layers of color, surrounded by the sometimes hyper imagined flowers and leaves. I often let my eyes lose focus and work through the painting, excusing the details in favor of color and movement."

"My current series of large paintings attempts to surround the viewer with a wall of saturated florals that are familiar but imagined, an impossible arrangement, the result of my own meditations."

 

 

Tim Abel

 

My practice is very material-driven. I like using materials that are humble: paper, plastic, discarded/found fabric. Part of working with these materials is the tactile relationship that I go through sewing it. I like the surprise of working with and transforming a common material like paper, or plastic shopping bags or plastic packing material. Through revision and constant reworking, the materials lead the making. 

My work quietly confronts ideas of masculinity through my method of making: embroidery, sewing and quilting. I use traditional quilting patterns, or the quilting notion of using a repeated shape to create a sewn composition as my current guiding method. My chosen materials of paper and plastic also eschew traditional norms of permanency, as does my deliberate preference to create temporary installations. 

I turn to repetition and revision as guiding notions of making as a way to directly respond to and normalize flux. To be realistic about the fragmenting of time, I keep a running wall of small works. It could be a fragment of fabric, a photo I found during the day, or a small paper collage, or older work that finds resonance. I see this as a gathering practice: it gives me a chance to add a single element, re-arrange or contextualize a larger work that I am working through. I think of the individual elements as something akin to quilt blocks, and the whole arrangement becomes an ever-evolving wall quilt. 

"RepeatPatternRepeat" will use the gallery to showcase a collection of works that attempt to find temporary order in this constant motion. Large wall-based sewn plastic works, works on paper, site-responsive paper-based installation, accumulated small works and ephemera will create a richly colored, patterned and layered visual environment. These works embody the ritual of searching for order through the act of gathering and making; finding a vocabulary of order by translating found pattern from natural and man-made structures ranging from traditional quilting patterns to geology maps to honeycombs.

 

 

 

 Justin Donofrio

 

"Through the lens of functional pottery I focus on questions about our relationship with objects. The geographical layered strata of each vessel represent fragments or glimpses into the density of every assemblage. Each vessel is made using clay that is artificially colored to reference natural tones. The juxtaposition of the natural and artificial speaks to a notion of manicured space in an attempt to cultivate order."

"Focusing on the fluidity of process and materials as remnants of making, I work with a limited number of tools and movements to allow the clay to actively inform the line quality and elegant volume. Relying heavily on the physicality of the technique I generously push and pull these lines to develop an undulation that resembles natural rhythms. The harmony of repetition comes through meditation of movement. The presence of process in the work is essential as my forms are searching for confidence in their construction. The conversation between the stained clay and glaze, obscuring or revealing, explores a didactic look at color as body and color as skin."