Exhibitions: Current | Upcoming | Past
Exhibitions: Past
Richard Creighton
Barbara Owen
May 28 – June 26, 2015
This exhibition is a showcase for the winners of the 4th All Media Juror's Choice Award. Established in 2009, our All Media Juried Exhibition, a recurring event, has featured some of the best and most interesting work in the South Coast Region of New England. Last summer 108 submissions were entered into the competition, and our juror, Maria Napolitano, chose 48 works for the show. In addition to curating a lively and interesting exhibition, Napolitano chose 2 artists for the prestigious Juror's Award – an exhibition in our gallery for the summer of 2015. The Juror's Awards went to Richard Creighton and Barbara Owen and the gallery is pleased to feature an exhibition of their work.
Richard Creighton is a sculptor whose work reflects his passion for research and collection of objects of utility. From spear guns to powder horns, he takes a decidedly eclectic approach to collecting but approaches it with a deeply held set of aesthetic principles that guide his research and ultimately, informs his work. His work combines a deep respect for materiality, a desire to make objects that are at once familiar and strange, as well as an investigation into the universal language of objects.
Creighton received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of New Hampshire and his Master of Fine Arts degree from Penn State University. He is a Professor in the UMASS Dartmouth Fine Arts Department in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. Exhibition highlights include: Group Invitational, DeeDee Shatuck Gallery, Westport, MA; 4TH All Media Juried Exhibition, Grimshaw-Gudewicz Gallery, Bristol Community College, Fall River MA, Juror, Maria Napolitano; Brush Gallery Juried Exhibition, Lowell, MA; Winter Show, Duxbury Art Museum Complex, Duxbury, MA–1st Place Award, Juror, Kitty Wales; and New Bedford Harbor in a New Light, New Bedford Art Museum, New Bedford, MA.
Barbara Owen is a contemporary painter and mixed media artist. Her current work is a reflection of a new approach to image making. Until recently, her studio practice of image development has been to develop ideas by making preliminary drawings and paintings. Her decision to manipulate those preparatory works by cutting and reassembling them to make finished work is a new approach, but one that maintains in its essence, her long held notions of image development.
Owen graduated from Bennington College with a Bachelor of Arts degree as an Interdivisional Major in Sculpture and Poetry. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Newport Art Museum, RI; Minor Injury Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; The Arts Center in Troy, New York; the University Art Gallery of UMass Dartmouth, New Bedford, MA; Yellow Peril Gallery, Providence, RI; and the Jamestown Art Center, Jamestown, RI. She has also had solo exhibitions at AS220 Project Space, Providence, RI; Colo Colo Gallery in New Bedford, MA and Knight Campus Art Gallery, CCRI, Warwick, RI.
The gallery's mission to educate and inform provides a forum for conversations and revelations about the art-making experience. The All Media Juried and the Juror's Choice Award exhibitions extend the invitation to everyone in our community to participate in that conversation. I hope you enjoy the show.
Kathleen Hancock
Director
Artists
Richard Creighton
A passion for researching and collecting objects which span the 15th through the 19th centuries has guided conceptual and aesthetic concerns in this work. Of particular interest are objects which are not directly connected to a vernacular design but seem to made from an eclectic experience of aesthetic imagery. Objects made specifically for utility and imbued with human concerns and emotions such as love and loss, fear and humor, ritual and survival and wrought by one individual are of particular interest. An interest in abstracting qualities from these objects in order to guide the development of work relevant to our time allows for a range of interpretations which may span the romantic to the absurd and invention which challenges history, attribution and probability.
Barbara Owen
The Work: Cut Paper and Installations
Throughout my career I have worked in series in order to explore how color, shape, material and paint itself develop and change one's experience of each piece while consistently exploring my subject matter.
The development of the three-dimensional paper work comes from a recent decision to cut up the drawings and templates that I had previously used in the preparation of a painting. I had wanted a break from painting and started to explore making work that was unbounded by the dimensions of a traditional canvas support. This cutting up process has now become a free-form way of creating new imagery, reconfiguring my original concept to give it new meaning. What was once discarded has become the material in which I make the work.
Starting with hand-painted paper I cut out shapes, leaving them whole or retaining a simple boundary, before assembling them into painting-like compositions, the end result being highly colorful and vibrant abstractions. I also use this same process and it is repeated on a bigger scale in a series I have installed directly on the wall.
How I find my shapes and where they come from is not arbitrary. However, the shapes are simply organic figures reminiscent of circles or flower petals or the shape of a face. They are significant to me in that after several years of painting abstractly I began to notice a pattern of shapes that I liked to make or that pleased me. I started extracting or isolating these from those layers of abstraction. These shapes are present in my paintings and now in the works made from paper – they are just being used differently. In a way they emerged from chaos and became organized and now they have been abstracted again through process.
Historically, I have been an artist who has worked on pieces in the studio alone and shown them only after months, even years of scrutiny before the public ever sees them. Now when I am asked to install directly on the wall, I find myself slightly nervous and excited with my folders of cut paper and some idea of what I want to do. Keeping in mind that I have several hours, maybe that whole day, and hoping that I will be satisfied with the result.
In this new work the planning and the execution have become intertwined. The installed piece presents the inseparability of knowing/not knowing; the installation is the result, sum, residue of action and real-time experience. Process and object become fused. So far it has never been the same piece twice.
