Kes Zapkus, Mary Shaffer, Marilynn Gelfman, Francois Deschamps, Daniel Schottenfeld, Ben Dallas Exhibitions
OK Harris Works of Art
This event has ended.
Kes Zapkus
This new group of works from Kes Zapkus fluctuates between polarities of structure and romanticism. Frameworks of the artist’s felt experiences underlie this painterly abstract form. Zapkus’ tendency to present complex informational fields relates to his fascination with parallels to musical composition and the digital world. Each distinctly individual painting is a facet of a gradual, five-year cyclical, evolutionary process.
Mary Shaffer
One of the significant influences in the American Studio Glass movement of the 1970s, Mary Shaffer developed a technique she calls “mid-air slumping,” a unique method of bending glass into art. Her “Tools” series combines resonant, down-to-earth items like ice tongs, farm implements, and discarded buggy wrenches with the fluidity of molten or plate glass, in a marriage of sturdy simplicity, wit, and dazzling elegance.
Marilynn Gelfman
American Past Times & The Tenacity of Memory
The history of the United States is comparatively short, but as rich and complex as the cultures that comprise it. This exhibition addresses that history from two viewpoints.
American Past Times clocks are about passage of time told by the continuously variable position of clock hands pointing to and passing over small and familiar objects, a chorus of bits and pieces humming their histories to the tune of a cultural anthem.
Bi-frontal Pairs are evocations of characters from nursery rhymes, fairy tales, old stories and cultural icons constructed in pairs, connected back-to-back. Each figure is the obverse of its mated figural coin. Each pair poses with evocative moxie.
Francois Deschamps
For a year, living in Bamako, Mali, Francois Deschamps rode in the front seat of taxis. He examined the items displayed on the dashboards or hanging from the rear view mirrors as the slowly disintegrating taxis sat stalled in traffic or careened along the dusty streets. The dashboard became a metaphor for the driver’s personality as the chance juxtapositions of interior vs. exterior were a metaphor for Deschamps’ visual experience in Bamako. These photographs are the result.
Daniel Schottenfeld
Painting with gouache on the gum that came with packs of baseball cards, Daniel Schottenfeld has recreated the images gleaned from those cards and from other historical baseball imagery. These compulsively created, miniaturized people and vignettes exquisitely rendered on the most mundane and transitory of materials are relics of obsession and devotion.
Ben Dallas
Ben Dallas makes wall mounted constructions normally fabricated of wood and painted with a variety of acrylic media. His wedge-like pieces in various sizes are individual productions in a series of works he calls Gradients. Dallas paints the planes of his sculptural structures to produce both surface color and pictorial effects. Here, painting functions to visually equate and coexist with simple, dimensional forms resulting in a variety of dualistic composites.
[Image: Mary Shaffer “Chained Yellow #13-22” slumped glass and found metal 15 x 9 x 3 in.]
Media
Schedule
from December 14, 2013 to January 18, 2014
Opening Reception on 2013-12-14 from 15:00 to 17:00