NYAB Event - Kathy Cantwell, Suejin Jo and Pat Badt Exhibitions

Kathy Cantwell, Suejin Jo and Pat Badt Exhibitions

The Painting Center

[Image: Pat Badt "Selfie Portugal Stone and Corkwood" (2015) Oil on support, 40 x 30 in.]

This event has ended.

The Painting Center presents Kathy Cantwell: Nightlines and Suejin Jo: The Rite of Spring in the Main Gallery and Pat Badt: Short Stories in the Project Room.

Artist Kathy Cantwell knows her way around a stripe. In the paintings on display in her current one- person show Nightlines, she takes a pattern associated with regularity and restriction and transforms it into of vehicle of indeterminacy and expansion. Working in encaustic, the painter shuns the straight edge in favor of jaggedness, variable density, and overlapping. As an art student, Cantwell was drawn to the work of Gene Davis, a color field painter known for his color-balancing act of verticals. Taking his minimalist cue, she collapses the space between form and color, using simplicity and singularity to explore chromatic relationships. Yet for Cantwell, it is about the process of laying down the color, and her stripes result from making a complete side-to-side gesture with resistance from her medium.

She is equally an expressionist in her palette, which hovers in twilight tonalities. Even when a brighter shade is introduced, it is subdued by the wax medium and by the surrounding embrace of darkness. Allowing for associations and metaphor, Cantwell admires the work of Sean Scully, and she seeks to similarly elicit humanistic content from a universally recognized motif. With encaustic, she takes advantage of its having passed from one state to another, which is an almost fleshy embodiment of crossing the line or of knowing no boundaries.

After working in the music industry in New York City, Kathy Cantwell moved to New Jersey, where she currently lives with her wife and two children. In 2015, she had a solo exhibition Landforms at Gallery 103 in Maplewood, NJ. She has been shown in such group exhibits as: “Square Foot” Project Gallery, Miami Art Basel, Miami, FL, Arte Internazionale in Matera, Italy, One + One, A Gallery, Provincetown, MA,
Viewpoints 2015, Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Arts, Baruch College’s Mishkin Gallery, Montclair State University’s George Segal Gallery, the Monmouth Museum, the Edward Hopper House in Nyack, N.Y., and numerous others.

Suejin Jo’s paintings are often inspired by poetry, music and memories of childhood landscapes. When she found out about the upcoming show three months ago she wanted to make all new works for it and sought inspiration in Igor Stravinsky’s ballet and orchestral music, The Rite of Spring. She feels that, even though over a hundred years have passed since its first performance, that Stravinsky composition stays as fresh and awesome as the return of the Spring itself every year. Her first work “Adoration of the Earth” was followed by “The Sacrifice” and then by “Dances of the young girls” and “Dance of the Earth”. Jo hopes to complete two more ongoing paintings before the show opens.

Suejin Jo, a Korean born abstract painter based in New York, studied at Columbia University and the Art Students League where she won McDowell traveling fellowship juried by Richard Pousette D’Art and Romare Bearden. Jo had numerous solo and group exhibitions in New York, Korea, Mexico, Italy and Japan and participated in several art fairs including Scope, Pool, Architecture and Design and AAF. Her last solo show was in Knokke-Heist, Belgium, in 2014. Jo won Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Solo Exhibition Award 2008 juried by DC Moore Gallery. Her work “Pontchartrain” was included in the 2012 State Department calendar, “Homage to American Women Artists.” Jo’s work is in many private and public collections including Library of Congress, Chase Manhattan Bank, General Instrument Company, Embassy of San Marino, NAPABA Law Foundation, Sogang Univerisity, Ahl Foundation, 9/11 Memorial Museum, Art in General, Korea Exchange Bank, Hyundai Construction Co., Pulmuwon Food Corp.

Short Stories refers to Pat Badt’s recent series of paintings, which explores the memories of people, places and things that create moments of experience. Badt often uses the backs of her paintings to embed found objects that refer to the painting’s subjects, creating hidden “readings” that inform her work. For this exhibition, these works are presented on hinges so that the viewer is able to see behind the paintings and glimpse this secret place.

Pat Badt’s work is inspired by memory and place, filtered through experience and sensibility. Her studio is in an old barn along the Jordan Creek, surrounded by apple orchards, low mountains and the convergence of two creeks. She loves the process of painting — the laying down of paint and the quest to find the appropriate handwriting and the right color, texture and scale.
Pat Badt is Artist-in-Residence / Professor Emeritus at Cedar Crest College. She received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and her BA from the University of California at Santa Cruz. She splits her time between New York City and Pennsylvania.