“Child’s Play” Exhibition

Odetta Gallery

[Image: Meg Atkinson "Small Beer" (2014) oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in.]

This event has ended.

Keeping their inner child unabashedly front and center, the four artists of Child’s Play take a romp through color, ethics, and war. We see through their works their hearts, unfiltered, open, and mischievous. Meg Atkinson, Ken Kocses, Margaret Roleke, and Eileen Weitzman share an interest in the adult nature inherent in toys, visual games, and positing political and social concerns through their sculptural and painted works.

In the Flat File: Featured artist Lydia Viscardi will present a series of paintings on panel that speak directly to childhood memories. Fran Kornfeld’s drawings and paper pulp pieces come from a larger series called Icarus.

It was Picasso who said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
While her work in Child’s Play is not meant specifically to capture the exact meaning of this quotation, she believe in its efficacy at getting at the root of what makes art compelling, of what makes making art compelling. Time spent in the studio is as close a return to childhood as she can imagine. There is nothing else like it; time falls away. The playfulness that emerges in her imagery is in part an expression of joy.
Meg Atkinson is an artist and art educator. She has exhibited in the New York and tri-state area, including shows at Morgan Lehman Gallery and Storefront Ten Eyck. Meg has also contributed to the blog, Painters on Paintings, and has had fiction published in BookCourt’s literary magazine, Cousin Corinne’s Reminder. Meg lives and works in Brooklyn.

Kenny Colors is a mixed media painter currently residing in Queens, NY. Born in 1983 in Central New Jersey, he attended Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI from 2001-2005, earning a BFA in Painting.

At an early age, he showed an affinity for artistic expression using the colorful toys and games of his childhood. Sports and games held something of a sacred status with him, exemplified through his dedicated following of local professional sports teams. To him, a pro sports game was more than a game; it was the sanctification of the lighthearted.

After moving to Brooklyn, NY in 2006, began to study improvisational comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, which develops his sense of play in the dynamic stage environment, an experience that affected him both on a personal and artistic level. Kenny wrote, acted, directed and produced multiple stage and video shows in the period from 2006-2010. The shows were loose riffs around a central, absurd story, usually rich in 80s & 90s pop culture nostalgia.

It wasn’t until 2011 that Kenny recommitted to a studio practice. Working closely with digital drawing tools, he meticulously painted Photoshop reproductions of old video game scenes. To counter this digital heavy approach, Kenny also pursued a series of expressionist, mixed media collages using print outs of Internet-based images. These works were shown in various Brooklyn group shows in 2012-2013.
Soon after, Kenny became heavily influenced by craft store materials such as pipe cleaners, craft poms and googly eyes, as well as other dollar store toys. The cheap and goofy nature of these materials were perfectly conducive to an even more lighthearted approach to his art making. In 2014, he transformed his basement home studio into an “Art Funhouse”, painting bold, busy patterns on the walls as a backdrop for a series of fabric covered paintings. This style was also carried out in his 2015 installation “The War Of War” at Christopher Stout Gallery in Brooklyn, NY.

In the body of work for “Child’s Play” Roleke has created diminutive worlds in which toys tell the story of consumption, consumerism, war, and the misuse of power and religion. The monochromatic tableaus are a vehicle for contemplative meditation but jarring elements keep the viewer unsettled.

Margaret Roleke is a sculptor and also makes works on paper. She has lived and worked in New York and Connecticut for most of her life. Her work has been exhibited often. Highlights include a solo exhibit in 2016 at Arcilesi and Homberg Fine Art on the lower eastside of NYC and a 2-person show at ODETTA in 2015. She has been reviewed in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, and other publications. Her sticker pieces are in the flatfiles of Pierogi.

Eileen Weitzman’s new work is influenced by my extensive travelling and uses materials and designs found in the Middle East and Africa. These lively colored and patterned sculptures explore contemporary issues of global concern with a smattering of psychological insight and wit. Her stitched drawings, reflecting the schizophrenic tensions of daily life, attempt to jump out of their foundation and create a life of their own. All of the pieces were started with a smidgen of an idea and evolved organically while searching for the meaning of life.

Eileen Weitzman was born in Chicago, Illinois. She received an MSW and JD, but in recent years she has concentrated on her self taught art making. Her work has been exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally at Windows Gallery (Birobidjan,Russia ), Newark University Gallery,(Newark, NJ), Pierogi Gallery, Monumental Propoganda (NY,NY, Canada and Russia) and Centotto Gallery, Valentine Gallery, and Life on Mars Gallery (Bushwick, NY). She has received a fellowship from Vermont Studio Center, artist grants from Artists Space and Puffin foundation and an NEH grant.

Recently she travelled to Egypt and Ethiopia on an artist residency where she lectured at Zoma Contemporary Art Center in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She is currently working with the artist program at Creedmoor Living Art Museum where she has worked for many years.
Her work is in private collections in New York, Berlin, Germany, Paris, France, Chicago,Houston, Phoenix and San Diego.

Lydia Viscardi is best known for her representational mixed media collages that combine highly detailed realistic painted and drawn imagery with flat shapes cut out from patterned papers and fabrics. Her work demonstrates a sustained interest in exploring the complex relationship between humans and animals. She is also fascinated with neuroscience and memory, particularly childhood memory, and how it informs adult identity.

Viscardi mines her own childhood and past for potent experiences that she depicts with both humor and an uneasiness that creates psychological tension. This irony imbues her two-dimensional mixed media Childworks and Recollections series and her assemblage sculpture. Viscardi teaches Studio Art at Quinnipiac University and Housatonic Community College and is a museum educator at the Housatonic Museum of Art and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art.

For several years Fran Kornfeld has been exploring the process of papermaking. Through time, she developed a technique that proved to be a unique approach to painting; one that involved the use of plain and pigmented linen pulps that are applied with conventional kitchen tools, rather than with brushes or palette knives. For this series of works for Child’s Play, Kornfeld has combined the disciplines of drawing and pulp painting in a series of pieces titled “Icarus Descending” (parts1-3). This new approach has opened up a world of possibilities that can be applied to any future works, whether they are on paper or installed directly on the walls of an exhibition space.
Fran Kornfeld lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her B.A. with a major in art at Brooklyn College and currently serves on the board of ATOA (Artists Talk On Art). Her work has been extensively shown in the metropolitan area and beyond and her most recent shows include “New Visions” at FiveMyles, “River and Biota” at the Freyberger Gallery, Penn State Berks, Reading, PA and “Small Works/Baruch” at the Sidney Mishkin Gallery, New York, NY.