“Reconfigured” and “Small Disturbances” Exhibition

Carter Burden Gallery

This event has ended.

Carter Burden Gallery presents three new exhibitions: Reconfigured in the East Gallery featuring Marilyn Church and Basia Goldsmith, Small Disturbances in the West gallery featuring Andrea Lilienthal, and On the Wall featuring Robert Petrick.

Marilyn Church presents large acrylic paintings of abstracted figures in Reconfigured. Although she occasionally strays into what seems like total abstraction, the figure has been a continuous theme throughout her career. The impact of the stories of victims and those charged, first fascinated her as a court room artist. A sense of intense emotion resonates in her works. Now, freed from any prescribed boundaries of subject matter, her work is based on improvisation, dream images and, intuition. Church explains, “In this process of discovery, a narrative eventually emerges however illusive it appears. It is often cloaked in mystery, eroticism, and ambiguity.”

Basia Goldsmith presents energetic, vibrant abstracted paintings in Reconfigured. For some time one of the recurrent subjects of Goldsmith’s paintings has been the cityscape viewed from her apartment. It encompasses Riverside Park, the West Side Highway, the Hudson River and, sometimes, the New Jersey and New York skylines. Her pieces transform with the different colors of the seasons, time of day, and even the scaffolding in front of the window to create a dynamic new story. Goldsmith’s paintings are embedded with photos and articles that are paired with painterly brushwork, creating a sense of dimensionality. Goldsmith states, “When I start to paint, I find myself in a constant struggle between my desire to have a conscious objective and the strong impulses from within, where I find myself painting in a subconscious state.”

In her second exhibition with Carter Burden Gallery Andrea Lilienthal presents dresses sewn from newsprint and thread in Small Disturbances. The forms highlight the images printed in the New York Times and call attention to life and nature under stress in many of the places the photographers focus their cameras on. Lilienthal seeks to transform images of sorrow and misery into beauty. She does so with the most transient material we throw away every day and gives it a new life. The dress patterns themselves elicit memories and associations of an earlier time when immigration, deforestation, and climate change were not on the front pages. She states, “The grief depicted here contrasts with the innocence of the form to elicit outrage, empathy, and hope. We look so fleetingly at these images as the newspapers are discarded. Here we can contemplate the photographs and find meaning. The dresses serve as memorials to the lives depicted and to the photographers who captured their stories.”

Robert Petrick presents an installation that challenges perception entitled ART/LIFE in On the Wall. Alongside his work in nonobjective painting, Petrick has always been intrigued with words and letters in art and as an intrinsic artform itself. ART/LIFE is his latest effort in the form of “psychopoetic” word and illusion, illustrating words that are not always what they seem.