The opening reception for Ink is Friday, July 8 6:00-8:00 pm. It is free and open to the public. Please consider joining us!
The exhibition features thirty-nine works on paper in ink, by the following artists: Roberta Allen, Chris Arabadjis, Nancy Blum, Lori Ellison, Sky Pape, Jessica Deane Rosner, and Eric Wolf.
Roberta Allen’s works are made with metallic ink pens on black paper. Small-scale and intimate, these elegant and abstract diagrammatic drawings illustrate phrases written in cursive, part of Allen’s ongoing series exploring consciousness, Mind Matters: An Unscientific Exploration of the Mind. Combining the subjective and objective with text and imagery, the artist uses humor and paradox to “subvert the viewer’s expectations to stimulate self-awareness or reflection.” Chris Arabadjis creates his 11 x 10-inch drawings using red and blue ballpoint pens, largely during his two-hour daily subway commute. He employs a rule-based system, making marks while following rules that determine how it can be differentiated from the previous mark, mimicking a process of growth and mutation. Arabadjis describes the creation of his work as part of a meditative practice; he thinks of his drawings as “mini physics calculations or simulations…like trying to build my own universe from scratch.” In her drawings Nancy Blum creates undulant and biomorphic abstract forms by repeating adjacent lines with black and gold ink on white paper, or in one larger work, white ink on black paper. In the smaller drawings, the gold and white linear elements overlap so that moiré patterns emerge, adding an optical vibrancy to the work. Blum’s forms coil and pulsate with an organic, fecund energy, and are an expression of the artist’s desire to communicate the interconnectivity of all living things. Lori Ellison (1958-2015) was well known for her intricate, patterned drawings made with Paper Mate ballpoint pens on lined notebook paper. Ellison celebrated the use of humble, accessible, and portable materials, and as she noted, “….One does not have to make large work to hold a wall. Compactness and concision can be a relief in this age of spectacle.” Her drawings nearly always fill the page with a variety of repeated motifs. For example, in this show, circles, eye-shapes, star formations, basket-weaves, and biomorphic forms are all rendered with a devotional intensity. Sky Pape switched from working in oil to working with ink and paper after a series of life events made the former medium untenable. She has found ink to be an endlessly rich material for discovery and expression in her linear and patterned geometric abstract drawings. Working with white ink on black or blue grounds, Pape explores variations of radiant and complex configurations that shimmer and pulsate. For the artist, the slight irregularities in the drawings “reveal tipping points between stability and collapse, and the dance between continuity and uncertainty that pervades our lives.” Jessica Deane Rosner’s small-scale, dense, and detailed drawings are made predominately with ink but also include watercolor. They are part of her ongoing Ruled Unruled series, where sections of the work are made as perfectly as possible with drawing tools, with subsequent marks added freehand. The inclusion of brightly colored passages in two of the works is, for Rosner, a “representation of wary optimism in a violent, exhausting world of bad news and shocking events.” Eric Wolf is the sole artist in the exhibition who uses brushes rather than pens to apply ink to his paintings on paper. Bold and undulating passages in rich, dark blacks as well as tonal washes in gray describe the essence of rocks, bodies of water, distant mountains and changing light. Since the late 1980s the artist has traveled to the Phillips Memorial Wilderness Preserve near Oquossoc, Maine to directly observe the natural beauty of the locale. The resultant paintings are a vibrant and pure distillation of observed nature, each created in a single working session.