The Brooklyn Arts Council administers Grants for projects based at senior center sites across the Borough.  Since February 2018, my placement at the Carmine Carro Community Center gave me the opportunity to work with seniors from Marine Park, Brooklyn.  The participants developed drawing and painting skills to render images onto clay slabs which resulted in ceramic tiles.  All materials were supplied through the Brooklyn Arts Council SU-CASA grant and firings took place at my studio in Red Hook.  The Carmine Carro Community Center provided the classroom space for approximately 12-14 seniors, who were inspired to create several designs as they gained confidence working with clay.

The themes reflected their interests in various travel locations or general subjects of nature or abstraction.  On June 22nd, an exhibition and reception was the final culmination of the teaching residency, coordinated along with an exhibit of artwork by children in the Marine Park community.

 

CARMINE CARRO COMMUNITY CENTER

 

http://milldev.org/marine-park-active-adults/

 

The exterior Mural, which was created during a three month session at IS 51 in Port Richmond, Staten Island.  Students from 6th through 8th grades were involved as a long term after school project initiated by LEAP,  Learning through an Expanded Arts Program.

Design for Mural Concept

Composite IS51R

Starting the project in October 2017, students used a white primer as a base coat on the school facade, facing Watchogue St.  Drawing a grid over the primer made the placement of images easier.  T-shirts contributed by the Sports and Arts Foundation made the process more manageable.

For Spring 2018 the School Cafeteria became the next site for a mural design to revamp the large room on the lower level.

A devoted group of students have created the scene which depicts a stylized version of life on the ocean floor.

www.leapnyc.org

Material Process

Curated by Peter Gynd

October 21 – 29, 2017

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 21, 12 – 6pm

Material Process is a multimedia exhibition of artworks by eleven artists working at TI Art Studios in Gowanus/Redhook Brooklyn. The artists in this exhibition—Jacob Faber, Judy Hugentobler, Sara Jones, Katherine Keltner, Kakyoung Lee, Casey Lin, Janice McDonnell, Spencer Merolla, AV Ryan, Traci Talasco, and Alexa Williams—present a variety of works ranging in use of materials from en plein air oil painting, to found object constructions, ceramic sculpture, and video installation.

The exhibition speaks to how materials and process hold influence on an artistic practice and the ways in which each artist dictates their own aesthetic and conceptual sensibilities through their media. Organized in conjunction with the annual Gowanus Open Studios, the reception for Material Process will coincide with the opening of artists workspaces to the public throughout the weekend of October 21-22.

Jacob Faber works with found wood and objects to create sculptures that suggest, or invite an interaction. The materials in his works are used in the condition which they were found in order to preserve the detailed impressed left upon them from their previous life. These details, along with their new sculptural forms, build narratives on the history and lifespan of an object beyond its original and intended use.

Judith Hugentobler’s ceramic works are inspired by landscape and the naturalistic textures found in them. She works with slab building techniques which allow her to enhance and articulate surface irregularities as the clay hardens, giving her vessels an organic sensibility within a cultivated form.

Sara Jones works with textiles, fabrics and threads in her paintings which examine the fluid borders between our memory and the spaces we inhabit. The formal repetition of the grid in her work is a literal reference to weaving, yet also metaphorically references a screen, or scrim: something that allows some things to flow through, but prevents others from entering or crossing the boundary.

Katherine Keltner explores order and randomness in her works and how images both construct and destruct a sense of identity. Her paintings are created using light washes of paint to capture a trace of objects from her immediate surroundings like scraps of paper, old drawings, and remnants from the studio floor. The resulting paintings hint at a personal narrative and the need to catalogue the objects of everyday life.

Kakyoung Lee’s moving images and video installations are focused on the overlapped—and accumulated—layered lines of non-historical daily images.  Starting from video footage captured from her daily surroundings, she deconstructs and reconstructs hundreds of sequences in a fresh structure, utilizing a time intensive process of hundreds of hand drawings to create reanimated interpretations of these events.

Casey Lin’s biomorphic ceramic sculptures are inspired by active organisms such as coral, parasites, fungi, and bacteria that seem to be simultaneously alive and broken down. Emphasizing the cyclical nature of growth and decay, she draws inspiration from the liveliness in clay that parallels a natural process of transformation and reuse.

Janice McDonnell’s paintings are about finding beauty in undesirable places. She paints traditional landscapes—both en plein air and from sketches in the studio—of the Brooklyn industrial waterfront and its surrounding commercial environments, adding an urban sensibility to the historical genre of landscape painting.

Spencer Merolla views materials as repositories of memory which both retain and transmit meaning. Coal Comforts is a concept bakery in which traditional baked goods are replaced with inedible versions made from coal ash. The ash holds a symbolic meaning suggestive of personal mortality (ashes to ashes, cremation, etc.) while the familiar and enticing forms of the baked goods speak to the temptations—and consequences—of overindulgence.

AV Ryan combines familiar elements from the Western art cannon with everyday objects to create abstract sculptures that tell a new story about materials. Her works are cast in lightweight materials including paper, joint compound and gesso, which she then reworks to bring a luminous and tactile quality to their surfaces.

Traci Talasco uses elements of architecture as a social/political space in her sculptures and installations. Balance and imbalance are repeating concepts in her work that translate in a number of ways from gender inequality, to financial imbalance, and day-to-day struggles. Employing a variety of home construction materials and decorative elements, she exploits commonly held associations with these everyday materials to further build on with her own narratives.

Alexa Williams’ wall-hanging sculpture references a sense of place and the tension between control and happenstance. Her use of industrial materials—including cement, construction chalk, spray paint, and graphite—reflects her New York surroundings and responds to and confronts the apparent rigidity of materials.

Sweet Lorraine Gallery

@ TI Art Studios   183 Lorraine St  Brooklyn, NY 11231    http://www.tiartstudios.com