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Luscious Painting Exhibition: BIG, FAT & JUICY


BIG, FAT & JUICY


Exuberant
Painting, May 2 – June 28, 2014



Free Opening Reception, Artist Talk and All-Age Art Workshop:

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Friday,
May 2, 6:30-8:00PM


New! Artist Talk: 7PM

Find out what's happening in Pelhamfor free with the latest updates from Patch.

Art
Center is pleased to announce Big, Fat & Juicy, a group show of

large-scale abstraction that pushes the boundaries of the physicality of

paint. Paintings and sculptures by four New York-based artists, Emily

Noelle Lambert, Dorothy Robinson, Josette Urso and Deborah Zlotsky,

combine the deliberate spontaneity found in abstract painting and the

inventive possibilities of paint itself, which appear here in lush and

expressive ways.  Big Fat & Juicy will be on view from May 2 – June

28, 2014 with an opening reception, and all-age hands-on workshop on

Friday, May 2 from 6:30-8:00pm. Make sure to arrive on time to hear the

Artist Talk at 7pm. Admission is free and open to the public.


Curated
by Alexi Rutsch-Brock and Elizabeth Saperstein, the title of the show

comes from the exuberant qualities that get people excited about

painting:  large scale canvases, spirited brushwork and tactile surfaces

that stimulate all the senses. From a distance, a viewer can discern

geometric shapes and topographies, connected by a bounty of colors. Up

close, it gets even better, and links the physical with the personal.

The three-dimensionality of the paint comes into focus, bumps, clumps

and all, and reveals how each artist handles paint very differently, but

to similar conclusions. Paint moves around the surface as the weather

moves across the earth, which these artists embrace as a metaphor for

the peaks, valleys, storms and myriad barometric terms used to describe

life’s journey.

“The exhibit examines how paint is approached, either as a spontaneous action or something that looks like a mistake, but is actually constructed,” says Alexi-Rutsch Brock, a visual artist and educator, and co-curator of the exhibit. “The works show everything that paint can do.” Dorothy Robinson creates landscapes that are on the verge of imploding or exploding; sky and water merge, the earth cracks

open and the stage is set, invoking the journey to the center of the

earth. Or is the soul? The swirling, shifting of tectonic plates give

way to Josette Urso’s idiosyncratic, acrobatically-infused surfaces that

weave, smear and spin, a kind of visual mountaineering that feels like

you are traveling with the artist’s brush in short, fast leaps of color

and shapes. Deborah Zlotsky’s jewel-like dangling rocks deliver us to

the sedimentary layer of the earth, all chunky cave-crystals or Mexican

salt mines, prehistoric, amorphous – closer to the rock. If the journey

starts with Robinson, perhaps it ends with Emily Noelle Lambert. Here,

among the found wood, objects, detritus, and paint that the artist

intuitively transforms into totemic sculptures and vibrant paintings, is

an extraordinary resting place, absolutely personal, and entirely

hopeful. “Accidents and change are showing in the work, and that is the

evidence of the process and journey,” says Rutsch-Brock of the work

included in the show. “You can’t always tell where it starts and ends,

but all this substance peeking through gives you a sense of a time

before.”

 
Related Programming
Friday, May 2
6:30-8pm- Opening Reception and All-Age Art Workshop
7pm- Artist talk

 
About the Artists

EMILY NOELLE LAMBERT

Emily
Noelle Lambert received her MFA from Hunter College, New York and her

BA in Visual Art from Antioch College, Ohio.  Lambert has shown

nationally and internationally including past solo exhibitions in New

York, Chicago, and IMART in South Korea.  She has also been included in

numerous group shows in New York, Weekend Space in LA, and RH+Gallery in

Istanbul. Emily was born and raised in Pittsburgh and now lives and

works in New York City. She has been a Keyholder Resident artist with

the Lower East Side Printshop and was recently awarded a 2014 residency

with the Dieu Donné Workspace.

DOROTHY ROBINSON

Dorothy Robinson is a Brooklyn-based artist; she has exhibited her work at Slate

Gallery in Williamsburg and Edward Thorp Gallery in Manhattan. She

studied geography as an undergraduate and received an MFA in painting in

1993 from UC Berkeley. She has been awarded residencies at Marie Walsh

Sharpe Art Foundation and Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and a grant

from the Pollock Krasner Foundation.

JOSETTE URSO

Josette
Urso received her MFA in Painting from the University of South Florida

and currently works in New York City. Urso has had numerous grants and

residencies, including, a Gottlieb Foundation Award in 2013, Yaddo in

2009 and a second Pollock-Krasner Foundation award and residency at the

Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Germany, both in 2008.  She traveled to

Taiwan for a residency at STOCK20 in 2006 and to Cambodia with the AIEP

American Artist’s Abroad program in 2004.  Other awards include those

from Basil H. Alkazzi, the NEA and Art Matters and she was a participant

in the Bronx Museum for the Arts AIM program. In New York City, she has

shown at the Drawing Center, Storefront, Norte Maar, DFN Gallery,

Markel Fine Arts, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Metaphor Contemporary, and the

New York Public Library.       

DEBORAH ZLOTSKY

Deborah Zlotsky is a 2012 recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts

Fellowship in painting and is represented by Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in

New York. She has exhibited her work in exhibitions across the country,

and her drawings are in the curated flat files of Pierogi Gallery and

The Boston Drawing Project at Joseph Carroll and Sons Gallery, as well

as the online-curated registry at The Drawing Center. A selected list of

public collections includes Nordstrom, Progressive Insurance, Rutgers

University, the Waldorf Astoria, the New York Palace Hotel and the

Albany Institute of History and Art. Over the past 10 years, she has

received residency fellowships at Yaddo, VCCA, Ox-Bow, Millay Colony for

the Arts, Ragdale Foundation, the Weir Farm Art Center and the

Kimmel-Harding-Nelson Center for the Arts.

About the Curators

BIG
FAT & JUICY  is organized by Alexi Rutsch-Brock, a visual artist

and art educator, and Elizabeth Saperstein, an independent curator.

Involved with the Art Center since childhood, Rutsch-Brock has served on

the Art Center’s Gallery Advisory Committee and has organized exhibits

throughout the metropolitan area since 1989, most recently “Legitimate

Vagina” at Miranda Fine Arts in Port Chester, NY. She received her MS

from the College of New Rochelle and her BFA from the School of Visual

Arts, and is an art teacher at New Rochelle High School. Saperstein has

served on the Art Center’s Gallery Advisory Committee since 2004, where

she has organized several thematic group exhibits including still life,

landscape, comics and cartography; most recently, she organized “Horizon

Variations,” at the Camera Club of New York.  She is a former professor

of multimedia studies at the University of the Arts and program manager

at the Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop. She received her MA from Purchase

College and BS from Emerson College.

###
Pelham Art Center   155 Fifth Avenue   Pelham, NY 10803   914-738-2525   info@pelhamartcenter.org
Hours: Tuesday–Friday, 10–5pm; Saturday, 10–4pm
Directions: Located 5 blocks from the Hutchinson Parkway exit 12 and 2 blocks from the Metro North Pelham stop

These
events and programs are made possible, in part, by the ArtsWestchester

with funds from Westchester County Government. Pelham Art Center also

receives funding from: New York State Council on the Arts, A State

Agency; Westchester Jewish Community Services; hibu; Nurses Network of

America; Town of Pelham; New Rochelle Campership Fund; Bistro Rollin;

Robin’s Art+Giving; Nycon; Junior League of Pelham, Prospect Hill

Lunchtime Enrichment; Strypemonde Foundation; Mark Link Insurance;

Broadway Electric, Owen Berkowitz; Members; and Annual Fund Donors.

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