Posit

A journal of literature and art

Galen Cheney

Posted on September 18, 2023 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

I have been dedicated to painting for the last 30 years. It is an intensely personal,meaningful and difficult pursuit that I have come to rely on as a way to understand myself and my place in the world. It is in the act of painting that I am both my most vulnerable and brave, where I take risks, face my fears, wrestle with my ego, and remember with urgency that there is no time to make anything that is not true. My paintings are abstract and generally large and are statements about energy made manifest through intuitive color choices, invented compositions, resounding mark making and the cathartic act of ripping and tearing past works in the service of the new. Both thematically and visually they address ideas of expansion and contraction, freedom and constraint, the hidden and exposed and interiority vs. exteriority. What I most want my paintings to convey is a raw vulnerability that is relatable to the viewer and transmits authenticity and beauty. I have long felt a deep kinship with graffiti of all kinds, from ancient cave paintings and centuries-old carved messages on China’s Great Wall, to tags on trains and city walls and declarations of love carved into trees. They all contain the energy of the human hand and the basic human need to tell a story, leave a mark, be remembered. These influences have been present in my work in various ways for many years. The work I am exploring now is a blend of collage, painting and weaving. The pieces are a synthesis of old and new; fragments and strips of paintings that I have ripped or cut up are collaged and woven into new works. Conversations between current and past ideas are embedded in the richly textured surfaces of the paintings, reflecting today’s fragmented digital world while nodding toward traditions of weaving and the handmade.

Galen Cheney is a painter living and working in North Adams, Massachusetts. She was born in Los Angeles and grew up in New England where she has deep roots and feels a strong connection to the land and architecture. After receiving her undergraduate degree in art and Italian from Mount Holyoke College she lived in New York City and worked as a magazine editor. Realizing she was in the wrong profession, she left New York after a few years to attend graduate school at the Maryland Institute, College of Art. Thirty-plus years later, she is still painting. Galen’s work has been exhibited and collected in Europe, the U.S., Canada, and China. She has had residencies at the Millay Colony, Vermont Studio Center, MASS MoCA, and DaWang Culture Highland in Shenzhen, China. A residency at Pouch Cove, in Newfoundland is upcoming in 2024. Past shows include Buffalo Arts Studio, Mark Bettis Gallery (Asheville), David Richard Gallery (NYC), University of Maine at Augusta, University of Dallas, The Painting Center (NYC), Gray Contemporary (Houston), and Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, among many others. Her work has been featured in many publications, including New American Paintings, Art New England, Tupelo Quarterly, Berkshire Magazine and Whitefish Review. She was recently interviewed for the podcasts Sound and Vision and I Like Your Work.

Jane Kent

Posted on May 25, 2023 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

Printed images, to me, are built from the ground plane forward. Layer over layer. I begin with an object using drawing to uncover the oddness of everyday things. For this new work, I am using mirrors. Loosely drawn ovals and rectangles are placed over a backdrop of wallpaper; graphic shorthand of diagonal stripes represents reflective surfaces which become fields of color.

Previously, I have worked with unfolded cardboard boxes, shower heads, clock faces and
drafting lights. Now, I am looking at the distinct configurations of reflection — looking at subject as an invitation to look at looking itself.

Jane Kent makes drawings, prints and artists’ books. She has been working on an artists’ book project since 1999 and has just completed her 6th collaborative project in this series, Little Albert. Working with a previously unpublished prose poem by Joyce Carol Oates, Little Albert, published by Grenfell Press, will be released in May 2023. Kent’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of Art, Library of Congress, Print and Rare Book Division, Beinecke Library, among others. She has previously shown at the Brooklyn Museum, Mississippi Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, International Print Center of New York, among others. She has been awarded grants from the Lower Eastside Printshop, NY (publishing residency), 2022; Barbara and Thomas Putnam Fellowship, MacDowell Colony, Artist Residency Fellowship, 2012; The Corporation of Yaddo (artists’ fellowship), 2017, 2004, 1995; National Endowment for the Arts (individual artists’ grant), 1990; among others. She lives in New York City and teaches at the University of Vermont.

Taraneh Mosadegh

Posted on May 17, 2022 by Posit Editor

Mount Damavand (2021) — The Wind Will Carry Us (2021)

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Artist’s Statement

In my practice, by using Micro/Macro levels of observation and intuition, I intend to understand nature, humanity, science, and the threads and patterns that connect them. I mean to acknowledge the interconnectedness between humans and other forms of being without privileging humans. Repetitive mark-making, exploring the materiality of paint and the transparency of each pigment, layering one on top of the other, creates a spatiality that helps me pinpoint zones where the human and the non-human overlap, intertwine and resonate.

Since 2020, I have been experimenting with a 400-year-old formal technique, Reverse Glass Painting, which uses a transparent material to combine reflective light on glass with the subject’s emergence. The surface glass covering the painting is also refractive, absorbing select wavelengths of light but not others. Using multiple layers of glass makes a material conversation of vernacular form and biomorphic organic shapes. Color, Reflection, and Refraction provide the vocabulary.

The trajectories of the reverse glass painting have been part of Iranian history for a long time: This technique arrived in Iran via the Silk Road around the 17th century from Venice. Safavids embraced it, and the Zand dynasty sustained it, but the method prevailed during the Qajar era (1789-1925). During this period, not only did Iranian paintings change as a result of European influence, but also Iran encountered political upheavals: Constitutional revolution; Women criticizing the social and political state of the nation; Iran getting partitioned by foreign forces, etc. Before this era, reverse glass painting was primarily used in interior decorations, but after that, it evolved to be autonomous artwork by individual artists. It reflected the realities of its time.

Taraneh Mosadegh is an Iranian visual artist based in Vermont and New York. She earned her MFA from The Le Roy. E Hoffberger School of Painting at MICA in Baltimore and her BFA from Tehran Art University. She has been an artist-in-residence at Vermont Studio Center, The Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, and The Windy Mowing Artist Retreat. She has shown her work in Tehran, Toronto, Baltimore, Johnson VT, and Woodstock, NY. Mosadegh is the recipient of the 2022 Vermont Arts Council Development Grant and the 2019 Alumnux juried exhibition prize of Vermont Studio Center, where she will have a solo exhibition at The Red Mill Gallery in October 2022.

Tamar Zinn

Posted on January 24, 2022 by Posit Editor

Behind Closed Eyes 19 (2019) — Behind Closed Eyes 21 (2019)

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Artist’s Statement

As a visual artist, I am driven by curiosity about what is possible, rather than seeking certainty. By working intuitively and without a preconceived endpoint, I let the work lead the way. The thread that runs through my paintings and drawings is the embrace of the transitory nature of our experiences. While recent paintings have centered on shifting atmospheric sensations, my drawings are a visual manifestation of breath and gesture.

In my search for quiet in an increasingly tumultuous world, several years ago I began a daily practice of sitting in stillness, open to whatever came into view from behind closed eyes. In two recent painting series, Behind Closed Eyes and Where I Find Myself, I’ve gravitated towards the ineffable sensations I experience during this daily period of reflective solitude. Particles of light slowly rearrange themselves across the field, colors shimmer and recede, and there is a never-ending flow between stillness and drama. Having shifted from painting singular images to multi-panel installations, the paintings increasingly reflect the belief that nothing is fixed, and that our perceptions are comprised of a multiplicity of moments.

Since I am seduced by light but also drawn to aspects of formalism, finding a balance between the two keeps the work in a state of tension until each element seems to find its place. The formal structure of the multi-panel paintings allows me to place unique sensory experiences side by side and present them as one. And ultimately, it is the imposition of this structure that gives me the freedom to fix in place that which is impermanent.

In my drawings, my embrace of both transitory and formal concerns is revealed through the interaction between gesture and the field. Attention to the unique nature of the field for each series of drawings grounds me in formal structure. Making the field is a slow and methodical process in which multiple layers of pigmented charcoal are gently rubbed into the surface of the paper. It is only once the field is established that I turn my attention to drawing the lines, an act that is filled with risk and where I feel most exposed.

For me, to draw is to breathe and to breathe is to experience a fullness of self. In this way, my drawings are rooted in the time of their making. Recent drawing series have reflected a dance between line and space — each helps to define the other. Each gesture is a choreography of movements, and once made, the marks may be altered but all that was there remains. While the gestures may be evocative of many things, my drawings depict nothing in particular.

Tamar Zinn is a visual artist whose work balances light-infused romanticism and reductive structure. Both painting and drawing are integral to her studio practice and distinct in both intention and process. Recent exhibits of Zinn’s work include Where I find myself, a 2021 solo exhibit of paintings at Markel Fine Arts, NYC, and Liminal Space, a 4-person show at Bryant Street Gallery, Palo Alto, in 2020 where Zinn exhibited a selection of drawings. Zinn has curated several group exhibitions and periodically blogs about contemporary art. Her work is included in corporate and private collections throughout the United States.

Hester Simpson

Posted on May 11, 2021 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

The echoes of childhood define who we are. We live in memory. — Benjamin Bush, Dust to Dust

My abstract paintings are founded in early memory, creating an emotional space that pervades my everyday life. This emotional space is what I paint. When I paint, I mix thinned acrylics to a pourable consistency, allowing an even flow over panel. I work slowly, building strata of paint in even, smooth layers, evolving mutable patterns. In this way, I record time spent, an accumulation of memory and of returning again and again to the activity of paint on panel. Color is the expressive component of my work, informed by dreams, memory, and theory. The interaction of purple, brown, green and yellow, for example comes directly from a dream, in which a visitor to my studio points to four colors on my palette and states, “These are your colors. This is what you must do.” I know immediately that these colors represent my immigrant grandparents, influential in my formative years, and essential to my present. While I play with systems of pattern and color, challenging what I know, I revisit these seminal colors during times of change.

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke describes this phenomenon:

And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time.

Such change recently occurred in the wake of my mother’s death and the clearing of my childhood home. What has emerged is a new form which pays homage to the life of trees, and how they bear witness to our own existence. My research tells me that we share 25% of our DNA with trees. As I pass them on my daily walks, they speak to me of regeneration. I respond with new paintings.

Work creates its own time. — Ad Reinhardt

Hester Simpson grew up on Long Island’s north shore in the embrace of her immigrant grandparents. Her grandfather, a painter, lavished his enthusiasm for art in every corner of life. Today, decades since his passing, Simpson credits his spirit with her own passion for her practice. Simpson studied at Carnegie-Mellon University and Cranbrook Academy of Art, and has been a Visiting Artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Tyler School of Art, and The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, among others. The highlight of her 30-year teaching career, however, is in leading and evaluating workshop programs for the homeless, the disabled, and the incarcerated. Simpson is represented by more than 30 works in the William Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection, a philanthropic arm of the Harlem Children’s Zone. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Gottlieb Foundation Grant, a Wolf-Kahn Exhibition Grant, and three residencies at The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico which transformed her sense of light and color, profoundly influencing her painting to this day. Simpson has exhibited her work internationally and is represented by Ricco Maresca Gallery New York City, where she has had five solo shows. Phyllis Braff of The New York Times has described her work as “mesmerizing.”

Dee Shapiro

Posted on May 11, 2021 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

As in a dream of alternative realities, absurd connections, or on a trip passing familiar landscapes in unfamiliar settings, new conscious and unconscious associations are brought to a 2-dimensional surface in my work. In the recent pieces, geometry (seen even in the structure of organic forms) directs composition: arbitrary drops of color undermine control and create shapes that succumb to the overwork of drawings, rendering obsessive intricacies and paint application building the forms. Collage material adds extraneous influences in a subtle blend.

In the beginning was pattern. First the Fibonacci progression color coded on graph paper, followed by a series of work that included architectural elements off the grid. With all the work, always color, a nod to the Albers studies. A redirection to small horizontal paintings of the geometry in cities and landscapes ensued for a number of years.

Missing the early fascination and engagement with pattern led to more recent work exploring evocative biological and organic forms, the evolution of which is the more recent work as well as borrowing from sources that include other artist’s work in a collaborative effort.

Another direction takes me to appropriate iconic paintings of women by well-known artists in the past and to rework those images in pattern with paint, ink and mixed media.

Always a continuum in my current practice is the exploration of pattern wherever it appears in other sources and cultures as well as imagined and combined.

In this newest body of work, I am unflinchingly forging ahead to newly wrought terrain with the underlying echoes of the beginnings.

Featured in the Pattern and Decoration exhibit at PS I, Dee Shapiro has exhibited in New York and elsewhere since the late 1970’s, with solo and group exhibitions at AIR, Andre Zarre Gallery, Everson Museum, Nassau County Museum, David Richard Gallery, Bernay Fine Art and many other galleries and museums in the US and abroad. Her work is in the collections of the S.R. Guggenheim Museum, Heckscher Museum, Albright Knox Gallery, Birmingham Museum, William Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection, and other university, corporate, and private collections.

A painter who also writes and makes artists’ books, Shapiro’s practice explores the intersection of pattern, nature and geometry. Her imagery is borrowed and imagined from weaving, beading and the crafts of other cultures, as well as biomorphic forms overlapping within each individual piece. She employs a variety of media and has produced several bodies of work including systemic patterning, city and landscapes, prints and large figurative mixed media pieces. She has been teaching art history and studio art at Empire State College, SUNY, and Old Westbury, NY.

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