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.

David Storey

Posted on May 25, 2023 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

I make paintings that engage the fluidly permeable boundaries between image and abstraction. Invention, configuration, clarity and the potential energy of color are essential elements to shape a painting that is being made to be uniquely about itself.

Painting is the proper forum for the description of an entire world. It can be an endless, timeless vista that seems to have boundaries yet presents no limits to the possibilities of ever renewing transformation.

Viewing and engaging with a painting is a contract. Once the terms are agreed upon all separations dissolve. The physical laws of here and now are void. Opposites merge. Painting brings us to another mysterious world within our own, collapsing sameness and difference into a universal visual moment.

David Storey is an artist who lives and works in New York. He makes paintings, drawings and prints that compound and condense the interaction between image and abstraction. Collections include the Museum of Modern Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Fellowships include the Guggenheim Foundation and an NEA individual artist’s fellowship in addition to residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Public art projects include for the MTA, fourteen mosaic murals installed in the 20th Ave. of the N line subway in Brooklyn (2019).

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.

Soledad Salamé

Posted on September 30, 2022 by Posit Editor

Garden of the Sacred Light (1994) — Grotto (1994)

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—images courtesy of Goya Contemporary and the artist—

Artist’s Statement

My art is a conceptual and visual exploration of the intersection of science, technology, and social justice issues defining the age in which we live. Engaged with the political implications of environmental issues, my recent work maps vulnerable marginalized communities suffering the greatest consequences of natural disasters.

Working in glass, silk, and paper effectively extended my visual vocabulary, incorporating textual relief elements to underscore collective negligence regarding climate change, including rapid melting of glaciers and polar ice caps. Climate change has triggered people’s migration from areas affected by rising water and unstable weather. In the USA, Border security policies intensify the social impact of migration, exacerbating unsustainable environmental practices.

Our world is in a constant flux and transformation. The way we communicate our actions’ consequences has been transformed. We once created a tactile object – a newspaper — providing a richly physical interaction made from plant-based paper; today, with the slow death of print media, we interact with world news through digital reporting, easily distorted or manipulated.

I wish to record this change as a call to action to protect both the earth’s precious natural resources and its people, while pointing to the fragile beauty surrounding us. By magnifying the pleasures inherent in natural materials — paper, textiles, and even sand-based glass – my work seeks to remind us of the magnificence and splendor that may be lost if we do not protect the environment.

Soledad Salamé, American, was born in Santiago, Chile in 1954. She currently lives and works
in Baltimore, Maryland, where she directs Sol Print Studio, an experimental space for artists to develop and refine their printmaking skills.

From 1973 to 1983 Salamé lived and studied in Venezuela. During this time she was exposed to the rainforest, a pivotal experience in her artistic development. As an interdisciplinary artist, Salamé creates work that originates from extensive research of specific environmental and human rights topics. In the pursuit of new ideas, she has conducted intensive field research in the Americas, and Antarctica.

Her work has been presented at multiple venues, Baltimore Museum of Art, Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD. Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; Denver Museum of Art, CO; Miami Art Museum, FL; El Museo Del Barrio, NY; The Women Museum, Washington DC; and the Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile.

Salamé’s work is represented in private and public collections internationally, including The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC, The Baltimore Museum of Art. Her work is included in The Contemporary Museum, 20 Years, by Irene Hoffman, Latin American Women Artists of the United States, by Robert Henkes and Latin American Art in the Twentieth Century, by Edward J. Sullivan.

Ana Rendich

Posted on May 17, 2022 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

I have always been connected to the invisible and visible aspects of human drama, the particular and the universal. Although my paintings and sculptures are my own work, they are not intended to be about me. The subject matter is greater than me as an individual. My studio is like a lab, where space, form and meaning intertwine, shaping and filling my artworks.

I have been exploring the Japanese concept “Ma” (間), a concept embedded in our relationship with our space, internal and external, and how we relate one to another one; as well as the interpretation of time and space, pauses and silences, and the emptiness in a space, full of possibilities. This concept MA is the skeleton of my works, where my art starts. These sculptures, mixed media and paintings emerge from a thought, an infinite path with no endpoint, where resolution is impossible. Hope in the light of loss and displacement is my primary subject. The works are fragments of what has been lost, negated, and postponed. Their structures are a form of reparation, a healing tool, tying together absences and presences, sometimes in a meditative form.

In some of my sculptures, I incorporate resin, because of its reflective or opaque property, but I transform it, leaving my own fingerprints, and colors are mainly a tool that reveals presence. In certain works, the observer can see the ghostly effect generated by the reflection created by the mixed media illustrating the transient and mercurial nature of reality. Upon seeing my art, many find that the colors draw their attention before anything else. The story behind these colors is born in the interplay between these colors, but it is not color itself that matters most to me. Rather, the color is secondary, the whole composition makes the work… Colors and shapes are not separated elements, both are an essential symbiosis. When I make an artwork that contains individual pieces, it is always thinking that each piece must belong to the next artwork, creating a work, where all the pieces share the same space; the togetherness is what makes the work.

My work has been evolving and changing every year, incorporating new media and materials. Sculpture and mixed media has helped me to grow, and it gives me the chance to explore pieces rooted in the human condition, past and present social and historic events. In the WWII pieces, for example, the research in getting the letters from WWII has been a long road, it almost took me two years until I started to work.

The base of my art is bringing presence through absence. There are different types of absences: not only physical absence, but also the lack of the fabric that could make us better human beings. All these have created the need to incorporate other elements, according to the sensibility of each piece, like the use of wood, fabric, metal, yarn and paper, besides oil, silicone, etc. I enjoy immensely the closeness with my materials, that intimacy…the tactile and physical connection, too, aids to create a deep connection with space, form and meaning, leaving all decorative items aside, and helps me to concentrate more in exploration, questioning and contemplation. I see the reflections, materials and surfaces as healing presences, making the invisible visible.

Ana Rendich was born in Argentina and lives and works in Spotsylvania, Viriginia. She attended Instituto Superior de Arte del Teatro Colon, University del Salvador, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the National Academy of Design, New York, New York.

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.”

Christina Haglid

Posted on May 11, 2021 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

There has always been an intersection between the process of writing and painting in my work. It has somehow been my guide. In the last six years, that connection intensified as I started writing short stories and flash fiction while taking online classes. I find the process of writing and painting so different in almost every way, but there is something freeing and generative in writing which helps my painting process. Or perhaps it’s a reminder of what painting is for me – something intuitive that needs to be trusted. And what they do have in common is a desire to encapsulate and distill a single moment, a story, about the complexity of our emotions and experiences.

My work is about something I wish I could have seen, imaginary worlds, a commentary on awe that is inspired by nature, science, and history. Objects in my work are a stand in for the figure as psychologically inspired narratives comment on the strength vs. fragility of life. Items in a painting are like words on a page. Objects, spaces, and most importantly light are placed to create meaning similarly.

Christina Haglid exhibited her artwork with Ann Nathan Gallery (1997-2016) and is now represented by Gallery Victor Armendariz in Chicago. A graduate of the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Haglid attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1990 and has an M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her artwork has been included in numerous gallery exhibitions, art fairs, and museum shows including Loyola University Museum of Art, Illinois State Museum, Greenville County Museum of Art, Art on Paper New York, Art Chicago, and Art of the 20th Century at the NY Armory. She is based in Chicago, IL.

Elizabeth Shull

Posted on January 27, 2021 by Posit Editor

The Other Night at Zuma (2020) — The Ride (2020)

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Artist’s Statement

A central rhythm in my work is the exploration of texture and is often combined with the disclosure of the unexpected. I am intrigued with the nuances of the natural world and the endless supply of subject matter with all its subtleties and surprises. I don’t tell you what to see but remind you to be observant and investigate beyond the surface. By layering and creating texture there seems to be an archeological direction with what is clearly visible and what is more obscure. My art practice is about the process, risk taking, discovery, and the magic of research.

Elizabeth Shull was born and raised in Southern California and lives in Los Angeles. As a painter her predominant intention is to encourage visual exploration and trigger thinking beyond the predictable. Elizabeth’s undergraduate degree is from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She holds an MFA from Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. She has participated in many exhibitions and has pieces in several private collections.

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