On Thursday I attended two fabulous exhibitions at Carter Burden Gallery and Atlantic Gallery. Below are highlights and descriptions of each one:

CARTER BURDEN GALLERY ANNOUNCES NEW EXHIBITIONS BY RE-EMERGING NYC ARTISTS

January 9 @ 6:00 PM - February 5 @ 5:00 PM

Carter Burden Gallery presents three new exhibitions: Reconfigured in the East Gallery featuring Marilyn Church and Basia Goldsmith; Small Disturbances in the West gallery featuring Andrea Lilienthal; and On the Wall featuring Robert Petrick. The reception will be held January 9, 2020 from 6 – 8 p.m. The exhibition runs from January 9 through February 5, 2020 at 548 West 28th Street in New York City. The gallery hours are Tuesday – Friday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.

Marilyn Church

Marilyn Church presents large acrylic paintings of abstracted figures in Reconfigured. Although she occasionally strays into what seems like total abstraction, the figure has been a continuous theme throughout her career. The impact of the stories of victims and those charged, first fascinated her as a court room artist. A sense of intense emotion resonates in her works. Now, freed from any prescribed boundaries of subject matter, her work is based on improvisation, dream images and intuition. Church explains, “In this process of discovery, a narrative eventually emerges however illusive it appears. It is often cloaked in mystery, eroticism, and ambiguity.”

Church has taught at Pratt Institute and FIT and has been a courtroom artist for The New York Times and television, earning her a TV Emmy. Her drawings have been collected by both the Smithsonian Institute and the Library of Congress, which has 4,500 of her pieces in their archives. A book of her work, The Art of Justice, was published in 2006.

Basia Goldsmith

Basia Goldsmith presents energetic, vibrant abstracted paintings in Reconfigured. For some time one of the recurrent subjects of Goldsmith’s paintings has been the cityscape viewed from her apartment. It encompasses Riverside Park, the West Side Highway, the Hudson River and, sometimes, the New Jersey and New York skylines. Goldsmith’s paintings depict the different colors of the seasons, time of day, and even the scaffolding in front of the window with painterly brushwork embedded with photos and articles that create a sense of dimensionality. Goldsmith states, “When I start to paint, I find myself in a constant struggle between my desire to have a conscious objective and the strong impulses from within, where I find myself painting in a subconscious state.”

Born in Poland, Goldsmith was sent to an internment camp in North Africa as a child, along with her family, and was later relocated to Scotland. She attended London’s Central School of Art and became a textile designer and painter. Goldsmith has exhibited extensively across the United States, including commissions by The Chrysler Building, Metropolitan Life Insurance, and many others.

In her second exhibition with Carter Burden Gallery Andrea Lilienthal presents dresses sewn from newsprint and thread in Small Disturbances. The forms highlight the images printed in The New York Times and call attention to life and nature under stress in many of the places the photographers focus their cameras on. Lilienthal seeks to transform images of sorrow and misery into a kind of beauty. She does so with the most transient material we throw away every day and gives it a new life.

The dress patterns themselves elicit memories and associations of an earlier time when immigration, deforestation, and climate change were not on the front pages. She states, “The grief depicted here contrasts with the innocence of the form to elicit outrage, empathy, and hope. We look so fleetingly at these images as the newspapers are discarded. Here we can contemplate the photographs and find meaning. The dresses serve as memorials to the lives depicted and to the photographers who captured their stories.”

Robert Petrick presents an installation that challenges perception entitled ART/LIFE in On the Wall. Alongside his work in nonobjective painting, Petrick has always been intrigued with words and letters in art and as an intrinsic artform itself. ART/LIFE is his latest effort in the form of “psychopoetic” word and illusion, illustrating words that are not always what they seem.

ATLANTIC GALLERY 2020 JURIED EXHIBITION SEEING THE UNSEEABLE

Artist Susan Rostow

Artist Statement

The effects of time, nature’s cycles and how humans impact the environment are the themes that are repeated in my work. I invite the viewer to touch and interact with my sculptural books as the tactile qualities are not all visible or accessible at first. Surprise elements, small worlds, both intimate and bold, reveal themselves in the process of turning the pages. As the viewer becomes engaged in the sight, feel, and smell of the piece, they experience a sense of visiting a strange yet familiar place. The work is a reminder of the constant stream of change, which affects us all.

My creative process begins with a walk in the woods, beach, desert or city where objects such as plants, soil, shells, discarded plastics are collected. A series of drawings and prints are created from the found materials. The prints and drawings are bound together with the objects themselves, using a mixture of mud, glue and pigment to fuse the experience together. Paper, tree fungus, roots, soil, bones, sand, shells, and bits of plastic merge together, growing into the sculptural book. With the addition of each object, a new dialog begins, and the piece evolves telling its story. The work becomes a document, recording a culmination of events that have taken place between nature and myself.

Susan Rostow

BIO

Susan Rostow is a New York City based artist working mainly with printmaking, drawing and sculptural books. She is a NYSCA/NYFA 2017 Artist Fellow in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts and a Pollock-Krasner grant recipient. Her work is included in significant collections such as the Allan Chasanoff Bookwork Collection at Yale University Art Gallery and the Library of Congress National Print Archives. Her prints and sculptural books have been shown in group exhibitions in New York, Europe and Peru. In 2017 she was awarded an Artist in Residency at the New York Academy of Medicine Library, New York, NY. Her works have been published in Carrier Pigeon: Illustrated Fiction & Fine Art magazine, published by Crown Paper Press, NY NY and Graphics Impressions, SGC International, Fall Issue 2017.

In addition to Rostow’s active career as an artist, she creates art materials. Rostow has made a major contribution to the practice of safer printmaking by creating Akua soy-based inks, developing new printmaking methods and by teaching numerous workshops.

Walter Brown

Artist Walter Brown enjoys working with plastic bags & recyclable trash-irrationally optimistic in these troubled times that sanity may yet prevail.

Walter Brown is a physician (pathologist) turned artist, creating installations with conventional and unconventional media. At its core, his work is an attempt to obtain security and achieve individuality in an unsafe crowded world, to distinguish fact from fantasy, and to deal with current environmental/political realities. He likes to find beauty in unexpected places, but also enjoys the seamier side of the human condition.

His compulsion is to put varying amounts and combinations of acrylic paint inside small plastic bags of the type often seen in the produce section of the supermarket. Each bag is uniquely manipulated into whatever shape, color design, or texture is needed. Depending on the amount and variety of colors added, method of dispersal of the paint within the bag, and other factors, tangible and intangible, the result is never the same, and often worthy of notice.

A single bag can be an individual artwork, or groups of bags can be combined to make a composite large image. Colors combine in unexpected ways. Textures are variable and surprises are common. Sometimes bubbles form; other times, the paint flows in small rivulets along the crevices of the plastic. Wire mesh and aluminum are ancillary materials, which when used in conjunction with the plastic bags, allow additional creative avenues.

The individual plastic bags are best viewed with backlit light, and are therefore placed between plexiglass and mounted onto light boxes to be displayed.

When used to create artworks, the unexpected resurrection of the plastic bags achieves a kind of justice. Instead of trash marring the landscape, the bags become worth looking at, completing a transformational circle.

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