House & Garden
September 3 – October 9, 2022
Washington Art Association
4 Bryan Memorial Plaza, Washington Depot, CT 06794
Curated by Kenise Barnes
Reception: Saturday September 3, 4 – 6 public invited
Hours: Wednesday – Saturday 10 – 5, Sunday 12 – 4
Contact: Kenise Barnes, Kenise@kbfa.com
Washington Art Association, info@washingtonartassociation.org
Artists:
Mio Akashi Yayoi Asoma
Julia Whitney Barnes Lisa Dahl
KK Kozik Kristin Lamb
Melanie Parke Jill Parisi
Roxa Smith Roger Ricco
The connotation of home is emotionally charged, the very word “home “makes us pause.
Tenderness for our home and garden has rooted more deeply in the past few years. The ten artists in this exhibition make work that is distinctly individual, what unites them is that their work conveys taking care, cultivating growth, and the being the custodian of memories.
The artists in the exhibition work in various media including ornately decorated hand-colored and cut prints, pattern paintings who’s digital and collage elements add meaning and contemporary context, as well as several painters working in the more traditional medium of paint. The show includes two photographers whose flower photographs are elegant elegies to single specimens and an artist whose work is a hybrid of photography and painting.
Yayoi Asoma’s paintings are built through exploring the notion of recollection. The artist is interested in how memory works as a constructive process that reproduces, filters, alters and interprets the past. The work speaks through the familiarity of the home, where spaces of our everyday lives entwine with the memories and associations of our experiences. While a house is often referred to as a home, the concept of "home" is broader than a physical dwelling. Home is often a place of refuge and safety. Home is an experience as much as a specific place.
Asoma received her BFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA in visual arts from Mason Gross School of the Arts. Her exhibitions include Yayoi Asoma: Curated by Stephen Westfall, CUE Art Foundation, New York, NY; The Grass is Greener on the Other Side...So What?, Leo Fortuna Gallery, Hudson, NY; Artist As Teacher, The Studio, Armonk, NY, Remembering is Everything, Alter Space, San Francisco, CA; H-Art Gallery, Albany, NY. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times and Hyperallergic. Asoma is an adjunct professor at Manhattanville College, teaches studio programs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in NYC public schools through Studio in a School. Asoma lives and work Brooklyn and New Milford, CT.
Julia Whitney Barnes’ work is a hybrid that uses both painting and a camera-less photography method called cyanotype. To make her paintings Whitney Barnes selects plants grown in her own Hudson Valley garden which she preserves through a pressing process in which she dissects and shapes each form—akin to specimen from a natural history museum. These flowers combined along with intricately cutout photographic negatives are used to create the cyanotype. After the photograph is made, Whitney Barnes reanimates the white space left by the solar-plate process with watercolors.
Julia Whitney Barnes has been awarded numerous residencies, grants, and public art projects. Her work has been featured in publications and blogs such as The New York Times, Chronogram, Hyperallergic, Apartment Therapy, Flavorpill to name a few. The artist earned her MFA Fine Arts at Hunter College, and her BFA Fine Arts at Parsons the New School for Design. She lives and works in the Poughkeepsie, NY.
Lisa Dahl is a mixed-media artist whose work addresses the home and the American Dream. By simplifying the structure of a house to a basic form, Dahl explores the traditional ideas we attach to home ownership as well as what these buildings evoke for us, In several of Lisa Dahl’s small mixed media painting the “home’ image is repurposed from magazine reproductions of homes in the real estate section. Dahl manipulated these found images by adding paint turning hedges, rooftops, and lawns into psychedelic patterned abstractions.
Lisa Dahl’s has been honored with grants, residencies and commissions form NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, Design Trust for Public Space, The MacDowell Colony, The Parrish Art Museum, and many others. Her work has been highlighted in Art Agenda, The New York Times, The Daily Voice, Chronogram, Apartment Therapy, and many other publications. Dahl earned her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, and her BA from Bowdoin College. She lives and works in Staten Island.
KK Kozik painting Wallflower epitomizes the theme and title of this exhibition. This large canvas brings together an interior wall decorated with paintings of garden flowers. As evidenced by this work the artist’s connection to home, garden, and art is personal and tender.
Kozik’s work is in the collections of Smithsonian Museum, William Benton Museum, Florida State Museum of Fine Arts, Copelouzos Family Art Museum, Athens, Greece, General Electric Corporation, Harvard Business School, Library of Congress, Progressive Corporation, and others private and public collections in the US and abroad. Kozik has received many honors and grants including William and Susan Piccotte Award, Connecticut Artist Fellowship in Painting, Commission, “Flights of Imagination,” Fitchburg Art Museum and Fitchburg State University, Magnesium Electron, NA Prize, North American Print Biennial, Commission, MTA Arts for Transit, Rockaway Park Beach 116th St Subway Station, Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Grant. Her paintings have been exhibited extensively in the US and featured in publications such as The New York Times, Artforum, ArtNet, The Brooklyn Rail and The Village Voice. She earned her MA from Syracuse University and BA from University of Virginia and studied at Edinburgh University. KK Kozik lives and works in Sharon, CT where she also curates ICEHOUSE Project Space.
Kristin Lamb says, “I make labor-intensive images of labor-intensive textiles and patterns”. Lamb is engaged in the process of re-painting a textile or pattern often from cross stitch, embroidery vintage, French wallpaper or occasionally from her own photography of interiors and landscapes. In her Remix series Lamb begins with a digital collage taken from earlier embroidery paintings, cropped, and remixed to near abstraction before being over-painted with labor and care.
Lamb has been awarded numerous residencies including Golden Foundation, Wassaic Project and Soaring Gardens. Her work has been exhibited extensively in the US. Lamb’s work has been featured in many magazines and blogs including Hyperallergic, ArtNews, ArtScope, and The Jealous Curator. She earned an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, A teaching certificate from Brown University, A Post Baccalaureate degree from School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and a BA from Brown University. Kristin Lamb lives and works in Providence, RI.
Michigan artist Melanie Parke works pay homage to familiar domesticity and bucolic life. Her interiors and still life paintings of flowers linger and inspire like a memory of an afternoon spent with and old friend. The artist reconstructs familiar interiors and filters them through the ideology of memory. Her subjects often center on flowers, birds, decorative objects, gardens, and domestic settings with the intent to create safe places for pleasure. Parke utilizes sentiment to craft as a domestic locus and seeks visual lushness by alternating tonal moods and vivid ornamentation to build on a sensation of memory which conjures both comfort and longing.
Parke’s paintings have been exhibited widely through the US. She has been a visiting artist three times at The American Academy in Rome and has been awarded several other residencies including in Maine, California, and Tuscany. Her work has been featured by The Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, Classic Chicago Magazine and Painters Table to name a few. Parke earned her B.F.A. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied at Herron School of Art. The artist lives and work in rural Michigan.
Jill Parisi is a masterful printmaker who uses many methods and materials to create flora and fauna of imaginary ecosystems. Like a jazz musician, she is riffing on nature, taking colors and structures from a variety of species and places, and reconfiguring them in novel ways. Much of her work reacts to viewer proximity, an observant viewer is rewarded with remarkably detailed patterns, or with the discovery of other smaller and more delicate “species” hidden beneath the first layer. Materials such as translucent tissue-weight papers, feathers or glass inform these fantastic and ephemeral botanical species.
Jill Parisi’s work has been exhibited widely including in International Print Center New York’s New Prints exhibitions, The Krakow Printmaking Triennials, the International Print Network’s Graphically Extended exhibition, the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, and at Medjeback, in Falun, Sweden. Her work is in various private and public collections in Italy, China, Portugal, and others including University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital, Joan H. Tisch Center for Women’s Health, and New York University Langone. She completed public art commissions for New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Arts for Transit program, and for DC Government Services. She was the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Artists’ Books in 2005. Parisi earned a BFA and an MFA in Printmaking at the State University of New York at New Paltz. She lives and works in New York State.
Roger Ricco’s background as a painter has an enormous influence on his photographic vision. Working in rural Woodstock, NY, Ricco finds sources for his work in his own backyard. Bits of nature, stones, shells, flora, feathers, and the like are assembled into tabletop sets. Further transformations are orchestrated by Ricco’s use of painted backdrops, dramatic lighting, and by shooting film through a variety of transparent screens. His humble subjects are reborn in ethereal and dramatic compositions. Ricco was selected to be the Diane Marek Visiting Artist (with exhibition) at the Cress Gallery of the University of Tennessee. He was awarded The Rome Prize in painting by The American Academy in Rome. His work is in numerous private and public collections, including the Museum of Photographic Art, San Diego, CA.
Included in the exhibition are four floral works by photographer Mio Akashi from her "One Stem, One Branch" series. This body of work was inspired by the philosophical and symbolic tea flower arrangement created by Sen no Rikya who is the founder of the Japanese Tea Ceremony. Akashi selects one stem or branch from the dozens growing in her backyard in Litchfield County and perfectly captures them against a simple white background. Her photographs are beautifully minimalist, each single specimen becoming an icon.
Akashi’s photographs have been exhibited throughout CT and NY and are in several private and public collections. She Graduated earned her BFA from Fashion Institute of Technology and practiced as an interior designer for many years before concentrating on her fine art. She was born in Japan and lives in New York and CT.
Roxa Smith’s paintings are anchored in themes of quotidian domestic settings. Influenced by her Venezuelan upbringing, a passion for lush color, intricate patterns, and naïve and outsider art dominates her work. Smith metaphorically layers elements in the work to create tableaus steeped with personal symbolism that explore nuances of intimate living spaces. Drawing from the familiar, she navigates between seeing, describing, interpreting, and inventing. These colorful compositions with their shifting, oscillating planes present recognizable, yet idiosyncratic off-kilter worlds. Infused with a unique, magical vibrancy, their vivacity acts as a foil to the darkness and worries of reality.
Born and raised in Venezuela, Smith studied Western Art History and German at Bowdoin College and received a Postgraduate degree in Fine Art at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Smith’s work has been exhibited throughout the US. Including a sold-out show at C24 Gallery (NYC) in 2022. Smith has received a range of awards, residencies, and fellowship including the Vermont Studio Center, New York Foundation for the Arts, Basil Alkazi Fellowship at the Sheldon Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska. Additionally, she has been published in many magazines and newspapers such as Interlocutor magazine, Viceversa magazine, New American Paintings, Studio Visit Magazine, Artspace magazine, New York Times, and HuffPost (2012). Roxa Smith is represented by C24Gallery, NYC. She lives and works in NYC.
The exhibition curator is the owner and director of Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Kent, CT, and a board member at Washington Art Association.
https://www.washingtonartassociation.org/exhibitions/house-and-garden
Hours:
Wed - Sat 10 am - 5 pm
Sun 12 pm - 4 pm
4 Bryan Memorial Plaza
Washington Depot, CT 06794
860.868.2878
