By Andrew Firestone
At the new exhibit at NAVE Gallery. "Elements: Line, Color and Form," three very different artists, using three very different art forms, painting, drawing and sculpture to come together in a spectacle of the grand and the minuscule.
Curator Susan Berstler said the diverse works were united by their use of "found" objects calling the goal of the exhibit "to create conversations between and to draw attention to similarities among these different bodies of work."
The works visually evoked the raw materials of life, from Kathleen Finley's miniaturized villa-cities, to a strikingly expressionistic visual grid of the human hand in a graphite drawing by Alisa Dworsky.
Somerville artist Ron Brunelle exhibited a range of his acrylic paintings, which brought many to absolute memorization with his enrapturing use of deep colors. Peter Miner said he felt Brunelle's "Mayo" was "Monet-like."
Brunelle used everyday objects such as bicycle chains to simulate effects of patterns, and said he wasn't surprised when his paintings resembled nuclei and proteins in shape. "I think there is a connection between common industrial structures and molecular structures."
Alisa Dworsky also exhibited her work in graphite drawing and printmaking. An accomplished architect out of Montpelier, Vermont, Dworsky's drawings rely on lines in shadow and space. She described her process as blurring the lines between second and third dimensional visualization.
Kathleen Finlay, a Somerville artist, took a different approach, making sculptures using common materials in meticulously constructed miniature cities and giant strands of cord and rope. She described her art as "about how we make things to try to keep ourselves safe and protect ourselves against time," exhibiting her plaster sculpture of a broken, crumbling city.
"Elements: Line, Color and Form" opened at the NAVE Gallery Thursday, July 8 and will run until July 25.
I don't understand what the above comment means or how it relates to the art show.
Posted by: Ron Newman | July 23, 2010 at 09:33 AM