Discoveries

First Friday Opening, October 7, 2005 from 5-8 p.m.Gallery Open House, Saturday, October 8, 2005 from 10-5 p.m. Gallery Talk at 12 NoonBob Creamer, Edda Jakab, Heidi Fowler, Greg Mort, Bart Walter, Miriam Martincic and Melissa Zink – Bob Creamer, Edda Jakab, Heidi Fowler, Greg Mort, Bart Walter, Miriam Martincic and Melissa Zink – appearing courtesy of The Parks Gallery in Taos, NM,

Contemplating our world anew and realizing a fresh perspective occurs in two ways. One is through initial encounter, the other is through further investigation. Discoveries, the upcoming exhibition at Carla Massoni Gallery, is a curatorial blend of both.

Two venerable gallery artists, including Greg Mort and Bart Walter add to the exploration of new ideas with experimentation and insights gained in a deepening pursuit of their interests.

Edda Jakab’s silhouetted spheres float in a field of liquid light. Her oil paintings consider transience as the artist looks for evidence of the immortal if evolving processes of time. To do this she establishes an interactive scenario through her forms. While the oil is still wet from painting these, Jakab begins to abrade it. What remains will not leave. It has promised itself to the canvas and the canvas will not relinquish its possession. What is added in the removal process is the reach between and among the forms, the connections or conversation; the imprint of one form upon another. Jakab’s abstraction grew out of earlier work in realism as the artist began to realize the gradations and correspondences that lie beneath the obvious, and found her artist’s voice emerging. Recent exhibition venues include a solo exhibit at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Art in Wilmington, DE, Critic’s Picks at Maryland Art Place in Baltimore, and the American Embassy in Bucharest, Romania, with the Department of State’s Art in Embassies Program. Her work has been published in New American Painting VIII.

The poignant sculptures of Miriam Martincic are soliloquies, human declarations of secret thoughts, private events and separateness, tenderly wrought to indicate vulnerability. The gestural shape of each attenuated figure fixes a fragile organic state of being in the cool impervious stone they are carved from. Martincic received a BFA in Studio Art from Columbus College of Art and Design and a MFA in Sculpture from Ohio University. She is also a student of yoga and from that life discipline draws a particular awareness from isolating and energizing parts of the body.

Melissa Zink uses letters as ciphers in her bronze work and painting. The decodification of an underlying message is not always possible, as the artist intends to offer these scripted forms to the viewer as sensuous ephemera. As if each familiar letter (or word), memorized under duress in school, undresses itself to be an innocent and untested experience of the senses. Ms. Zink, who is represented by Parks Gallery in Taos, New Mexico, has enjoyed a prolific and highly celebrated career continually experimenting with and reinterpreting phenomena in her eloquent bronze and clay sculpture, and two-dimensional collage.

Heidi Fowler, whose landscape series on powerlines, was recently presented, offers an intimate look into the abiding mystery of seashell patterns. Her paintings offer the promise of a grand order in the numinous iridescence or spiraling configuration of even an imperfect shell shard. A Communication Arts major at Columbus College of Art and Design, Northern Illinois University and University of Maryland, Fowler has just recently turned her focus exclusively to the making of fine art. Fowler is also represented at Artists’ House Gallery in Philadelphia.

Bob Creamer’s recent explorations of the universal splendor in natural structure have led him to work with a large format scanner as a camera. Only three years old as a technology, the photo scanner captures and conveys an entirely different reality. Creamer molds flowers, as they decline and degrade, into extraordinary shapes and gestures, and immortalizes them at close range in the strange source light of the scanner. Creamer is an architectural photographer by trade, and his artistic emphasis has primarily involved the landscape. This new direction of iconic botanical investigation has brought Creamer to the attention of the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum, where a solo exhibition has been scheduled for the Spring of 2006.

Greg Mort’s poetic watercolor, Icarus, recalls the mythological Greek character who longed to fly, and sacrificed everything to this dream. For Mort, Icarus is a motif of the artists’ own predicament. Venturing farther from the certainty of making accepted imagery to attempt the unconventional and unanticipated is, for Mort, a flight with an untested set of man-made wings – equally a chance for failure and revelation. With an impressive array of collections that house Mort’s work such as the Smithsonian Institution’s National Collection and the National Air and Space Museum, The White House, the Corcoran, the Brandywine River Museum and Farnsworth Museum of Art, Lowell Observatory, Time Inc. – to name only a few – it may be a surprise to learn that this artist is self-taught. Mort’s scientific/mathematical facilty and fascination, his natural comprehension of scientific themes and principles, have garnered the attention of the best minds in these precise disciplines.

The sinewy tension of the wild returns to the gallery in Bart Walters’ well-known, impressionistic bronze sculptures of predators and their prey. Walters goes on expeditions to other continents to understand the nuances of his subjects’ demeanor. The stances these animals assume throughout each day of sleeping, eating, mating, nurturing their young hold Walters captive. The instinctive roping musculature that he renders in his subject leaps into action with every base emotion that may require it, accumulating to form the essential being of the creature. Walters, a Maryland native, has been sculpting in clay since the late 1980’s. Originally receiving a BA at Hiram College, he has autonomously furthered his style through observation. He has been invited to have a solo exhibition at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole in 2007 and has work included in a group show that will open at the Easton Academy Art Museum this November.