Works by
Nancy Davidson
Wlodzimierz Ksiazek
Lloyd Martin
David Newton
Susan Unterberg
Denyse Wilhelm

March 4 – April 1, 2004

There are an infinite number of art works, artists and ideas from which to organize an exhibition around. One can pose a question or confront an issue and then discover and explore as many possible configurations as space and time will allow. Many of the exhibitions presented at this gallery are a product of this deliberate yet organic process of investigation and refinement. Some ideas can be resolved quickly while others may take many years to unfold. If one is lucky, some of the preconceptions about the answers can be discarded long enough to let a specific installation of works present their own narrative.

This exhibition is based on an idea presented by Denyse Wilhelm. The structure and pattern that brought these artists together relied on both a randomly defined progression and a distinct linear relationship between the artists. The linkages form two parallel lines. One established an arbitrary progression from painting to works on paper to sculpture. The other connection required that each person starting a chain had to suggest the name of someone else they knew and so on until the process had been repeated twice. Thus, painter Wilhelm suggested Susan Unterberg who in turn proposed Nancy Davidson. The second progression started with sculptor David Newton who recommended Lloyd Martin who invited Wlodzimierz Ksiazek. A certain caprice was built into this exhibition and yet the group of artists brought together through this process provides powerful insight into the ways that meaning can be shaped from a coincidental set of encounters.

Denyse Wilhlem’s works for this exhibition comprise large, colorful and translucent paintings that create a vision of the Tikkun Olam, or the Restoration of the World, a great myth in the Jewish tradition of Lurianic Kabbalah. “The myth inspires me through its message of hope, that humankind has a task of finding and reuniting the shards of vessels which once held the creator’s light, but could not contain its intensity and thus shattered.”

Wilhelm holds an MFA from UMASS Dartmouth, a B.S. in Rehabilitation Counseling from Boston University and a B.A. in Art History from UMASS Dartmouth. She is an adjunct art instructor at Bristol Community College and full time counselor within the college’s Center for Developmental Education. Recent exhibitions include American Democracy Under Siege, Hera Gallery, Wakefield, RI; AS220, Providence, RI; Sol Gallery, Providence, RI; Gallery 244, UMASS Dartmouth, MA; and the Providence Art Club, Providence, RI.

Susan Unterberg says that, “While my photographs are often based on realistic images, their concern goes beyond the depiction of realism. My current series of fish pictures . . . is a metaphor for the fleeting nature of being in which nothing stays the same for longer than a moment. Taken in a fountain, with sunlight reflecting on the water, optical fragmentation produced innumerable ‘fleeting moments’, some of which I was able to record, many of which are only remembered. In our current world, where most fleeting images are those of violence, death and disorder, these images are antidotal for me.”

Unterberg lives in New York City and received her M.A. from New York University, NY. Recent exhibitions include Yancey Richardson Gallery, NY; Anderson Contemporary Art Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; Danses Gallery, NY; and The Johnson Gallery, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. Fellowships and awards include stays at Yaddo, MacDowell Colony and the American Academy in Rome.

Nancy Davidson’s work “integrates extravagant, bulbous, simple, large scale forms with a feminist view of popular culture, fused with a strong component of the comic grotesque. The forms in my work are inflated, enormous and
immoderate. Their material, latex, is inherently fragile . . . I produce works that use humor and excess that repudiate currently held notions about women and the images they produce.”

Davidson holds an M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lives and works in New York City. Selected exhibitions include solos at Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA; Robert Gallery, New York, NY; Crystal Blue Persuasion, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH. Selected group shows include Fantasy Underfoot, 47th Corcoran Biennial, Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, DC; Fathoming, Southeast Center of Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC and Zero-G: When Gravity Becomes Form, Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion, Stamford, CT.

David Newton’s recent work has come from a desire to make things that are suspended. “I have also wanted to make work that feels stuffed. These physical states correspond to personal moods as well as perceptions of the world at this time. By making the sculptures I feel like I don't have to feel that way myself. I let the sculpture do it for me. So stuffed and suspended are what gets me going these days.”

Newton recently moved to North Carolina from Rhode Island and currently holds an Assistant Professor post at Guilford College in Greensboro. Selected solo and group shows include exhibits at Lenore Gray Gallery, Providence, RI; Gordon College, Wenham, MA; AS220, Providence, RI; and David Wynton Bell Gallery, List Art Center, Brown University, Providence, RI. He received an M.F.A. from Bard College and attended the Art Student’s League in New York from 1978-81

Providence-based artist Lloyd Martin’s work reflects his continuing interest in the process of painting and its affect on the logics of formally considered paradigms. He states, “An adjustment in my thoughts regarding composition has led toward more deliberate arrangements of geometric forms. Placement, scale and color relationships have a crucial urgency. Accidental painting events are anchored in a synthetic order. The transgressive ability of nature and its influence on the progress of time is exhibited visually century to century-decade to decade.”

Martin has most recently exhibited works at Steven Haller Gallery, New York; The Brattleboro Museum, Brattleboro, VT; Lenore Gray Gallery, Providence, RI; and Trustman Gallery, Boston, MA. He is the recipient of the 2000 Drawing Fellowship Award from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. He attended Rhode Island School of Design and graduated in 1980.

Wlodzimiercz Ksiazek was born in Warsaw, Poland and became a permanent resident of the United States in 1988. He was educated at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and holds an M.F.A. in both Painting and Art in Architecture. He currently lives and works in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
Donald Kuspit has written of his work:

Ksiazek's esoteric paintings engage the abstract ghost of the sacred. The friction between the surface formed by the gestures and the depth suggested by the pattern . . . generates a vague, numinous feeling of the sacred, for its substance is no longer available for human use. It can be said that in mourning for the sacred, Ksiazek's paintings preserve the idea of it, for archaeology - which is a kind of mourning - is in effect a way of preserving, even resurrecting. . . the idea of something that was once necessary to life, and may still secretly be, which is why it is excavated and its ruins cherished.(1)

Selected exhibitions include solos at Alpha Gallery, Boston, MA; Kouros Gallery, New York, NY; Longborough University Gallery, Lonborough, England. Selected group exhibitions include the 7th Annual Boston International Fine Art Show, Boston, MA; International Art Fair, Art of the 20th Century, New York, NY and Wandering Library, Project of the International Artists’ Museum in the 50th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy.

(1):Monographic Publication: Wlodzimierz Ksiazek: Paintings. Jaffe-Friede & Strauss Galleries, Hopkinson Center, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NY, April 14- May 10, 1998. Text by Donald Kuspit. Published by Dartmouth College, NH (Library of Congress # 2002449208)