Gelah Penn: Clash By Night
Thursday, August 20 - Sunday, October 11

Image: Clash By Night (detail), 2009, site-specific installation, mixed media.

Opening Reception: Thursday, August 20, 6-8 PM
(Part of Creative Cocktail Hour)
Artist Talk: Thursday, September 24, 6 PM

Hartford, Connecticut – Real Art Ways presents Clash By Night, a site-specific installation by Gelah Penn. Penn uses unconventional materials to
create three-dimensional shapes, lines, and shadows. The opening reception
is on Thursday, August 20, from 6-8 PM, during Creative Cocktail Hour.
Admission to the opening is $10/$5 for Real Art Ways members. After
August 20, admission to the gallery is a suggested donation of $3, and free
for members and cinema patrons. The show runs through Sunday, October
11. Real Art Ways is located at 56 Arbor Street in Hartford’s Parkville
neighborhood. For more information, call 860.232.1006 or visit
realartways.org.

Gelah Penn’s work is both sparse and substantial. Her site-specific
installation presents jagged, three dimensional lines, shapes, and colors set
against stark white walls. The unconventional materials used in her work
include vinyl lanyard, monofilament, plastic mesh, rubber & vinyl tubing,
plastic & Styrofoam balls, and upholstery needles.

Gelah Penn on her work:
“In my recent work I explore the linear language of drawing in three dimensional space using the lexicon of gestural abstraction. By manipulating
colored monofilament and other tendril-like materials, I mean to construct
a kind of substantive ephemerality, an accretion of marks and their
shadows delineating maelstroms of visual noise; a luminous expanse in
suspended animation, conjuring microscopic activity, arterial systems, dust,
and weather.”

Peter Frank, critic and editor of THE Magazine, says of Gelah Penn's
work:
"Penn's style is ... punchy and pulsating. Whorls and waves end in knotty
clusters, isolated strands connect thick clumps, networks of meandering
tendrils grab at one another and passing viewers. The force of process here
resides less in the sense we get of Penn having made the installation than
in the less likely but even more vivid sense that the installation is still
being made--is in fact continuing to make itself."

Gelah Penn will give an artist talk on Thursday, September 24 at 6
PM. Admission is free.

Major support for Real Art Ways’ visual arts programs comes from Real Art Ways members, Howard & Sandy Fromson, Greater Hartford Arts Council’s United Arts Campaign, Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Wallace Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation, Travelers, Robinson and Nancy Grover, and Gary E. West.

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