Balam Soto: Intangible Proximity at Real Art Ways

Utilizing high and low-brow technologies, Balam Soto creates interactive sculptures and installations. Soto creates custom software for his pieces, bridging physical objects with coded data, resulting in experiential works that are never the same twice. Intuitive, tactile surfaces allow the viewer to interact and create their own experience in the gallery.

Curated by David Borawski, Intangible Proximity opens Thursday, October 18 6-8 PM during Creative Cocktail Hour.

To learn more about Soto’s work, click here to visit his website.

About the Artist
An award-winning, new media artist, Balam Soto has exhibited in fine art venues worldwide. Venues include the New Zealand Art Festival; Brooklyn Academy of Music; Creative Tech Week in NY; the AluCine Latin Media Festival in Toronto, Canada;  World Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science Museum in Queens, NY; El Museo del Barrio in Manhattan, NY; Gallery of Oi Futuro in Brazil; Queens Museum of Art in Queens, NY; Everhart Museum of Natural History, Science & Art in Scranton, PA; the Centre Cultural in Brussels, Belgium; the National Library of Cameroon in West Africa; and the Art and Technology Corridor at the Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh, PA  among numerous others.

Balam has received six Editor’s Choice awards and one Best in Class award from the World Maker Faire held at the New York Hall of Science Museum in 2010 – 2016.  In 2016, Balam was Officially Recognized by the Hartford City Council (CT) for the positive impact his work has had on the region. In 2009, he was awarded the Latino de Oro [Golden Latino] Award for Arts & Culture in Connecticut; he has also received Official Citations from the Mayor of the City of Hartford, CT and the Governors of Rhode Island and Massachusetts.  In April 2008, Balam was honored with a Diploma of Recognition as a “Maestro,” a Master of Visual Arts, by the National Congress of Guatemala for “being a valuable and outstanding artist with international success.”

Balam is the owner of Balam Soto Studio and co-owner of Open Wire Lab, both located in Hartford, Connecticut.

Mixing biology, ecology, and fantasy, Maggie Nowinski’s DRAWN wHOLE presents a series of drawn works that explore systems, both social and biological. Her linework mimics both historic woodcut illustrations and scientific illustrations, creating new specimens out of recognizable shapes and parts.

Nowinski says, “I imagine they are specimens in a kind of empirical study and simultaneously examine them as I construct them. As they emerge I am aware that the lived experience in my body is vast and enigmatic and I think about the interplay of resilience and ache in these specimens – triumphant adaptations and self-sufficient, sometimes toxic, systems.”

Curated by David Borawski, DRAWN wHOLE opens Thursday, October 18 from 6-8 PM during Creative Cocktail Hour.

For more information about Nowinski and her work, click here to visit her website.

Connecticut Art Review
Oct 24 Review | Maggie Nowinski: Drawn wHole

About the Artist
Maggie Nowinski is an interdisciplinary visual artist, arts educator and curator who lives and works in Western Massachusetts and has an active exhibition record, showing work regionally, nationally and abroad. She is the recipient of numerous LCC grants through the Massachusetts Cultural Council. In 2017, she was the recipient of the Berkshire Taconic Foundation Artist Resource Trust Fellowship which partially supports her work in this current exhibition. She received her BFA in 1997 and her MFA in 2007.

While her process is rooted in drawing, her artworks frequently take the format of installation and combine traditional and unusual media, audio, video and performative processes. Her work often responds specifically to site or material, and her process is embodied by an awareness of the conceptual and political inevitability of art making. She is also fond of collaborations.

Nowinski is adjunct faculty at Westfield State University in Massachusetts and Manchester Community College in Connecticut and is Artist-Mentor with Vermont College of Fine Arts in the MFA/Visual Arts Program.

 
In her Plate to Platelet series of paintings, Mia Brownell combines diagrammatic space with a stark black/white/gray palette that graphically delineates the ambiguous and contradictory spaces she is constructing. Occupying positions within these spaces are collections of fruit painted in a meticulous, illusionistic style.

Sometimes the still life elements rest upon the fragments of shelves that lean and turn in space, alternately fixed, floating or falling. The shelves frequently cast shadows onto their indefinite surroundings, encouraging the viewer to read them simultaneously as space and surface.

Connecting the otherwise isolated images are linear devices that resemble vines, umbilical cords or arteries. The relationships indicated by the linear elements evoke the kinds of systems represented by organizational flow charts.

Brownell says, “These paintings dissect and interweave fundamental elements of nature, food, and culture – of movement, and impulse – that might be labeled theatric. My motivations stem from the confluences between the seductive excesses of food culture, the vanity and illusionism of traditional still life painting, and the constructed spaces of computer generated scientific imaging.”

Curated by David Borawski

About the Artist
Mia Brownell was born in Chicago, Illinois to a sculptor and biophysicist. She uses the conventions of the the painted food still life as a means to comment on contemporary issues surrounding food. Her paintings simultaneously reference 17th century Dutch Realism and the coiling configurations of molecular imaging.

Mia has had solo exhibitions in major American cities including New York, Boston and Washington, DC.

Mia’s paintings are in several private, corporate, and public art collections including Wellington Management, Fidelity Investments and the National Academy of Sciences.

Her work has been reviewed and published in numerous publications including The Boston Globe, The Village Voice, New York Times, HiFructose and Artnet Magazine.

Mia’s paintings have been included in over 130 group exhibitions worldwide where she has exhibited with several celebrated artists counting Robert Gober, Cindy Sherman, and Alexis Rockman.

She teaches painting and drawing in New Haven at Southern Connecticut State University.

Featured image: Plate to Platelet VII, 2017. Oil on linen, 30″ x 36″

Noah Loesberg explores our interaction with architecture and objects on a personal level. Starting with familiar objects – in this case traffic barriers – he injects shifts in scale, materials or context to create varying levels of abstraction.

According to Loesberg, “I approach my sculpture as a set of substitutions; materials stand in for other materials, forms for other forms, at varying levels of dissonance or consonance.” Night Work includes sculpture and drawing.

The exhibition will be on view through Sunday, September 23.

About the Artist
Noah Loesberg was raised in Huntington, Long Island, a suburb of New York City. He studied art and music at Bennington College, and earned an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Loesberg lives in Brooklyn and maintains a studio in Ridgewood, Queens.

Artist Statement
“Architecture is rich with cultural intentions. In my work I represent what I experience in the built environment. I am interested in the objects, structures, and decorative devices that we navigate daily, those of the living room, the hallway, and the street outside. Although facades are usually what we think about when architecture is mentioned, looking at buildings is more akin to viewing mountains or forests; The man-made structures seem to arise like feats of nature. I focus on a much lower order of minutia, the smaller details of interior design and street level construction, where our interactions with architecture are personal. I start with a familiar object, and through shifts in scale, materials and context lead to varying levels of abstraction. Examples of my work include a street curb, which wraps the base of the gallery walls and can’t be stepped over, a huge smoke detector, which quietly intones weather reports, and a radiator, which uses the ironic visual warmth of wood instead of actual heat.”

Sponsored by

This exhibition catalogues the process of the students’ work with artist/faculty Mary Mattingly to create a public art project for Hartford inspired by the Park River.

The Park River’s North Branch runs through campus before being engineered to run beneath Downtown Hartford.

This river has served as inspiration for an ongoing blog, individual artworks, activities based on co-education and learning, and a Fluxus-inspired toolkit that encourages a deeper engagement with rivers.

Nomad/9 MFA: Interdisciplinary, is a low-residency program at Hartford Art School, focusing on sustainable culture and cross-disciplinary art practices.

These events and artworks have been created by graduating students Rachel Dennis, Kay Douglas, Megan Driving Hawk, Désirée Duell, Susan Hackett, Benjamin Hao, Andrew Oesch, Jess Porzuczek, Rory Sparks and Tathy Yazigi.

Real Art Ways has a longstanding relationship with the Hartford Art School going back to RAW’s founding in 1975. One of Real Art Ways’ missions is to provide opportunities and exposure for emerging artists.

John Kelly has been producing creative work in the worlds of dance, performance, and visual art for decades. Sideways into the Shadows combines his work in drawing and performance to give an insightful yet contemporary look into his history and process.

Alongside portraits of artists and friends who died of HIV/AIDS, Sideways into the Shadows includes hand-rendered transcriptions of journal entries originally written during the epidemic. Dating as far back as 1976, the entries weave in and out of humorous, honest, raw, and provocative moments. Says Kelly, “Beginning in 1982, my friends and colleagues were dying…AIDS has framed my story to an unavoidable degree. Their absence remains part of my work.” The drawings serve as elegies to lost compatriots, artists, and creators.

The exhibit also includes video documentation of his previous performances, as well as a video installation in our Video Gallery.

Real Art Ways would like to acknowledge and thank Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project for helping Sideways into the Shadows travel from their NYC gallery space to Hartford.

About John Kelly
John Kelly is a performance and visual artist whose multifaceted career spans more than three decades. His innovative performance works stem from autobiographical, cultural, gender, and identity issues, realized through the theatrical, visual, movement-based, and vocal delineation of character. Subjects have included the AIDS epidemic, the Berlin Wall, the Troubadours, and Expressionistic Film, and character studies based on Egon Schiele, Caravaggio, Antonin Artaud, Joni Mitchell, and Jean Cocteau.

To learn more about Kelly and view more of his work, visit his website.

Featured image: “Ethyl Eichelberger” (detail)  2018. Mixed media on paper. 14″ x 11″

Shields explores ideas about vulnerability, protection, blindness or obscured vision, and non-verbal/pictorial signification. The imagery stems from ancient Middle Eastern and African shields and armor (for humans as well as for animals in battle), but the work reflects a broad imagining of what shields might be, what they accomplish, and when and why they are used.

Shields seem to be objects of protection, but they are also markers of vulnerability, weights that complicate agility, screens that compromise vision, and ornate, celebratory displays of identity or belonging. A shield protects and divides, standing between one thing and another.

In geological terms, “shield” signifies a rigid, ancient layer of the Earth’s crust that withstands change without succumbing to pressure, without folding up into a mountain range or buckling down into a crater.

Shields also function as markers of authority, nationality, or inclusion, bearing signs, insignias, or serving as identifying badges. In battle, a shield is typically forged from metal, wood, or another hard material, protecting a vulnerable body behind it.

Utilitarian objects of protection and defense, shields are also ornate aesthetic objects that hover between sculpture and painting. Craig’s Shields invites viewers to consider the relationships between defense and design, insulation and exposure, visibility and invisibility.

The exhibition includes black and white drawings, paintings, and malleable sewn works, as well as a site-specific, participatory installation that invites visitors to create and display their own shields. A 16-page hand-drawn zine accompanies the show.

About Megan Craig
Megan Craig is a visual artist and an Associate Professor of philosophy and art at Stony Brook University. Recent solo shows include Rose Sings at Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim in Germany, Lines of Flight at Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York, and If and How at Scott and Bowne Fine Art in Connecticut. Craig has also produced several large-scale participatory public performance works, including most recently Traveling in Place (2017) with Rachel Bernsen at The Yale Art Gallery, Gather Round (2017 – 2018) in conjunction with Cold Spring School in New Haven, CT, and The Way Things Felt (2016), commissioned by Artspace and supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Craig has been awarded painting residencies and grants from several institutions including the Pollack Krasner Foundation, The Weir Farm Trust, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Vermont Studio Center, and the New York Arts Foundation.

At Stony Brook University, she teaches courses in aesthetics, ethics, French phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and American philosophy. Her research is focused around accounts of memory, sensibility, and ambiguity – with a focus on sensation, synesthesia, and color perception.

Craig is also the graphic designer for Firehouse 12 Records, and a mother of two.

www.megancraig.com

Combining unconventional materials in unexpected manners, Abductions and Reconstructions offers fresh takes on abstraction, collage, and sculpture. Curated by David Borawksi, three artists present a diverse range of aesthetic considerations.

Meg Hitchcock uses sacred texts to craft intricate designs and imagery. The labor intensive practice of cutting minute details mimics the rituals and meditations contained in her source materials. Hitchcock often uses letters from one text, such as the Bible, to craft passages in another text, like the Quran. Regarding this process, Hitchcock says “…by deconstructing and recombining the holy books of diverse religions, I undermine their authority and animate the common thread that weaves through all scripture.” Featured image at right: Bling No. 4: Visitation, 2017; Letters cut from the Bible, print by Gustave Dore, paper burned with Tibetan incense; 8 7/8 x 7 1/4 in.

Ryan Sarah Murphy’s bright cardboard reliefs live in between the worlds of sculpture and painting. Her assemblages create what could be aerial views of farmland, architecture plans, or political maps of imaginary nations. She crafts these objects with a sense of seriousness and play befitting the found, casual nature of her materials. Featured image, top of page: at the margins of the land, 2017; Unpainted cardboard, foam core; 6.25 x 9.75 x 2.5 inches.

Liz Sweibel uses both found and purposefully acquired materials in her precarious sculptures and assemblages. Speaking to her process, Sweibel says “I build [my art] using particular yet ordinary materials and gestures. The process is low-tech, immediate, and improvisational, and primarily takes form as spare, abstract sculpture, installation, and drawing.” Featured image below: Untitled (Splinter #11), 2015; Wood, paint; four elements; 2.5″ x 6″ x 4″ (variable).

To view more of Hitchcock’s work, visit her website.

To view more of Murphy’s work, visit her website.

To view more of Sweibel’s work, visit her website.

Trained as an architect, New Haven-based artist Stephen Grossman uses drawing and painting as a means to navigate dimensional space on paper and panel. Through mixing organic and geometric shapes, his work embodies both structural architecture and figurative bodies. Charcoal, ink, and graphite create subtle differences in warmth throughout his drawings, accented by moments of intensity through gouache.

The works presented in Wander allow the viewer to engage an imaginative sense of space through Grossman’s line weight, texture, and sparse usage of color.

To view more of Grossman’s work, go to his website.

Featured image: I once delivered a package to the 89^th floor of the Empire State Building, gouache on panel, 16” x 20”, 2017.