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Past and Future:
Jen Violette: Fruit & Dwellings (glass)
Artist Reception, First Friday Art Walk, March 7, 5 - 8 PM
In her first show at Daniel Kany Gallery – Fruits & Dwellings – Vermont artist Jen Violette's mixed-media landscapes and still lives incorporate hot-sculpted glass, cast glass, stainless steel and wood. Violette's dwelling series presents cast glass house forms in tree-filled landscapes: the spare settings mix a playful wit with an almost essentialist historical reverence. The reductive house forms feel distilled rather than simplified and their subtle sweetness – combined with the solidity of the trees – imparts the notion these homes have been settled for generations. Violette's dwelling sculptures ultimately present a warm and grounded relationship between the houses and the landscape – as though they have been there so long that they have become part of each other.
Violette's fruit and vegetable still life pieces are backed by a distressed steel surface that imparts an unusually effective setting for glass sculptures. Her treatment of the steel allows the artist to control richly reflected light in balance with the solidity of the metal. In Violette’s Five Green Pears, for example, her hand-sculpted fruits present their vibrant surfaces with a color palette so appealing that it somewhat masks the sculptural content of the work. Violette’s grouping of five humorously flows between the mathematical proliferation of minimalist sculpture and the organic growth of the fruit (Violette is, after all, an avid gardener as well as a sculptor).
Just as in the landscapes with their post-autumnal trees, Violette's fruit still life pieces are very successful in establishing a seasonal sense of time. Free of nostalgia or specific narrative, Violette's work achieves the contemplative quality of traditional still life with surprising ease and clarity.
Jen Violette received her BFA from Alfred University and has studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, Pilchuck Glass School, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, The Studio at the Corning Museum of Glass and the Penland School of Crafts. She has studied with Lino Tagliapietra, William Morris, Dante Marioni, Richard Marquis, Pino Signoretto, Randy Walker and Karen Willenbrink-Johnsen among others.
Oil paintings by Sarah Savidge: Shapes & Shimmers
Daniel Kany Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of eight major paintings by Seattle artist Sarah Savidge.
The artist, who is currently a professor of art at Johnson State College in Vermont, produced this body of work in Vermont in 2007 – 8. The dynamic set of paintings in Shapes & Shimmers explores formal issues such as mass, volume, mark-making and the interplay of light with color. The result is a series of works that presents itself boldly – displaying an active exuberance as well as a sophisticated complexity. The shimmers in Savidge’s work derive from a combination of surface and sumptuous color. By adding and, at times, partially removing layers of paint, the originally legible forms devolve into more painterly content. Savidge’s approach prioritizes the strength of composition while still emphasizing the mysterious and ephemeral qualities of the work.
Paintings by Sand T: Black Square
Boston artist Sand T is introduced with an exhibition of her very newest work at Daniel Kany Gallery: seven small black monochrome resin grid paintings. "I personally wouldn't call these works elegant,” responds the artist, “but they do have a sheer reductive clarity that isn’t simple or decorative.” The resin paintings on panel are solid black and articulate their structures through the drops that well up on the resin surfaces - at times with rationally Euclidian clarity and others with a rhythmically explosive abandon that would make Brian Eno proud.
Ben Coombs: Glass Sculptures
Daniel Kany Gallery is pleased to present a group of glass sculptures by Ben Coombs that had been recently on view in “A Gathering of Contemporary Glass” that opened at the Farnsworth Museum and ran through February 2008.
For more information and publication-quality images, please contact Daniel Kany.
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