(Guttenberg NJ) Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present MADE HERE: FALL 2019 a group exhibition of our current Artists in Residence; Mary Ancel, Bruno Nadalin and Komikka Patton. On view December 7th - December 31st, 2019. The works included in MADE HERE: FALL 2019 were created during the artist’s 3 month Space & Time Artist Residency at Guttenberg Arts. Guttenberg Arts will host an opening reception for MADE HERE: FALL 2019 on Saturday December 7th from 7pm - 9pm.
Mary Ancel is an artist who works in textiles, print and photography. Her work indulges in excess and obsession, using bright colors, sparkles and rainbows in order to delight and distract. At the same time wistful and celebratory, it navigates her strained relationships to both beauty and loss. During her residency, Ancel produced a body of works on paper that combines her background in printmaking and photography with the materials and techniques from her sculptural practice. These works blend photographic imagery with more abstract textural elements in order to emphasize their fantastical content. Drawing inspiration from embellished Indian painted photographs, the decoration upon these works have been integrated into the imagery, calling attention to the shifting perspectives of illusion and reality. The themes of these works center around thresholds, portals and passageways to other realms; through both the imagery and the material combinations, Ancel generates a series of densely embellished realities.
Bruno Nadalin’s work focuses on the grotesque and monstrous as an avenue towards expressing and exorcising social and personal anxieties. Nadalin’s art is primarily narrative in approach, although the conditions of these narratives tend to be ambiguous and undefined. At Guttenberg Arts, Nadalin developed a series of etchings, utilizing hard ground, soft ground, and aquatint, which feature human forms undergoing traumas of definition. The figures in these pieces push upon one another, intrude into one another’s space, sharing limbs, their features shifting and melding, like the thieves in Canto XXV of Dante’s Inferno. There seems to be an attempt at connection between the beings in these etchings, yet this often appears to be thwarted or channeled into aggression, while the nebulous space that surrounds them highlights the disquieting nature of their interaction and resists a context which may help to ground and thereby reconcile them.
Pulling on Afrofuturist themes, Komikka Patton’s motifs relate to Black motherhood and motherships. In a post-apocalyptic world that reconstructs societal hierarchies and authorities with a mark of an “X” and brings forth a voice to a truth that seems to have been denied access to a sanctioned stage. Patton has recently returned from overseas and her most contemporary work cycles narratives that explore comprehensive visions of futuristic Utopias/Dystopias that converge at the intersection of awareness, power, and emancipation; anchoring them with direct relevance to contemporary social issues in ways that communicate their (Blacks) participation in, and alienation from the larger world. Using drawing, printmaking, and collage gives me opportunity to tap into the world of the fictional, surreal, and mythical. And worlds are born, realms that are stories of survival and that seem to be made up of a biologically ingrained endurance that boils down to skin color. Mother was born out of the unknown as it relates to ancestry, self, having a single black mom, fear of motherhood, and mortality. At Guttenberg Arts, Patton is interested in perceptions of time in relation to Blackness. Just how fluid is time when wrapped in traume, what does it mean when the past does not stay in the past, and what happens when the past is also the future.
Prior to the Opening Reception to MADE HERE: FALL 2019 on December 7th, Guttenberg Arts will host a Holiday art sale in support of their new glass blowing facilities (3pm - 7pm). Exhibition: December 7, 2019 - December 31st, 2019; Opening Reception on Saturday December 7th, 7-9pm.
Guttenberg Arts programming is made possible by a grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a division of the Department of State, and administered by the Hudson County Office of Cultural & Heritage Affairs, Thomas A. Degise, Hudson County Executive & the Hudson County Board of Chosen Freeholders.