“Animals: Dreamed & Dreaming“
Concord Art Association • Concord, MA. Concordart.org • October 19–November 24, 2013
Curated by long-term painter Tamara Krendel and two years in the making, this imaginatively and considerably stretches the concept of “animals.” The works by nine artists range from realistic and representational to fanciful and electronically produced. Some suggest forms in the process of emerging, others portray stasis and calm. They enact the theme across painting, sculpture, prints and installations.
A number of the most interesting interpretations are abstract. Elizabeth Awalt creates a series of circles taken from the form of frog eggs. These are exceptional in both color and layered form. In larger oil paintings she captures the swirling momentum of eddies on ponds. Some, such as Swimming in Circles, suggest insect or animal life caught in the moving whirlpool.
Susan Heideman represents nature in very large sewn watercolors with collaged monotype fragments. Her Proteanna series shows nature and its denizens constantly evolving in gracefully arced compositions that recall Chinese landscape painting scrolls.
Modern technology informs the light installations of Beth Galston and the kinetic sculpture of Steve Hollinger. Emerging from a sea captain’s box placed in a fireplace, sparkling lights suggest the flight of fireflies that Galston saw from her porch in Carlisle at dusk, evoking a dance of light and evanescence. In Hollinger’s Pods, strings with glass containers surround mechanical seed-like elements to create continuous sound as well as sight.
Created more traditionally, the small box-wood carvings of Anne Oldach represent with skill and humor an octopus, a manatee, a caterpillar and other creatures large and small . An encaustic and mixed-media collage of a shining frog is vibrant and amusing. Also traditional in representation are curator Tamara Krendel’s watercolors, with her cat as featured feline muse in a number of drawings.
The works in this exhibition, inspired by the animal and insect worlds, range from tiny (a mere two inches) to tall (some 8 x 5 feet). The most exciting are installations that recreate a world of wonder and diversity. Yet each vision is different, as the media change from traditional to experimental. The Concord Art Association, founded in 1917, has attracted artists who practice an impressive gamut of media, as reflected in this special sampling.
– Alicia Faxon
Cate McQuaid, exhibition tips
ANIMALS: DREAMED & DREAMING
Seven artists delve into the metamorphic power of animals and their worlds in this show, curated by Tamara Krendel. Protean, wild, and sometimes absent, they may suggest something of ourselves. Through Nov. 24. Concord Art Association, 37 Lexington Road, Concord. 978-369-2578, www.concordart.org
– Cate McQuaid
Bugging out
Critters large and small and no need for bug spray
…and they’re not the only critters that have the art world abuzz.
By Cate McQuiad, Globe Correspondent
Order Insecta at Concord Art Association, 37 Lexington Road,
Concord, Through August 14 978 369 2578 concordart.org
“…Watercolor is the perfect medium to capture light shining
through a moth’s wings, and Tamara Krendel does a haunting job
in “Luna, Backlit” making her moth dark and monstrous, with lurid, green-yellow wings…”
– Cate McQuaid
Kate Farrington: LOCAL POETICS: WINGED & WHISPERED
Fort Point Arts Community Gallery/Boston, MA
www.fortpointarts.org
August/September 2006
Tamara Krendel’s curatorial project winged & whispered brings together five artists who are at various stages of their careers. This is her fourth group show choosing artists who practice what she terms “poetic realism,” which is mirrored in the subjects of the artwork, all from nature: sightless and wingless insects, Luna Moths pushing out their wings, wintering clouds of monarchs, empty nests, and a butterfly collection underneath a silent screened-in porch.
Subtexts proposed through the interplay between the paintings, sculpture, and installation is just one aspect of this engaging exhibition. This show succeeds because the dialogue it generates resonates beyond both the physical and conceptual boundaries of gallery space. The gallery is an extension of a mezzanine-level café in the middle of the Fort Point arts district in Boston. Its permeable setting provokes creative exchanges as evidenced by the formal opening (which included a live jazz presentation by The Krendel-Clark group). The informal gallery talk by participants, and the poetry reading by artist/poet Jenny Lawton Grassl. Maxine Yalovitz-Blankenship’s oil paintings employ symbolism about treasures from her life: paper birds from carnivals, nests, and keyholes that she elegantly described in her gallery talk.
Krendel’s luminous watercolors convey the same care and dedication it takes to raise moths for two years, which she did for primary research in her studio, foregoing even leaving for summer vacation. Riyo Hiroto’s tiny silver forms combined with wood express her desire to communicate in a technically very difficult and demanding format. The semi-abstract, heavily loaded oil paintings of Elizabeth Awalt play on the modernist grid, such as in two small works in which strokes of paint create a rough screen to separate us from the moth and dragonfly caught behind. Lawton Grassl’s Cornell-like box constructions house pinned-down lines of poetry, perhaps referencing her childhood memories.
—Kate Farrington
Essex Art Center/Lawrence, MA
www.essexartcenter.com
FINNED & FEATHERED
“Without showing any detectable style biases, curator Tamara Krendel identifies the work of five artists included in this exhibit, which is broadly based on birds and fish, as poetic realism. She augments the visual presentation with written poetry, having asked each artist to submit at least one poem for the gallery notebook. The opening reception featured readings by Jenny Grassl, whose poems are also in the gallery; their typography and layering are as inviting as an artist’s sketchbook. Krendel’s sensitivity to both the natural world and poetic interpretations of it has toughness and wit, dispelling any criticism of identity politics that might be associated with the exhibit’s celebration of Women’s History Month. From the ironical leaps through history watched over by birds in Gail Boyajian’s five paintings to the droll, voyeuristic curiosity of pigeons courting and mating in Linda Price-Sneddon’s video, intellect and edginess face off against tenderness and often quite sumptuous color. The artists’ commitment to idea balances, if not overtakes feeling. In her poem, Price-Sneddon writes of “Vulnerable Tenacity,” an apt description of the forces of nature observed.
The thickly applied paint and fluid marks of Laurel Hughes’s and Elizabeth Awalt’s paintings fervently connect with their subjects. Hughes’s chickens are depicted close-up but generalized, their body language and postures telling all. Awalt, with great range and rich palette, manages to paint a reflected sunset immersed in all its exquisite drama without an ounce of sentimentality. Krendel explores the metaphors of a caged bid with fluent brushwork and an eye for lyrical light.
Not surprisingly, most of the selected poems are image and nature centered (Mary Oliver was the choice of more than one artist). As noted by Krendel, the poet as muse or inspiration is not the intention; rather, the artists and poets meet in their observation of nature as a vantage point for perception.”
– Meredith Fife Day
Exhibitions In Sight
by Burton Wasserman
“Chrysanthemum Greenhouse in Morning Light,” by Tamara Krendel at Widner thru June.
“Variations of human form and many different flowers all figure quite prominently in the two solo offerings currently on view (through June 27) at the Art Museum of Widener University in nearby Chester. Specifically, they consist of paintings by Tamara Krendel in which colorful blossoms appear repeatedly, and sculptures by Anne Oldach in plaster, fiberglass and bronze, embodying 3D presences with such titles as “Mountain Child,” “Wood Nymph” and “Walking Man.”
Dealing directly with subjects as diverse as rhododendrons, delphiniums and day lilies, Krendel exercises considerable poetic license, freely transforming the shape of growing plants and botanical settings in which they’re found into oil and watercolor compositions rippling with light and patterns of excitement. Poetic transcriptions of her most naked perceptions, these pictures are not observations based on external realities as much as they are playful inventions; inspired composites of jewel-like incandescence, sparkling vitality and imaginative joy.
Most interesting of all Krendel’s designs based upon greenhouse interiors. Powerful images in which the perspectives are suggested by the architectural construction are counterpointed by a profusion of assorted plant forms. They manifest an offbeat balance of agitated vitality and earthy strength.”
– Burton Wasserman
Series: Tamara Krendel Greenhouses