MICHELLE WEINBERG
These drawings are made by slipping carbon paper between folded sheets of mulberry paper, which transfers imagery from one side of the page to the other in a kind of pseudo printing process, creating half-tones and ghost images. The used black carbon papers are "negatives" engraved with the layered residue of drawing marks over time, and these impressions are transferred to a new drawing. I tend to focus on imagery from familiar or otherwise ordinary places and events: fragile projections that are subjected to entropic forces, dissolved by flickering patterns, eventually becoming skeins of static. My inscribed notes to self are repeated, reversed, incantatory broadcasts set free from normal context. This process is very generative for me, each phase giving birth to the next. It’s one of the “engines of drawing” I enlist in order to collaborate with chance. Always a beginer, learner, I invent highly subjective processes that are deployed across many mediums. I draw to penetrate appearances and to resolve images in my mind’s eye with the natural and built environment I inhabit.
Bio
Michelle Weinberg is an artist who produces art in her studio and for public spaces, architecture and interiors. She is the recipient of awards, fellowships and residencies from Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony, South Florida Cultural Consortium, SouthArts, State of Florida Individual Artist Award, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, homesession and Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain, Studios at MASS MoCA, 100West Corsicana in TX and more. Exhibitions and installations of her work include Project: ARTspace, High Noon Gallery, Berl's Poetry Shop, Charles Moffett Gallery and New York Public Library in NYC, ArtPort in Kingston, Delaware Valley Arts Alliance in Narrowsburg in upstate NY, Fine Arts Work Center and Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, MA, Russell Steele Gallery in East Hampton, La Plataforma in Barcelona and Emerson Dorsch Gallery, University Galleries at Florida Atlantic University and Frost Art Museum-Florida International University in Miami. Her private and public commissioned works include ArtBridge/Downtown Alliance in NYC, Wolfsonian Museum in Miami, Miami International Airport, City of Miami and Related Group, Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places, City of Hollywood, City of Tampa, Downtown Jacksonville Cultural Council, and Facebook offices. As a curator she has organized exhibitions at New York Public Library, Hewitt Gallery at Marymount Manhattan College, Byrdcliffe Guild in Woodstock, Miami Dade College Museum of Art and Design, Art and Culture Center of Hollywood in Florida and she has been Creative Director at Girls' Club in Fort Lauderdale collecting and exhibiting contemporary art by women since 2006. Weinberg founded her own flexible platform for promoting artist initiatives called Available Space in 2010. Her ongoing curatorial project "Artists Draw Their Studios" has been exhibited in four venues and includes more than 150 artists. She opened her own flexible art platform called Leeway., in a former 1850s church in Sharon Springs, NY in 2021. She is on the faculty of Marymount Manhattan College, a Lecturer at SUNY Purchase College, and she is a mentor at the Ratcliffe Art & Design Incubator at Florida International University.
Tete a tete
KEES HOLTERMAN
I use storytelling to dismantle memories, relationships, and environments to bridge the gap between past and potential self. I began creating this body of work after being diagnosed with congenital heart disease in early 2022. This diagnosis allowed me the space to move away from my printmaking practice and utilize painting and drawing to define impactful personal stories. Through repetitive imagery, skewed perspective and nonsensical light sources, I provide myself with the opportunity to investigate and gain control of specific narratives.
Each piece begins as if I am making a print, laying down graphic shapes, flat and bold colors, and characters transferred from sheets of vellum with graphite paper. As the work develops, I let go of some of the print-based foundations, and honor my influences of the Social Realist and American Folk art movements to further explore an image.
In being observed, these stories and moments I’m defining become something more tangible. I am offering vignettes of vulnerability, healing, and treatment; I’m confronting fear and uncertainty.
Kees Holterman (b.1994) is a Dutch-American artist currently based in Utrecht, Netherlands. His work spans fine art and commercial contexts, using drawing, printmaking, painting, and animation as guiding forces to create illustrative works of art that tell beautiful stories.
Kees was named a finalist for The Hopper Prize in Fall of 2022, and was recently published in New American Paintings Issue 164. His work has been shown in galleries across the United States.
ALI OSBORN - FRONT ROOM SPACE
This series responds to two specific limitations of the woodcut medium: its inherent graphic quality and the residue of the organic form from which the medium originates. In some ways these prints push against those limitations. For instance, I scraped the wood (more than I cut or carved it) to create gradations instead of flat areas of ink or no ink. In other ways the prints embrace the limitations—the most solid parts of the bags are the parts that look most like wood. Wood pretending it’s plastic.
The bags are characters in space, sometimes full of hot air, sometimes crumpling. The idea of a woodcut communicating subtleties of form originates, for me, in a Kathë Kollwitz print I first saw in college. The Widow depicts a grieving woman with her hands wrapped across her torso. Beneath her hands there is a quickening of the otherwise jet black ink, implying pressure and volume under her dress. My professor loved talking about that part of the print. Surely it couldn’t be an accident in the printing. Did it mean something? How much can you convey in the subtle shift of ink across wood?