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Spectrum / Sustainable Art Show

Spectrum / Sustainable Art Show

Sunday, March 23rd – Saturday, April 12th, 2014

Carriage Barn Arts Center

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Waveny Park, 681 South Avenue

New Canaan, CT 06840

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Opening Reception: Saturday, March 22nd, 6 – 8 pm            

Gallery hours: Wed. – Sat., 10 am – 3 pm; Sun., 1 – 5 pm

Contact: admin@carriagebarn.org

From piano keys and album covers to feathers and bird seed, the objects that make up the artworks in this thought-provoking show encompass a broad spectrum of re-purposed man-made and natural materials. The focus of the Carriage Barn Arts Center’s exhibition is on sustainable artwork that incorporates or highlights found, natural or recycled and re-purposed materials.  The context for this show is appropriate, since the Carriage Barn is a perfect example of a sustainable space that has been adaptively reused within a landscape (Waveny Park designed by Olmsted) that has also been preserved as open green space.  This provides the ideal environment for exhibiting artworks using found materials in novel and experimental ways.

All of the artists in the show give new life to the debris of civilization. The exhibition features many highly creative local artists as well as established New York artists, whose main focus has been on sustainable art.  The New York artist David Barnett creates intricate assemblages, which juxtapose natural and mechanical objects that recall the objects of curiosity in Renaissance collections.  His sculpture Saint Gabriel is a mock flying machine that comments on man’s compulsion to outdo nature through industrialization.  It’s created from hundreds of tiny turquoise-tipped rooster feathers supported by a soldered brass structure—and embellished with pulleys and gears to suggest a mechanical function that exists only in one’s imagination.

Visitors will be greeted in the courtyard by two monumental sculptures by Carole Eisner, who is based in New York and Weston.  Eisner’s elegant abstract sculptures are made from metal scrap and recycled fragments from buildings and bridges.  Her work has been exhibited in public spaces and museums, and is in collections such as the Guggenheim.

June Ahrens, another New York artist, who is now based in New Canaan, has also worked with found materials her whole career.  Her conceptual work “Staying Afloat” is made of a reclaimed table, a glass bowl, and a bar of soap in water that changes over time.  Her description of her work encapsulates the theme of the show: “Artistically, I transform discarded objects to create a visual language that evokes the experiences of impermanence and loss, fragility and vulnerability, pain and most of all healing and survival.”

Another New York artist Joan Giordano rewrites histories and explores popular culture in her sculptural wall collages consisting of corrugated cardboard and twisted and rolled newspaper.  Some of the local artists from surrounding areas in the show include Lubomir Tomaszewski, Lucy Krupenye, Jerome Harris Parmet, Constance Old, Thomas Berntsen, Stephanie Joyce, Amy Schott, Marjorie Tomchuk, Tracy Hambley, Carol Dixon, Luigi Antonioli, Don Axleroad and Hans Neleman.

The juror is Anne von Stuelpnagel, the Director of Exhibitions at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut.  The show is curated by Co-Directors Arianne Faber Kolb and Eleanor Flatow.

 

The exhibition is sponsored in part by Baldanza, New Canaan Wine Merchants, Karl Chevrolet, April Kaynor Homes, New Canaan Lions Club, Earth Garden, and New Canaan Foreign Car.

 

Saturday, March 29th, 4 - 6 pm: Sustainable Artists Talk

 

Thursday, April 10th, 7 pm: Lecture on Sustainable Design by Mark Robbins.  $10 for members; $15 for non-members. Details will be posted on website.

 

Sunday, April 6th, 2 – 3:30 pm

“Trash + Fashion= TRASHION!”

Children’s Workshop (ages 8-12) led by instructor Karen Siegel

Space is limited and reservations are required at www.carriagebarn.org or 203-972-1895

$15 for members, $20 for non-members.

 

 

 





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