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CLARK DERBES presents new work in wood. Derbes uses a multitude of materials and surfaces to create paintings, sculptures, and installations, ranging in size from the miniscule to the monumental. He sources architectural and biological elements to create works of art that are both primitive and futuristic using an approach that matches intuition with deliberation. His art conveys themes that are both whimsical and epic. Derbes' sculpture uses a vocabulary of forms & shapes adapted from urban architecture translated these into sculptures of carved wood, rendered by chainsaw and finished with a complex patina process which can include ashes, pigment, mud, and other organic materials to address the object's life as an artifact prior to its own history. This method of achieving the beautiful colors in his work also serves to match playfulness with form and flirts with Trompe-l'œil and Op-art . Clark Derbes was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1978. He earned a BFA at Louisiana State University, and currently lives and works in Vermont, Louisiana, and Texas. RICHARD KLEIN presents 'Two Trains' a sculpture made from eyeglasses and sunglasses, and a special project made from ashtrays. Klein is a Connecticut-based artist, curator, and writer. As an artist, he has exhibited widely, including the Neuberger Museum of Art at SUNY Purchase, Caren Golden Fine Art in New York, the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Hales Gallery, London, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin, Gavlak Gallery in Palm Beach, FL, and the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA. As exhibitions director of The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum he has organized over 40 exhibitions in the past fifteen years. LESLIE MURRAY paints intimate scenes and moments from imagined worlds using oil paint on wood panels. She is a painter of light and diaphanous spaces that range from small to quite large that contain playful—even whimsical—characters, participants, and observers finely rendered to float, stand, drop, or stack with a purpose. Murray renders the indefinable and defines the speculative. She employs pattern, a sophisticated palette, fearless miniaturization, gorgeous surfaces and polite nods to the painter's toolbox to render something familiar and fantastic. Murray lives in Brooklyn, New York and received her BFA from the Maine College of Art in 2008. She has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and twice at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, Maine, Michael Rosenthal Gallery in San Francisco, California, Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown, Massachusetts and elsewhere. DOUGLAS PADGETT is from the Midwest. He studied art at the John Herron Institute, Purdue University, and the BFA Painting program at Indiana University. Padgett lived on Cape Cod for several years before moving to New York City, where he now lives and works. For this exhibition he will present new paintings and drawings that continue his interpretation of familiar objects and an exploration of extended looking at that which is embedded behind our stories...at the objects that create and define space and support the architecture of our daily lives. Included are drawings of jigsaw puzzles of Cracker Jack boxes, seascapes and landscapes. PAUL STOPFORTH makes paintings and works on paper that focus on fragments of history and memory. His work demonstrate a willingness to embrace disparate spaces and the objects that inhabit them. For several years Stopforth has used objects in the world as source material, orchestrating ambiguous relationships with complex interactions of painted space and color, simultaneously woven through objects of history, memory and desire. Specifically he has been involved in objects, situations and occurrences from Robben Island, the notorious prison island for Nelson Mandela and many others. Now after almost two decades in the US Stopforth is painting a tentative connection that bridges the southernmost tip of Africa with the East Coast of America 'from the tidal pool called ‘Bethesda’ (place of healing) situated at the rock strewn sea edge of Robben Island, to the ‘Breakwater’ in Provincetown . He has 'arrived' at a new shore and new terrain with new paintings Provincetown's breakwater which are part of this exhibition. Stopforth studied at the Johannesburg School of Art and was awarded British Council Scholarship to attend the Royal College of Art in London; he and his wife Carol made the decision to leave South Africa in 1988, perhaps the bleakest year of the state of emergency period. Over the course of his career, he has held numerous one-person exhibitions both in South Africa and in the U.S.A. He has been represented in group shows in this country and in Europe, and has been the recipient of numerous awards and residencies. Public collections holding his works include the Harvard Film Archive; the Constitutional Court of South Africa; Tufts University Gallery; the National Gallery, Cape Town; the Johannesburg Art Gallery; Durban Art Museum; the Pretoria Art Gallery; and University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries. Stopforth is especially noted for an important series of drawings based on the death of the Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko. This work remains enduring testimony to the overt and covert legacies of apartheid-era interrogation and torture, and to the innumerable deaths in detention and through assassination that so characterized the Apartheid regime. Around the time of Biko's death in detention in 1977, soon after the opening of Market Theater complex in Johannesburg, Stopforth established and co-directed the alternative Market Gallery, perhaps the most important showcase of the visual art of liberation in late Apartheid South Africa. He taught in the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard for 10 years and is currently visiting faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.The Schoolhouse Gallery is located at 494 Commercial Street in the heart of Provincetown¹s East End Gallery District. For information and press contact Mike Carroll at 508.487.4800 or email mike@schoolhouseprovincetown.com. |
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