The Schoolhouse Gallery Presents:
A SEASON PREVIEW
Gallery Artists
June 3 - 29, 2011
Public Reception: Friday June 3, 6-9 PM

The gallery presents a 2011 season preview including works from Peter Acheson, Mark Adams, Liza Bingham, Linda Bond, Karen Cappotto, Clark Derbes, Lauren Ewing, Joe Fiorello, Damien Hoar de Galvan, Jane Henry, Jennifer Amadeo-Holl, Leslie Murray, Stephanie Roberts, Jessica Straus, David Schoerner, Vicky Tomayko and others. There will be an opening reception Friday June 3 at the gallery from 6-9 PM. 

PETER ACHESON was born Washington, D.C., and in lives Ghent, NY. Acheson received his BFA from Yale University. Acheson's paintings are a striking and refreshingly strange contrast to the slick Chelsea commodities we can become accustomed to. He rejects signature image and style for the pursuit of a level of mind deeper than language, a place where image and energy cannot be distinguished, where the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of painting are unified.
What elevates Acheson’s paintings into their singularity is his ability to concentrate on perception while the paint is applied both directly and matter-of-factly. His visual language is familiar and remote, individual and nameless. Acheson works in a tradition that was explored by the Abstract Expressionists and such later figures as Forrest Bess. He has shown at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York City and his group exhibitions include a three-person show with Andrew Masullo and Chris Martin, and "Sense Ability," curated by Cecily Kahn.

MARK ADAMS is a painter, printmaker, and a cartographer with the National Park Service based on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard since 1987. He exhibits regularly at The Schoolhouse Gallery where he has focused on works of art that use layered images of maps, personal notebook pages, text, data and images of animals and friends in light accumulation on paper and wood panels. Adams pulls ahead the curiosity and wonderment of his viewers as source material and somehow presents consideration, long looking and a little biology as a cool opportunity. Adams has taught at the Provincetown Art Association, Castle Hill Center for the Arts (Truro MA), and the Provincetown School Academy program and as a guest in the MFA program of the Fine Arts Work Center/Massachusetts College of Art. He has studied ecology, landscape architecture, printmaking and photography at University of California, Berkeley, California College of Arts and Crafts and studied with artists at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.  He also worked as a wildlife field biologist, scientific illustrator, forest fire fighter, gymnastics coach. His current interests include geologic time, taxonomies, coordinate systems and layering of information in maps.

LIZA BINGHAM is a painter working in  Boston, MA.  She is the recipient of two recent grants, including one from the  Massachusetts Cultural Council  (2010), and another from the Berkshire Taconic Foundation (2009). Bingham earned her M.F.A. from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and a B.F.A. from Cornell. She has exhibited at the Kingston Gallery in Boston, the Fireplace Project in East Hampton, NY, and the Lincoln Arts Project in Waltham, MA.

 Bingham’s modest to mid- sized paintings are done on muslin over panel and focus on a certain particularly American landscape. Her subject, the traditional suburban and rural house, is personal and as an upgrade on traditional landscape painting functions as a stand- in for personal subject matter . Using a wet-on-wet technique, her palette tends towards the fantastic and rainbow-hued. She executes her brushwork with seemingly quick , slippery and fleeting strokes, a masterful example of something paint can do that no other medium can accomplish. Image to image, Bingham's paintings also seem to be connected in conversation, a continuum of color, action and the passage of time.

LINDA BOND has a long Provincetown history beginning with a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in 1978.  Presently she teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art during the school year and in the summer program at FAWC.  She is also a mentor for the Low-Residency MFA program that MassArt runs in collaboration with the Fine Arts Work Center.  A Boston area artist, Linda holds an MFA in painting from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a BFA in painting from Bradley University.  Her work has been exhibited at the Art Complex Museum, the Fitchburg Art Museum, the Danforth Museum, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and the Corcoran Gallery.  Her most recent solo exhibition was at the Cambridge School of Weston in 2008.  The show and accompanying catalog were an integrated part of the school’s year long curriculum focused on Social Justice. Linda is the recipient of grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Massachusetts Foundation for Humanities & Public Policy and the Artists’ Resource Trust, among others.  Her work is in corporate, institutional and private collections including those of Boston University, Fidelity Investments, IBM and Nokia Corporation.

Linda Bond draws with gunpowder and graphite.  Her large to monumental sized images, inspired primarily by photographs from the New York Times and the Boston Globe, are testaments of recent history.  Along with images of smoke clouds from smoldering oil fields and bombed cities, she has been rendering human casualties – anonymous, veiled, alive, and lifeless since the 1999 war in Kosovo initiated the first of these pieces.  Most recently, Linda has been making portraits of “Peacemakers”.  With them she further expands the concept of using the volatile medium of gunpowder to create rather than to destroy.

KAREN CAPPOTTO makes collages layered with paint, graphite and ink, and oil paintings on canvas and wood panels. Originally from Syracuse, she has been a summer resident of Provincetown since 1988. Cappotto studied at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Ma., Boston College, and Oxford University. Her work is in various public and private collections and she has received multiple awards and prizes for her mixed media constructions. Recently she was awarded joint first prize in the 2010 international Picture Works Competition in Ireland.  In March 2011 she was included in a three-person exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association & Museum titled, 'Beyond Surface'. Her subject is place and the resonance and consideration of place, memory and the history of her found collage materials. Cappotto works with line but also with soft, torn edges. Her paintings are felt things, often revealing their meaning to her after she has finished. 

LAUREN EWING is a sculptor and installation artist. Her art addresses the relationship of individuals to institutions, the collapse of nature into culture and the vast construct of material culture in relation to memory and desire. Many of her site sculptures and installations are polyvocal. They involve image, materiality, simulation, language, sound and unique electronic texts which are thematically provocative and richly poetic.

She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally in galleries and in museum installations, including Diane Brown Gallery, Castelli Graphics, John Weber Gallery, Sonnabend Gallery, the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Decordova Museum, Massachusetts, Storm King Art Center, New York, Kunstverein Ludwigsburg, Germany; Kunsthallen Brandts Klaedefabrik, Denmark; Interim Art, London and the Sydney Biennale, Australia. Her work is in many private and public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Chase Manhattan Bank Collection in New York, the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, the Walt Disney Collection, the San Diego Contemporary, the Virlane Foundation in New Orleans and many others. Her site sculptures are located in many American cities including Seattle, Sacramento, Bernardsville and Bordentown, New Jersey, Atlantic City, Denver and Philadelphia.

CLARK DERBES’ dimensional paintings are an evolution of his “cut outs”.  In this work he employs a vocabulary from architecture in general and specifically the adapted architecture of lifts, ramps and curbs; influences have been present in his drawings for some time.  These now familiar forms have been translated onto sculptures of carved wood, rendered by chainsaw and finished with a complex patina process which can include ashes, pigment, mud, and temporary burial.  While the sculptures refer to ramps, rollers, curbs and boxes -the surfaces on which skateboarding is drawn- they are also paintings and recognizable hand-made artifacts.  

Clark Derbes was born in New Orleans in 1978. When he was in third grade, his family moved to Baton Rouge. He earned a BFA at Louisiana State University, and has had studios in Miami and Brooklyn, NY. Derbes currently lives and works in Burlington, Vt.

DAVID SCHOERNER (born 1984) is an American artist living and working in New York City. He received his BFA at Montserrat College of Art. Schoerner has had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles and Oslo and has been included in group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Hong Kong. Primarily working with photography and works-on-paper Schoerner employs a personal narrative to re-organize our pre-conceived notions of his familiar-feeling subject matter. He assembles seemingly disparate images into a new geography where time has expanded and memory is reconfigured. Schoerner's work also investigates the classical genres of photography, re-photographed imagery and text works. This can be seen as a continuation of the Conceptual art of the 60s and 70s, the Pictures Generation of the 80s and the topographical photography of the 90s, however he offers a more emotional, personal inquiry into what photography can be. In 2007 Schoerner founded Hassla Books where he publishes and edits artists books with emerging and established artists.

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.