The Schoolhouse Gallery Presents:
ALL FLAVORS
October 28, 2011 ~ January 2, 2012

The gallery presents a review of work from 2011 including work from Liza Bingham, Lynne Clibanoff, Adam Davies, Clark Derbes, Lauren Ewing, Bernd Haussmann, Nona Hershey, Sharon Horvath, Gina Kamentsky, Leslie Murray, Doug Padgett, David Schoerner, Paul Stopforth, Donald Traver, and Stephen Vassilakos.

We are pleased to present a survey of the 2011 season in Provincetown including painting, photography, printmaking and sculpture from our gallery’s roster. Driven by drawing, light and empathic responses to language, architecture and material culture these artists work in dialogue with each other to create a daisy chain of associations and permutations evidenced in this exhibition and filtered through the connecting lens of Provincetown as a source, a physical experience, a destination, a refuge and a studio site.

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 oil 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 a progression 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.

LAUREN EWING is a sculptor and installation artist who makes drawings, prints and photographs. Her art addresses the vast construct of material culture in relation to memory, desire and language. Many of her sculptures and installations are polyvocal simultaneously using image, object, space and unique electronic texts that are thematically provocative and richly poetic. She has exhibited nationally and internationally in museum and galleries including Diane Brown Gallery, NYC; Castelli Graphics, NYC; Sonnabend Gallery, NYC; John Weber Gallery, NYC; the Hirshhorn Museum; The New Museum of Contemporary Art; the Decordova Museum; Storm King Art Center; the Kunstverein Ludwigsburg, Germany; Kunsthallen Brandts Klaedefabrik, Denmark; Interim Art, London; the Sydney Biennale, Australia and many others. Her work is in many private and public collections including the Metropolitan Museum, NYC; the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Chase Manhattan Bank Collection; the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art; the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; the Walt Disney Collection. Her public sculptures are located in many American cities including Seattle, Sacramento, Atlantic City, Denver and Philadelphia. Ewing currently has studios in New York City, Indiana and Provincetown.

BERND HAUSSMANN divides his time between his studio north of Boston and Western Maine where he also works on a 250 acre nature project. Haussmann exhibits nationally and has had recent exhibitions in Boston, MA; Scottsdale, AZ; Fort Worth, TX; and Santa Fe, NM. His works are in a number of museum collections including the Danforth Museum of Art; Lyman Allyn Museum of Art; Hunterdon Museum of Art, Clinton, NJ; Longview Museum of Fine Arts, Longview, TX; and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, among others.

This important painter offers a deep investigation into the issues primary to the ongoing dialogue about painting in Provincetown. Haussmann's subjects range from an abstracted interpretation of nature to language and dreams to architecture to a total investment in the possibilities inherent in a single color. His masterful executions are couple trust in the unexpected and an investment in the intelligence of the viewer that is not often approached free from the burden of context. Haussmann extracts singular elements illuminated by bold colors and introduces a discussion of gesture, surface and the subconscious that, though contemporary in nature, can be traced directly back to the same philosophy of painting that defined Provincetown's schools from Hensche to Hofmann to Stout through the moment of abstraction's passionate public introduction at Forum 49. For him, rendering reality has been replaced with a trust that the viewer is the element that completes his work. With Haussmann's art we are alive and involved.

NONA HERSHEY's work is included in numerous public collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Library of Congress, DC; Fogg Museum; Yale University Art Gallery; Minnesota Museum of Art; Crakow National Museum; and the Calcografia Nazionale, Rome. She has participated in over 150 Print Biennials and Group Exhibitions internationally. Numerous solo exhibitions include those at Mary Ryan Gallery, New York, NY; Dolan/Maxwell Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; Galleria Il Ponte, Rome, Italy, Miller Block Gallery and Soprafina Gallery, Boston. She has had residency grants at the Asillah Forum Foundation, Morocco; the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ireland; the MacDowell Colony, NH, the Ucross Foundation, WY, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and The Vermont Studio Center. She taught at Tyler School of Art in Rome, Italy for 12 years and at Temple University's Tokyo program for one year. Since September 1993, Ms. Hershey has been Professor and Coordinator of the Printmaking Department at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. She was a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Grant in 2004 and a Somerville Arts Council Grant in 2008.

GINA KAMENTSKY, sculptor, animator, designer and teacher, has spent most of her life creating objects and media for the amusement of children and adults. During the 90s in her career as a toy and game inventor, she developed a worldwide reputation creating products for companies including Mattel, Milton Bradley, Fisher Price and Parker Brothers. Kamentsky combines fantasy and reality in one of a kind mechanical toys and kinetic sculptures. Gina Kamentsky lives and works in Provincetown and in Boston where she also teaches at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

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 and contain playful—even whimsical—characters, participants, and observers finely rendered to float, stand, drop, or stack with a purpose: to delight us with what is both familiar and fantastic. 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 that captivate viewers with intersecting plots and improbabilities.

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.  Like his previous work, Padgett's new paintings play upon the tradition of the sublime landscape, those realms of natural isolation and grandeur which provoke awe. But whereas human consciousness often appears as insignificant in the landscapes of the Hudson River School and German Romantic painters that serve as his models, Padgett's work asserts the primacy of the imagined landscape. Never fully representational in intent, Padgett’s paintings often take on the feeling of images pulled from dreams. Their simplified representational style creates a tension between letting the paint dissolve into abstraction and making it represent something recognizable. This tension allows for a more open interpretation of even the most familiar objects.

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.

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.
In his recent paintings Paul Stopforth continues to use objects in the world as source material. He orchestrates ambiguous relationships through complex interactions of painted space and color, that are simultaneously woven through objects of history, memory and desire. These are paintings whose presence transcend the ruins of the past.

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.

DONALD TRAVERreceived his BFA from SUNY, New Paltz, NY, and lives and works in New York. He is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Recent solo exhibitions include, Gregory Lind Gallery, Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR; White Columns, New York, NY; Krygier / Landau Gallery, Los Angeles, CA and Massimo Audiello Gallery, New York, NY. He has participated in group shows at Edward Thorp Gallery, NY; Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Jeffrey Coploff Fine Art, New York, NY; Karen McCready Fine Art, New York, NY; The Work Space, New York, NY; University of Texas, Dallas, TX; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, NY; NJ Center for Visual Arts, Summit, NJ; The Art Museum at Florida International University, Miami, FL; Barbara Toll Gallery, New York, NY; Grey Art Gallery, New York, NY; Galeria Fucares, Madrid, Spain and Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH. Public Collections include: Chase Bank, Fogg Art Museum, J. Paul Getty Museum, IBM, The Progressive Corporation, The Queens Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art and Yale University.

STEPHEN VASSILAKOS currently lives and works in Paris, France and summers on the Outer Cape. His present works are large format color studies derived from Nature, painted by layering colors with a luminous sometimes ominous effect. Bright Color Bands with diffused edges create different intensities of light. He works on paper and with oil paint on canvas. Stephen attended The Massachusetts College of Art & Design and School of the Museum of Fine Arts of Boston. He exhibits regularly in the US and Paris and his work can be found in a number of select private collections.

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.