Richard Klein/ Lauren Ewing/ Han Feng/ David X Levine/ Tess Michalik
July 22 – August 10, 2022/ RECEPTION: Friday July 22 6-8:30 PM
THE SCHOOL HOUSE GALLERY
The gallery is pleased to present an exhibition featuring new work from five of our gallery artists. The exhibition offers paintings, photography, and mixed media/ works on paper.
We are thrilled to present ‘TWO IF BY SEA’, an installation of new work by RICHARD KLEIN. Beginning in early 2020 with the start of the pandemic, Richard Klein began a series of works that used the traditional brass lantern as a central motif. ‘TWO IF BY SEA’ is the first exhibition of this series, which includes both sculpture and hand-worked prints. Klein had previously used the lantern form in his sculpture, but in this series of works the lantern is clearly offered as a symbol of both warning and hope. The title of the exhibition is taken from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem ‘PAUL REVERE'S RIDE’, published in 1861, that describes the way lanterns lit in the steeple of Boston’s Old North Church alerted Revere to the route the British were taking in their offensive. Written and published at the start of the Civil War, Longfellow’s poem was seen as a call to action in preserving the Union. Klein’s lanterns are presented emerging from darkness, but not yet illuminated, speaking of a moment filled with possibilities. Made of vintage discarded lanterns, eyeglasses and sunglasses, the sculptures are blackened with flashes of spectral blue on their surfaces. The prints are based on photographs the artist took at the source of the lanterns, a scrap metal yard in Stamford, Connecticut.
Richard Klein
Richard 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, New York; the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; Hales Gallery, London; Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach, FL; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA, Artspace, New Haven, CT, The Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), Portland, OR; Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown, MA, Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, NY; Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Brattleboro, VT; Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, NY; Exhibit by Alberson Tulsa, OK; and Incident Report/Flow Chart Foundation, Hudson, NY. In 2021 he mounted two solo exhibitions: The Understory at ICEHOUSE Project Space in Sharon, CT, and Richard Klein - New Works at Kenise Barnes Fine Art in Kent, CT. Reviews of his work have appeared in Two Coats of Paint, Whitehot Magazine, The New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, Art in America, and The New Yorker.
From 1999 to 2022 he was Exhibitions Director of Exhibitions Director of The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. In his two-decade long career as a curator of contemporary art he has organized over 80 exhibitions, including solo shows of the work of Janine Antoni, Sol LeWitt, Mark Dion, Roy Lichtenstein, Hank Willis Thomas, Brad Kahlhamer, Kim Jones, Jack Whitten, Jessica Stockholder, Tom Sachs, and Elana Herzog. Major curatorial projects at The Aldrich have included Fred Wilson: Black Like Me (2006), No Reservations: Native American History and Culture in Contemporary Art (2006), Elizabeth Peyton: Portrait of an Artist (2008), Shimon Attie: MetroPAL.IS. (2011), Michael Joo: Drift (2014), Kay Rosen: H Is for House (2017), Weather Report (2019), Hugo McCloud: from where I stand (2021), and Duane Slick: The Coyote Makes the Sunset Better (2022).
His essays on art and culture have appeared in Cabinet Magazine and have been included in books published by Gregory R. Miller & Co., Damiani, Picturebox, Ridinghouse, Hatje Cantz, and the University of Chicago Press, among others.
LAUREN EWING presents ‘Startling Beauty and Anomie ‘a project consisting of two new suites of paintings presented with an accompanying sculpture of a hand that has been made with cast silver or bronze. Both were made using her hand and carbon black soot, a byproduct of incomplete combustion. The ‘Black Swan’ finger paintings in soot began in 2020 as a way for her to work without technology, capital, or collaboration in the most reduced of circumstances, even in a cave if need be. She wanted small marks, subjects, and circumstances to be awesome and prophetic and to demonstrate both deep space and intimate looking. To this end she sourced her own photographic images taken in nature that had struck and stayed with her in an indelible way.
The image from the film "Mr. Turner” of J.M.W. Turner touching up his seascape painting with his fingers and spit at the last minute while it was already hanging in an exhibition in the National Academy has stayed with her as a kind of necessary truth. In observing that the absence of the hand in technological culture today is moving us further and further away from ourselves and each other Ewing wanted to retrace and to be in touch with primary mark making. While making the small 5 x 5” ‘Black Swan’ paintings she discovered that the carbon black was silky enough to spread thinly into mists and also dense enough to render indelible physical presences. These small finger-paintings served as studies for the larger painting series ‘Startling Beauty and Anomie’. The hand is central in both of these series and as a result pairing them with a cast hand came naturally. The ‘Black Swan’ paintings are paired with a cast bronze hand and the ‘Startling Beauty and Anomie’ paintings are paired with a cast solid silver hand.
LAUREN EWING is a sculptor, installation artist and imagist. Her art addresses the vast construct of material culture in relation to memory, seeing and nature. She has shown in Germany; Denmark; London; Australia; PS#1; Castelli Graphics; the New Museum; Hirshhorn Museum; Diane Brown, Sonnabend, and John Weber Galleries in New York City, and the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown. Her work is in MoMA, the Metropolitan, San Diego Contemporary, Chase Manhattan Bank, many other public and private collections.
We are delighted to welcome back JASON ROHLF. For this exhibition we will present his new series “Mutual Attractors”, mixed media works on paper that play on the concept of Strange Attractors and consist of paired collages layered into abstract paintings. Here Rohlf employs a cache of digitally sourced photos he has acquired as inspiration or “studio fuel”. These collage components are seen in pairs in the works in clear-to-tenuous relationship, touching on subject, color, harmony and pattern. Finding the right words to title the works is also part of his process.
Rohlf started these works mid-pandemic as a way to help overcome the mental weight of daily tragic news reports. Employing a diverse array of sources from the small paper “wheat pastes” layered on the walls and alleys of his Brooklyn neighborhood to the artist’s renewed interest in mushrooms and his immersive forays to find and photograph them served as a reminder that the world is brimming with wonders not always subject to ideological interpretation.
An added benefit of the series is that my social media & search algorithms have branched into an incredibly broad ecosystem of inspiration ranging from microscopic diatoms to galaxy searching telescopes. The mix of science and humor working together to prompt mental and visual associations all while adding perspective in the universe. -JR
JASON ROHLF moved to Brooklyn in 1999. He has exhibited his work across the United States, created a public installation for the MTA, and has lectured for the Pratt Institute, Bowling Green University and Lawrence University among others. He is the recipient of the Sam and Adelle Golden Foundation for the Arts Artist in Residency.
David X Levine
We are thrilled to present work from DAVID X LEVINE. This is his first exhibition with the gallery. David X Levine was born in Boston, MA in 1962, and has been living in New York City since 1998. Levine's vivid, labor-intensive colored pencil drawings range in size from the intimate to the monumental (10” to 10’). Mixing popular and high culture, Levine creates a formal vocabulary that inhabits subtle but lushly optical spaces, generating rich associations. All of the work has some kind of humor tempered with a profound seriousness. The exhibition consists of 12 works on paper made with colored pencil.
New York-based artist TESS MICHALIK is best known for her medium to large scale florals—intimate oil paintings that embrace joy, anxiety, simple pleasures, decoration, ornamentation, and the material nature of paint via lyrical mark making and patterning inspired by 17th and 18th century European textile design.
Born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, Michalik attended Herron School of Art & Design receiving her Bachelors of Fine Arts in 2010. After earning her Masters of Fine Arts from Northern Illinois University in 2014, Michalik moved to Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited in regional art institutions, university galleries, corporate spaces and commercial galleries. Michalik lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
The Schoolhouse Gallery is located at 494 Commercial Street in the heart of Provincetown’s historic East End Gallery District. Visit us at www.galleryschoolhouse.com. Call us at 508 487-4800. Instagram @theschoolhousegallery/ Facebook @Schoolhouse Gallery/ Twitter @MikeC02657