Elise Ansel/ Anne Beresford / Han Feng/ Kahn & Selesnick
The School House Gallery Through September 1, 2021
Elise Ansel, Triumph of Venus ll, 40x50”
ELISE ANSEL was born and raised in New York City. Ansel received a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University in 1984. While at Brown, she studied art at both Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design. She worked briefly in the film industry before deciding to make painting her first order medium. Ansel has exhibited her work throughout the United States and in Europe. Her works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the Evansville Museum of Arts and Sciences. She is represented by galleries in New York, London, Connecticut, Santa Fe, and Detroit.
For this exhibition we present a group of new paintings completed for this show at Schoolhouse. Ansel researches old master paintings as a source, using gestural abstraction to unearth and reconsider the original representational paintings that have caught her attention. She works wet on wet, a practice that results in rich translucencies and deep colors with brushwork and marks that appear effortless, but in fact require a mastery of material and a commitment to live intimately with each painting for the life of its making. She must know when to interject, to withdraw, to wait, to remove, to add and shift. The results are breathtaking works of art that demonstrate what is possible to achieve with paint and place Ansel at the fulcrum of art history, material culture, and the unpredictability of contemporary life. We are thrilled to present this selection of paintings for their insistence on discussing the artist as avatar and the artist as a curator of material culture and the visual world. These paintings are as much about Elise Ansel as a lens for our experience as they are sublime works of art.
Anne Beresford, The Now Known, 18x24”
We are delighted to present our third exhibition of the work of ANNE BERESFORD. Anne holds a BA from Harvard University and an MA from New York University. She has taught printmaking and painting at The Art Institute of Boston, Zea Mays Printmaking in Florence and in the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard. She was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in 2015. Her most recent solo exhibition (2015-16) was at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Ten Thousand Wonderful Things: A Conversation with the Collections, at the University Museum of Contemporary Art. Beresford’s work is included in a number of public & private collections, including Houghton Rare Book Library, Harvard University, University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Boston College, Hampshire College Special Collections, Boston Public Library & The New York Public Library.
Beresford’s work usually begins with an idea that materializes at the intersection of language and image, at a place where the meanings of both exist symbiotically. It is in this space – where the poetic meets the political & the literal becomes visual – that the idea of each work is born. Several recent series are created as monoprinted lithographs, using paper rather than stone as the printing plate. The fragility and imperfections inherent in the process of paper-plate lithography make it conceptual consonant with the themes of poignance, history and transience in her work.
A celebrated fashion and costume designer, HAN FENG began working in photography several years ago when colleagues and friends complimented her on her eye for the medium and challenged her to pick up a camera. A close friend, American photographer Lois Conner, helped her learn the fundamentals of the camera, and before long she was making landscapes in her hometown of Hangzhou, China. When the pandemic hit, she turned to combining meaningful and ephemeral objects from her kitchen and studio in New York. Conner as well as other artists and curator friends quickly noted that she had found her photographic voice.
The Gift , the title of the exhibition comes from her love of ceramics, cuisine, and photography. All the fruits and vegetables in the images were sourced from local specialty and farmers markets in New York City. The ceramic objects and sculptures used in her photographs are gifts from artists around the world as well as pieces from her private collection. “The earth gives us these beautiful even ordinary things,” she says referring to the food objects in her pictures. “I love to share them with friends, I really feel like they are a gift.” Intimate dinner parties she hosts at her studios in New York and Shanghai build on classic Chinese dishes often with an international fusion, much like her still life assemblages.
“During this strange period, I was looking at the many stones, rocks, sculptures, vases, and antiques I have collected from China and the U.S.,” said Han Feng recently. “I began to assemble them and create a small stage on a family table that’s over 100 years old. It was almost like making a Chinese soup with lots of ingredients. Other photographers, artists, curators, and friends were very positive about the work, and it really touched me and encouraged me to keep going. There is often a fragile moment where there is the chance that all the objects could fall down and sometimes during a shoot they would. There is a lot of surprise, fun and joy in the photographs.”
Kahn & Selesnick, Carnival Horse ll
KAHN & SELESNICK present the Dance of Death Panoramas. For this exhibition we continue to fall backwards in Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick’s world of augury, divination, fetish as identity, and ceremony and ritual as a way to cope with – well, times like these. We will present four new panoramas and a suite of 5 new photographs in a specially crafted installation.
RICHARD SELESNICK and NICHOLAS KAHN have been collaborating as Kahn & Selesnick since 1988 on a series of complex narrative photo-novellas and sculptural installations. They were both born in 1964, in New York City and London respectively. They met at Washington University in St Louis in 1982 where they collaborated informally as photography majors. After several of years of showing their art separately, they migrated to Cape Cod to work on an evolving series of photo-based projects involving fictional attributions, narratives, sculpture, and painting.
Kahn & Selesnick’s works are tactile and bodied, offering sleight of hand and the quicksilver flash of inspiration as interruptions to our habitual ways of seeing, instead encouraging us to feel the Earth and its history and to know our part in its unfolding story. The results are masterfully executed non-linear tales that appear to dream themselves.
Kahn & Selesnick have participated in over 100 solo and group exhibitions worldwide and have work in over 20 collections, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution. They have also performed artist’s residencies at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center and 20 Summers, Toni Morrison’s Princeton Atelier, the Lux Art Institute, the Djerassi Foundation, and the Addison Gallery of American Art. In addition, they have published 3 books with Aperture Press: Scotlandfuturebog, City of Salt, and Apollo Prophecies. Their latest book, 100 Views of the Drowning World, was published by Candela Books in 2017. They have received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Provincetown Arts Council, and have been featured in documentaries produced by Voom! and PBS. Kahn lives in Ghent NY, and Selesnick in Barrytown NY. They have been making photographs on Cape Cod for over 30 years.
Kahn & Selesnick, Dance Macabre Revolution