Mark Adams/ Breon Dunigan/ Stephanie Sassoon/ Vicky Tomayko/ Rebecca Doughty
The School House Gallery EXTENDED Through October, 3 2021.
Opening Reception Friday, September 3, 2021 (6-9pm )
Stephanie Sassoon, Stairway ll 12x14”
We are pleased to present new oil paintings by STEPHANIE FRANK SASSOON. Sassoon is a painter and teacher who lives and works from studios in Brooklyn and Ghent, New York. Her long association with Provincetown began in 1983 when she was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center and continues in the light and color that suffuses her oils. Her body of work devoted to the human torso, its form and breath, explores the liminal and silent world of becoming. Her more recent works, dreamlike and allegorical, similarly inhabit the in-between with homes and castles and tents, boats, and lighthouses, held in a floating world of uncertain peril and possibility.
A graduate of the Cooper Union, she is a former Guggenheim Fellow and a grantee of both the National Endowment and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts. She was a mask maker and puppet builder and the founder and artistic director of the Beaux Rêves Puppet Troupe. Stephanie’s paintings are in private collections coast to coast.
Mark Adams, Pond Float Figure 40x48”
We are pleased to present, ‘Guardians and Journeys’, paintings on canvas and used navigation charts by MARK ADAMS. Starting with a fascination for historic narrative painting and employing the language of myth and fable, these works attempt to transform everyday encounters with land water and sky into ordinary epics in order to suggest that we recognize our own displacement from the false equilibrium of the sheltered life and align ourselves with modern migrants and wanderers.
Also on view is the Cape Cod “Dawn of Native Time” map available as an editioned print. The map is currently on display as a floor print at the CCMOA through October and depicts the Nantucket coastal plains and George’s Island as of 11,000 years ago when sea level was more than 200 feet lower. Then, vast plains were grazed by mastodons and the first humans were arriving in a migration path around retreating glaciers. Many disappearing animals (Pleistocene megafauna) are shown such as giant bears, dire wolves, mastodons and walruses - as well as many animals that survive - such as coyotes, whales and sharks. This is the land and sea our predecessors navigated and foraged for 10000 years before Europeans arrived.
The paintings and drawings in this show depict the direct experience of nature that has been a singular human trait for thousands of years, accompanied by fires, feasts, navigation and migration. They depict being lost, negotiating with nature and finding shared social enactments as essential to fulfillment and survival.
Vicky Tomayko, Garden 30x44”
VICKY TOMAYKO is an artist and printmaker who works with a variety of techniques to create one-of-a-kind prints. For this exhibition we will present five new large monoprints with silkscreen, collage, and hand painting.
Tomayko teaches at Cape Cod Community College, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown Summer Program. She manages the print studio for the Fine Arts Work Center during the 7 month Residency Program, and for the Massachusetts College of Art Low Residency Masters Program, providing workshops and one-on-one instruction. She was an Artist-in-Residence at the Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School in Orleans for ten years. Tomayko was assistant professor of printmaking at Connecticut College, 1979 through 1981, and was awarded a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in 1985. She received an MFA in printmaking from Western Michigan University, and has been the recipient of two Ford Foundation Grants. She is represented by the Schoolhouse Gallery and has been included in exhibitions in New York, Boston, Miami, Los Angeles, Basel,Venice, Istanbul, Basel, and Melbourne.
Breon Dunigan
BREON DUNIGAN will exhibit new sculpture, 'trophy heads' and mixed media sculptures. Breon exhibits her sculpture and prints widely throughout New England and New York. Her work can be found in several public and private collections. Her studio is in Truro, on Cape Cod and she has deep connections to the Art Colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her horned “Trophy Heads” are a suite of individual wall sculptures made from repurposed furniture and textiles. These sculptures are a marvel of ingenious fabrication, and a witty commentary on the psychology of what it means to collect objects. The work also describes the tension she enjoys between our preconceptions about beauty in fine art, functionality in the decorative arts, and ways that objects like these trophies contain both possibilities. These artworks connect us with our hidden private desires, impulses and satisfactions about collecting including a flirtation with humor and fetish.
Rebecca Doughty, Smile #10 5x7”
REBECCA DOUGHTY is best known for her comic and tragic animal characters, whose fixed gazes engage with the viewer. These seemingly simple line-drawn figures with their guarded expressions provide a psychologically charged narrative.
The new body of work in this exhibition, Smile, focuses on a single detached facial feature: mouths with rows of tiny teeth seem to float, fall, pile up, and assemble; they become sediments, clouds, and cell-like chains and spirals. Ghosts of happiness haunt a fragmenting world.
Rebecca Doughty's drawings and paintings have been exhibited widely, including The Drawing Center in New York, The Boston Drawing Project, DeCordova Museum, Rose Art Museum, and the Courthouse Gallery in Co. Mayo, Ireland. She has received fellowships and awards from the Ucross Foundation, The Ballinglen Arts Foundation, The Massachusetts Cultural Council, The Blanche E. Colman Foundation, The A.R.T Grant Fund, and an AICA Boston Best Show Award. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, DeCordova Museum, Simmons College, Wellington Management, Fidelity Investments, and many private collections in the US, UK, Mexico and Japan.