Solo Exhibitions for First Friday Art Walk!
Opening Reception: Friday, June 2 from 5 – 9pm
Exhibition Duration: June 2 – July 1, 2017
The S.P.A.C.E. Gallery:
‘A Hair in the Stars and Grass’
by Peter Richards
Peter Richards – ‘If I Remember Those Seas Out of Kenai’
The Backspace Gallery:
‘Character Witness’
by Alex Costantino
Alex Costantino – ‘Resilience’
A pair of prolific studio members of The Backspace Gallery, Peter Richards and Alex Costantino, launch exciting solo exhibitions to kick off this June’s First Friday Art Walk!
With the loss of our auxiliary gallery, The Backspace, in June, this will be our last First Friday Art Reception in there…so don’t miss it!
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‘A Hair in the Stars and Grass’
Peter Richards
June 2 – July 1, 2017
In this new work I want each piece to tell a story, but with only the aura of a story and perhaps its setting doing the telling. I enjoy reading stories and so I’m interested in the ways stories evoke, transport, and enlist the reader into adventures built more out of atmosphere, tone, and voice, than what is ostensibly narrative. While events in life are important, I find it curious, and perhaps it stands as a rule—a great novel is great always despite it’s story. So I look in this new work to explore the question— outside of figure, what are some of the utilities a painting enjoys for creating realities that are at once habitable, intimate, and convincing, I’m also curious about the activity that exists somewhere in the overlap between viewing a painting and reading a text. I like to populate my paintings (suggestively) with what might be perceived as purely imaginary letters, and from alphabets and languages that are equally imagined. Imagined, but are they real? and if so, what are the semiotic, aesthetic, and spatial consequences when such lettering presents itself as not only imaginary, but also biological in form, and sentient in disposition? For me the question occurs simultaneous with the painting becoming embryonic in its outcome, and perhaps even still astral yet in the stage and mode it presents itself to the viewer. And as much as I want my painting to each one tell the particular story of how it came into being, it’s also true I wish for the viewer’s attention to absorb into the painting as one of its happily imagined, and living constituents.
Peter Richards – ‘The Slips’
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‘Character Witness’
Alex Costantino
May 27 – June 3, 2017
Although these are images riddled and defined by abstraction, still they are images of human beings experiencing change, life, transformation. They are meant at once to be paintings- objects concerned with their own materiality and the manner of their creation- as well as communions of artist and subject. What makes them portraits is, as much as anything, that they are not the human beings they represent.
Every portrait is a fiction, just as every painting is simultaneously an engagement with a subject and, in itself, an inert object. Whether full scale nudes or merely a pair of hands, these paintings are meant to capture some measure of an individual- some measure of the subjects’ emotional residue, of their physical presence, of their life lived apart from being a subject. And because these paintings depict people through varied ages and stages of life, these pictures communicate that transition. Each one is being, and becoming.
Alex Costantino – ‘Domenica’
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Gallery Hours: Thursday, Friday, Saturday from 12 – 5pm
The S.P.A.C.E. Gallery
266 Pine Street, Suite 105, Burlington, VT
See you soon, enjoy!
Filed under: Art Exhibits, The Backspace Gallery, The Space | Tagged: Alex Costantino, Art Gallery in Vermont, Burlington Art, First Friday Art Walk, Peter Richards, The Backspace Gallery, The Soda Plant, The Space Gallery, Vermont Art, vermont studio collective | Leave a comment »
The S.P.A.C.E. Gallery 