For Immediate Release First CT Venue for Boston painter and Tennessee Sculptor Woodbury, CT - Fenn Gallery will feature abstract encaustic paintings by Patricia Carrigan and will be the first CT venue for contemporary landscape artist Dido Thayer of Boston, MA, and sculptor Carrie McGee of Nashville, TN. The show runs from May 15 - June 22, 2008. Carrie McGee’s work bridges the gap between painting and sculpture. To create her paintings, McGee lays translucent acrylic blocks in a bath of water and puts metal objects on the acrylic which leave rust outlines and stains she doesn’t entirely control. She then adds oil paint to build up luminous and translucent color arrangements. Groupings of these blocks are suspended along wires hung inches from a wall or ceiling in grids or strands to stunning effect. Transparency is central to McGee’s work. By hanging the constructions several inches off of the wall, light has the room to reverberate - to not only enter from the front, but to reflect back to the viewer as it bounces off the wall. While painters like Mark Rothko manipulated pigment hues to create the illusion of light shining through the back of a painting, McGee uses existing architecture and light to create this affect. For Patricia Carrigan painting is about telling stories and recalling memories, either real or imagined. The encaustic is medium lends itself to Carrigan’s layered approach to visual storytelling, where the dense and scraped surfaces of pigmented wax suggest the distortions of time and memory which color stories over time. Her recent work was inspired by her artist residencies in Ireland, where she was exposed to the vast and mysterious beauty of the countryside, and influenced by ancient folklore. These inherent qualities of the land are evident in her new paintings which evoke ancient worlds of mystery and sacredness. Carrigan received her M.F.A. from the University of CT in 1994, and her work has been reviewed most notably in The Boston Globe, 1996, The New York Times, 1995 and Art New England, April/May 1999. Also on display are the emotionally evocative and haunting landscapes by Dido Thayer. Thayer is known for her use of Venetian plaster as an under layer in many of her paintings which imparts a richly textured and earthy ruggedness to the surface of her panels. Although inspiration for her subject matter is often drawn from nearby fields and marshlands, her paintings depart from pure realism to intensify the moody and dreamlike quality of these places. Her images are not what her eye has seen and replicated, but what memory would have recalled and imagination would have modified. Thayer is far more interested in conveying the atmospheric effects of these places than she is providing details of an actual scene. Thayer received her BFA in painting from the MA College of Art, 1994 and pursued postgraduate studies at Harvard College, School of Visual Arts and Environmental Studies. ### |
