ROGER SAYRE: SOUND AND VISION

SILVERMAN AND HAMILTON SQUARE CONDOMINIUM ASSOCIATION present
Roger Sayre: Sound and Vision

Opening Reception: Wednesday, May 11, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.  

Hamilton Square
232 Pavonia Avenue, Jersey City, NJ 07302
201.434.8000

Exhibition Run: Wednesday, May 11 to August 31, 2016 

Vinyl Color Theory #4 (Detail), 2014, Unique Chromogenic Print, 20 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist, rogersayre.com

SILVERMAN and Hamilton Square Condominium Association present  “Roger Sayre: Sound and Vision,” curated by Brendan Carroll. Sayre is an artist driven by ideas who often uses unconventional materials to create his work—LP record album covers, fog juice, step ladders, vinyl folding chairs. What unifies his varied body of work is the sense of playfulness in which the pieces were considered and then realized.

For “Sound and Vision,” Sayre will present roughly two-dozen image-based works that include a new series of lens-less photographs, as well as collages made up of illustrations clipped from dictionaries, cassette tapes, and found photographs. Despite the variety of techniques, materials, and approaches to image making, the work on view in this exhibition is inspired by music in some form. The title of the show, “Sound and Vision,” refers to the song of the same name from David Bowie’s 1977 album Low.

The Halo series is a continuation of Sayre’s two-decade exploration of handmade lens-less photography. Each image is unique, more like a painting than a photograph. There are no negatives, no editions. This work has the immediacy of abstract drawings. They look like no other photographs. At times, the colors, forms, and textures suggest religious auras, radioactive nimbuses, solar and lunar eclipses, and black holes. At other times, they resemble bodily orifices, eyeballs, and entry and exit wounds.

Historically, the process he uses is similar to the one originated by Henry Fox Talbot, one of the early pioneers of photography. Sayre comments:

“Although we live in a world of digital photography, my work has always been informed and inspired by the basic tenets of the process. The kernel of all photography is light striking a light-sensitive surface. The procedure behind The Halo Series stops there. The pieces are made by illuminating photosensitive paper with filtered colored light in a dark room, forgoing both the camera and the film negative.”

Sayre’s hands-on experience in the darkroom is one of invention and discovery. Each photograph receives a minimum of seventy-two exposures that vary in time and color filtration. One piece often informs the creation of another.

The Halo Series is a result trial and error, as much as cause and effect. “When a piece works, it is like hitting a vein of ore after digging for weeks,” notes Sayre. “A success is a rarity, but very satisfying and a result of all the previous work.”

For his collages, Sayre uses the same spirit of improvisation and discovery to create his idiosyncratic orchestras. He combs through old dictionaries to find illustrated depictions of musicians, which he arranges into one-of-a-kind ragtag ensembles of instrumentalists. Sayre does not approach a collage with a preconceived outcome. He has an open mind and lets the process of trial-and-error guide his decision-making.

Roger Sayre (b. 1963) received his B.F.A. from Bowling Green State University in 1985. He received his M.F.A. from Pratt Institute in 1992. Sayre has collaborated with artist Charlotte Becket on a series of public projects that explore and reframe environmental materials and contexts. Last year, they won Socrates Sculpture Park’s 2015 Emerging Artist Fellowship. Sayre cofounded (re)mixed media, an ongoing collaboration with artist David Poppie. Sayre’s works have been featured in Bronx Museum of the Arts, Jersey City Museum, Shore Institute of Contemporary Art, A.M. Richard Fine Art, Allen Priebe Gallery (University of Wisconsin), Regina Gouger Miller Gallery (Carnegie Mellon University), among others. His works have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Pinhole Journal, Flash News, and Pittsburgh Tribune. He has won numerous awards, including the 2015 Artist Fellowship Award from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He lives and works in Jersey City, NJ.

The exhibition will be on view atHamilton Square Condominium Association through August 31, 2016. For further information, please visit us at SILVERMAN or call number (201) 435-8000. Hamilton Square is located at 232 Pavonia Avenue in Jersey City, NJ.

“Roger Sayre: Sound and Vision” is the thirty-first exhibition that Brendan Carroll will organize for SILVERMAN. For additional information on the artist, go here: rogersayre.com.

SILVERMAN has presented the works of Elizabeth Gilfilen, Robert Hendrickson, Sarah Becktle, Kati Vilim, Mark Dagley, Candy Le Sueur, Ed Fausty, Anna Mogilevsky, Ali Harrington, Sara Wolfe, Anne Percoco, Shauna Finn, Melanie Vote, Paul Lempa, Fanny Allié, Michael Meadors, John A. Patterson, Charlotte Becket, Roger Sayre, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, Tom McGlynn, Margaret Murphy, Valeri Larko, Tenesh Webber, Glenn Garver, Jennifer Krause Chapeau, Michelle Doll, Tim Heins, Megan Maloy, Laurie Riccadonna, Thomas John Carlson, Tim Daly, Ann Flaherty, Scott Taylor, Jason Seder, Sara Wolfe, Beth Gilfilen, Andrzej Lech, Hiroshi Kumagai, Victoria Calabro, Asha Ganpat, Darren Jones, Ryan Roa,Laura Napier, Risa Puno, Nyugen E. Smith, Amanda Thackray, and Kai Vierstra.

Transportation directions from Lower Manhattan to Hamilton Square Condominium Association.

Elizabeth Gilfilen: Nightcrawler

SILVERMAN AND MAJESTIC THEATRE CONDOMINIUM ASSOCIATION present

Elizabeth Gilfilen: Nightcrawler

Opening Reception: March 4, 2016, 7–9 p.m.


The Majestic Theatre Condominiums

222 Montgomery Street

Jersey City, NJ 07302

201.435.8000

Exhibition on view in the lobby from March 4, 2016 — June 30, 2016

Curated by Brendan Carroll, brendanscottcarroll.com

Nightcrawler, 2015, oil on canvas, 34 x 25 inches. Photo credit: Bill Orcutt. Courtesy of artist.

SILVERMAN AND MAJESTIC THEATRE CONDOMINIUM ASSOCIATION presents “Beth Gilfilen: Nightcrawler,” curated by Brendan Carroll. This exhibition features a selection of 10 abstract paintings completed in late 2015 and early 2106. Each painting is oil on stretched canvas or linen. Gilfilen’s paintings are built through layers and layers of dynamic brushwork, the wiping away of paint, antagonistic color play, and spatial complexity. Intuition, spontaneity, and improvisation inform her work as much as formal considerations. The results invigorate.

Gilfilen’s dynamic compositions with no fixed viewpoint are animated. The paint roils and seethes across the surface in seemingly perpetual motion. Within the picture plane, intersecting lines and conflicting colors create an undeniable energy. These paintings appear as a conflagration, a dustup, and an apparition. The eye rarely has a place to rest. Within the melee, a form may emerge: an insect, bones, or a tree.

Gilfilen does not approach a blank canvas with a preconceived notion. She has an open mind and lets the painting tell her what it needs next. “I don’t really have any strategy,” she says. ‘[Painting] is very intuitive and changes the moment I begin. I don’t like formulas, and I want the painting to take whatever route it needs to take.” The subject and object of her work is the search to discover elusive forms in the act of painting. Resolution is not a forgone conclusion. Form is not always discovered. The journey, not the destination, is the key.

Although her paintings give the impression they were created during an uninterrupted burst of activity, they more often than not develop in time, in deliberate increments. Her paintings begin with drawing. Accumulated marks grow and deviate. Sometimes when she sees a recognizable form emerge, she negates it. Part of Gilfilen’s process is to sit with her paintings in order to identify what the marks and the forms might be trying to tell her. She works on several canvases at a time, each one influencing the next, in constant call and response. “I enjoy this complicated relationship to the painting that develops over time and across a body of work,” notes Gilfilen.

Line, the individual brushstroke, forms the backbone of her work. Gilfilen’s calligraphic approach leads the eye around the canvas and form the essence of her paintings. Whether thick or thin, straight, diagonal, or curved, lines have a depth, weight, character, and descriptive power.

“I love line and think it captures everything: a record of time, a description of edges, rhythm, emotion, authorship,” she notes. “I want the paintings to come out of that.”

What is thrilling about her paintings is how they straddle the line between frantic scrawl and idiosyncratic calligraphy. Is the viewer looking at childlike scrawl or purposeful arabesques, which pirouette around the picture plane in the hope of finding an elusive image or form?

Gilfilen’s gestured-based work shares stylistic affinities with the New York School, but she is her own artist with her own set of priorities. Unlike her predecessors, she is more interested in illusion and the conjuring of hidden forms from the act of painting. “I want to make those actions into things,” Gilfilen remarks. When asked what separates her work from Abstract Expressionists, she says “We are all just pulling out the threads of the fabric of what we have seen, or the paintings we identify with, and reweaving them. It is like the folk songs that are passed down and rewritten with a slightly different rhythm in the next generation.”

One of the joys experienced when looking at Gilfilen’s paintings is wrestling between two forces: On the one hand, viewers may try to identify a recognizable shape; on the other hand, they may find themselves just taking in the painting itself, surrendering to the spectacle. Gilfilen is aware of the seemingly contradictory forces in her work, and how they may undo or undermine each other. She states:

“For me, there is a huge tension between the basic immersion in making the painting and what that can come to suggest. The work grows as I work, and I have to suspend my expectations of what I think it will be. To be right at the edge of recognizing form is very invigorating, and it surprises me, but only feels true when I have been completely present with the elements of painting. When this happens, I feel I can grasp something made-up, invented, but also sort of “real” or concrete. I love the chase between what slips right into the visual consciousness as I am making the painting and [what] slips away. Every slight move or shift of the line changes the outcome, so yes, I am continuously undoing the painting in my quest to find it!”

The hidden forms in her thickets of lines reside on the tip of the tongue. Part of the fun at looking at her work is trying to match the association to its word.

Elizabeth Gilfilen is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BFA from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Awards include Yaddo, The Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Space Program, Gallery Aferro Studio Residency, Alijra Emerge Fellowship, and The Bronx Museum’s AIM Program. She was invited to make prints at Oehme Graphics in Colorado and was a Studio Immersion Project Fellow at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York .

Recent group exhibitions include Morgan Lehman Gallery, the Blackburn 20/20 Space, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York, NY, and Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, VA. Other group exhibitions include the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Islip Art Museum, and Lehman College Gallery. Solo exhibitions include Fred Giampietro Gallery in New Haven, CT; the Hunterdon Art Museum, Clinton, NJ; Gallery Aferro, Newark, NJ; and John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY. Her work has been published twice in New American Paintings; reviewed in Two Coats of Paint, The Boston Globe, The Newark Star-Ledger and The New York Times.

The exhibition will be on view at Majestic Theatre Condominium Association through June 30, 2016. For further information, please visit us at SILVERMAN or call number (201) 435-8000. Majestic Theatre is located at 222 Montgomery Street in Jersey City.

“Elizabeth Gilfilen: Nightcrawler” is the thirtieth exhibition that Brendan Carroll will organize for SILVERMAN. For additional information on the artist, go here: elizabethgilfilen.com.

SILVERMAN has presented the works of Robert Hendrickson, Sarah Becktle, Kati Vilim, Mark Dagley, Candy Le Sueur, Ed Fausty, Anna Mogilevsky, Ali Harrington, Sara Wolfe, Anne Percoco, Shauna Finn, Melanie Vote, Paul Lempa, Fanny Allié, Michael Meadors, John A. Patterson, Charlotte Becket, Roger Sayre, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, Tom McGlynn, Margaret Murphy, Valeri Larko, Tenesh Webber, Glenn Garver, Jennifer Krause Chapeau, Michelle Doll, Tim Heins, Megan Maloy, Laurie Riccadonna, Thomas John Carlson, Tim Daly, Ann Flaherty, Scott Taylor, Jason Seder, Sara Wolfe, Beth Gilfilen, Andrzej Lech, Hiroshi Kumagai, Victoria Calabro, Asha Ganpat, Darren Jones, Ryan Roa,Laura Napier, Risa Puno, Nyugen E. Smith, Amanda Thackray, and Kai Vierstra.

Transportation directions from Lower Manhattan to the Majestic Theatre in downtown Jersey City.

 

From the Metropolis and the Mountains: Paintings by Robert Hendrickson

SILVERMAN AND HAMILTON SQUARE CONDOMINIUM ASSOCIATION present
“From the Metropolis and the Mountains: Paintings by Robert Hendrickson”

Opening Reception: Wednesday, January 20, 2016, 6–8 p.m. 

Hamilton Square
232 Pavonia Avenue, Jersey City, NJ 07302
201.434.8000

Exhibition on view in the lobby from January 20, 2016, to May 6, 2016.

Curated by Brendan Carroll, brendanscottcarroll.com

“I work directly from what I see.” –Robert Hendrickson

Hoboken Panorama, 2010, oil on linen, 30 x 84 inches.

SILVERMAN and Hamilton Square Condominium Association present “From the Metropolis and the Mountains: Paintings by Robert Hendrickson.” This exhibition comprises a series of modest to large-scale oil paintings on linen, canvas, and wood panel. The mini survey, which spans 10 years, features both urban and pastoral landscapes completed in the plein-air tradition. The scenes are devoid of people but never lifeless.

For the past three decades, Robert Hendrickson has chosen to paint the places he has called home: Jersey City, Bayonne, and Colchester, NY. With titles such as Bayonne Sunset (2008), Pulaski Skyway (2005), Colgate Clock, Afternoon (2010), Pepacton Inlet (2012), Shed in Snow (2010), and Zinnias (2014), Hendrickson’s paintings present his everyday subjects in an unsentimental, no-nonsense style. His brushwork is direct, unfussy, knowing. The paintings are as much about color, light, and shape they are about depicting specific locales.

In a thrilling development, there’s a new sense of brevity to his forms. Hendrickson paints what he sees, nothing more, nothing less: a fledgling tomato plant under the midday sun; a fallen tree in a snow-covered woodlot; an isolated road unfurling into Hoboken. He never rearranges what he sees to fit an idealized view or a conception of the landscape. He is faithful to what nature presents to him. But it would be careless to suggest that his paintings have ever bordered on hyperrealism. Eliciting a sense of space has always seemed to be more important than capturing the likeness of the objects being depicted.

Jersey City Heights, 2007, oil on linen, 20 x 50 inches

Colgate Clock, Afternoon, 2009, oil on panel, 10.5 x 14 inches

Hendrickson tends to paint on a modest scale, which he likens to writing a short story. These paintings, unburdened by superfluous detail, simplify the landscape to geometry and hue. From time to time, however, he likes to open up space and paint on a large scale. These works, by contrast, feel more “like an epic novel” to him. Hoboken Panorama, for example, provides a sweeping, all encompassing view of the Mile Square City, which never seems bogged down by minutia.

Intuition, more than emotional connection or convenience, determines what scene he will or will not decide to paint. “This intuition allows me to find landscapes that lend themselves to an interesting abstract arrangement of forms and space,” he remarks.

Snow woods, 2014, oil on linen, 24 x 26 inches

“I used to really enjoy driving around the metropolis this side of the Hudson, attempting to find my next painting spot. It was like a treasure hunt. It was always the more ordinary that interested me. I never wanted my painting to be overwhelmed by the subject that I was painting. For example, the Manhattan skyline is a very attractive thing to try to paint. But for me, it may be a difficult thing to paint in a way that it doesn’t look like some picture postcard.”

He started painting the landscape in the late 1980s as an undergraduate at American University in Washington, D.C. One of Hendrickson’s professors allowed him to skip class so he could pursue his goal to paint the nearby landscape around the nation’s capital. He has not looked back in 30 years.

Why paint the landscape, and why now?

“It’s an odd thing to be painting the landscape in the present time, but it is something I enjoy doing,” notes Hendrickson. “I think there is a formal visual language that has developed since people have been making [landscapes], and by continuing that tradition, I am connected to something larger than myself.”

Pepacton Inlet, 2012, oil on linen, 23 x 20 inches

View of Bear Mountain, 2010, oil on linen

One distinction to be made between his urban and pastoral scenes is temperament. More often than not, the paintings set in and around Bayonne and Jersey City feature nondescript locations: vacant lots, side streets, dead ends. New York City’s skyline appears in many of these works but at a considerable distance, and it is often obstructed by rivers, neighborhoods, and highways. The Big Apple is close but not close enough, more a specter than a thriving metropolis. Per Hendrickson’s eye and hand, the city will always be beyond one’s grasp, leaving viewers to feel as though they’ll never get there.

By contrast, the paintings completed on Hendrickson’s property in upstate New York feel intimate, accessible. The subject matter is always close at hand and within arm’s reach. To look at a painting of his flower garden, one can imagine sitting on a lawn chair in his yard, enjoying a cold glass of iced tea during a spring day in May, possibly playing a game of I Spy with the clouds.

Zinnias, 2014, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches

ISE Cultural Foundation, George Billis Gallery, and Rotunda Gallery have organized solo exhibitions of his work. Gallery Shoshinkan, New Jersey City University, Ramapo College of New Jersey, and Frederieke Taylor Gallery, among others, have featured his landscape paintings in numerous group exhibitions. Jersey Journal, American Art Collector, and Dallas Morning News have written about his paintings. He has received awards from Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Studio School, and Wayne Art Center, and many others.

Hendrickson earned his MFA in Painting from Southern Methodist University (2004) in Dallas, TX, and his BA in Studio Art and Art History from American University (1989) in Washington, D.C. He has taught painting at College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, MO, and New York Studio School in New York, NY. He lives and works in Bayonne and Colchester, NY.

The exhibition will be on view at Hamilton Square Condominium through May 6, 2016. For further information, please visit us at SILVERMAN or call 201.435.8000. Hamilton Square is located in 232 Pavonia Avenue in Jersey City, NJ.

“From the Metropolis and the Mountains: Paintings by Robert Hendrickson” is the 29th exhibition that Brendan Carroll will organize for SILVERMAN. For additional information on the artist, go here: robertrhendrickson.com.

SILVERMAN has presented the works of Sarah Becktel, Kati Vilim, Mark Dagley, Candy Le Sueur, Ed Fausty, Anna Mogilevsky, Ali Harrington, Sara Wolfe, Anne Percoco, Shauna Finn, Melanie Vote, Paul Lempa, Fanny Allié, Michael Meadors, John A. Patterson, Charlotte Becket, Roger Sayre, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, Tom McGlynn, Margaret Murphy, Valeri Larko, Tenesh Webber, Glenn Garver, Jennifer Krause Chapeau, Michelle Doll, Tim Heins, Megan Maloy, Laurie Riccadonna, Thomas John Carlson, Tim Daly, Ann Flaherty, Scott Taylor, Jason Seder, Sara Wolfe, Beth Gilfilen, Andrzej Lech, Hiroshi Kumagai, Victoria Calabro, Asha Ganpat, Darren Jones, Ryan Roa,Laura Napier, Risa Puno, Nyugen E. Smith, Amanda Thackray, and Kai Vierstra.

Transportation Directions from Lower Manhattan to Hamilton Square Condominiums

 

 

 

Opening reception of Candy Le Sueur: Where Dreams Land

Photographs from the opening reception of Candy Le Sueur: Where Dreams Land, which was held Friday, September 11, 2015, 7–9 p.m. Enjoy.

 

ANNE PERCOCO: TERRARIUM

Anne Percoco, Terrarium @ ArtBloc, Jersey City, NJ

SILVERMAN and Hamilton Square Condominium Association in association with ArtBloc present ANNE PERCOCO: TERRARIUM

OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, September 5, 2014, 7–9 p.m.

Hamilton Square
232 Pavonia Avenue
Jersey City, NJ 07302
201.435.8000

Exhibition on view September 5, 2014–ongoing

Anne Percoco’s Terrarium transforms an industrial shipping container into an enclosed ecosystem. With the help of the Hamilton Park Greens Group volunteers, she has filled the containers with weeds harvested from nearby Hamilton Park. Throughout the two-month project run, the installation has been in a constant state of flux as the artist plants, waters, and maintains this living ecosystem while collecting seeds from plants for limited edition seed packets.

Percoco sees Terrarium as a foil to the domesticated space of the park, a wild place within the neighborhood, encouraging viewers to look at the overlooked, and to be aware of the complex wilderness growing in the peripheries of Jersey City. This project is about collective contribution as it is about habitation and biodiversity.

The installation is unassuming during the daytime but takes on otherworldly qualities at night with the activation of pink LED grow lights and a sound installation by Michael Durek. This ethereal quality invites viewers to consider the plants as having an interior life and an agency of their own.

Work In Progress: Terrarium

The score features minimal, droning sounds reminiscent of the hums and tones that form the background of our sonic experience of cities, while occasionally becoming more cinematic and tonal. The skillful layering of these elements makes them seem almost natural.

Ultimately, this project is about what is undervalued from our daily urban environment, how our value systems interact with both humans and non-humans, and, as Gary Snyder wondered, “where do we start to resolve the dichotomy of the civilized and the wild?”

Percoco makes art not by creating something new, but by reorganizing what’s already there. Her process is resourceful, responsive, and playful. She spends as much time exploring, collecting materials, and researching as she does making. She makes full use of each material’s unique formal properties as well as historical, cultural and environmental resonances.

Percoco studied at Drew University, Madison, NJ (BA 2005) and Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ (MFA 2008). Percoco was born in Boston, MA, in 1982. She lives and works in Jersey City, NJ.

For more information on Anne Percoco, or to contact the artist, please visit her website: annepercoco.com.

A rendering of Anne Percoco’s installation Terrarium. Courtesy of the artist.

Contributors:

Musician Michael Durek created original sound design for this installation. For more information on the artist, go here: michaeldurek.com.

Filmmaker John Dunstan will project an original video to the side of ArtBloc during the opening reception. For more information on Dunstan, go here: vimeo.

Partners:

SILVERMAN is a New Jersey real estate developer, creatively rebuilding urban areas, supporting the arts, while building neighborhoods.

ArtBloc is a mobile art gallery and performance space built from two repurposed shipping containers – it is a dynamic community venue for art, music, dance and theater.

Brendan Carroll is an artist, writer and curator. He organizes a rotating exhibition program of prominent and up-and-coming artists for SILVERMAN.

Transportation Map:

Transportation Directions from Lower Manhattan to Hamilton Square Condominiums