Forces and Formations

Kevin Bernstein
Jonathan Bucci
Claire Johnson
Chauney Peck
Elise Richman

April 1 – May 2, 2009

Forces and Formations is an exhibit about the relationship between personal processes and natural phenomena. The participating artists’ work explores underlying forces, elemental structures, and/or landscapes to create perceptual sensations that are viscerally felt. Natural forces and formations provide a jumping off point, a reference that inspires each artist’s highly personal visual logic and evocative manipulation of materials.

Kevin Bernstein’s painting process provides an analogue for natural processes of growth, decay, and states of flux. Intimate forms accrue in Bernstein’s paintings, creating compositions that are richly textural and evoke landforms and amoebas.

Jonathan Bucci’s process involves direct interaction with mixed media in a process that animates his abstractions of glaciers, tornadoes, waves, and plants with an emotional complexity that expresses pathos, humor, and angst.

Claire Johnson’s square, representational oil paintings of aerial topographies convey a sense of wonder for her subject matter, as well as pigment and paint. Her work delivers on two fronts, creating vertiginous spatial illusions and luscious layers of colored marks.

Chauney Peck throw rocks like dice, thereby using chance to create her compositions of rocks on brown craft paper. Her intimate, intuitive watercolor paintings transform the planar structure of rocks into patterned marks that are as elemental as the forms depicted.

Elise Richman layers acrylic, oil, and encaustic paint to create sculptural paintings that evoke a sense of place and refer to the sense of touch in visual terms. She uses the emotional and associative potential of color to convey the sensation of landscapes as well as broader concerns about the future of the natural world.