Borderlands

Julie Alpert
Susanna Bluhm
Cynthia Camlin
Elise Richman
Katy Stone

November 06 – 29, 2014
Reception / Thursday, November 06, 6–8pm

Borderlands explores borders on multiple levels. Each participating artist is intimately connected to perceptual and formal considerations of edges as well as more conceptual, poetic, and affective notions of boundaries.

Bluhm’s compositions are barely contained, actively pushing against the picture plane’s edge. She synthesizes boundaries between the imaginary and real as well as the spatial and the sensory. She conjures new environments that reference actual, personally significant landscapes that tell stories and evoke sensation through her sensitive yet bold paint application.

Camlin frames fractured representations of deep space that seemingly expand beyond the edge of the picture plane. She depicts changing environmental boundaries by referencing glacial melt and ice sheets collapsing. As she states in her artist statement, “If it is a world in these paintings, that world is in pieces, loosening and shifting.”

Stone ruptures the iconic rectangular picture plane, literally constructing fluid spatial dynamics and layered trajectories. Her exploration of borders operates on multiple levels. As she puts it, “My work deals with the border between what is familiar and fantastical, the border between motion and suspension, and the border between the natural and the artificial. I’m interested in depicting forms that are the edge between abstraction and representation and much of my work is about being in a zone of contemplation.”

Alpert straddles the both the traditional rectangular picture plane and the more physical realm of installation. She activates exuberant and playful yet psychologically charged spatial encounters, using pattern, flat planes, shadows and vivid color to explore “physical boundaries: boundaries of the paper’s edge, boundaries of the individual patterns, and the invisible boundary between viewer and work.”

Richman’s paintings begin with a single pour. The poured paint dries into forms that evoke elements of the material world such as the contours of islands, water bodies, and/or fluid dynamics. Such contours act as boundaries that are emphasized, softened or transgressed in subsequent layers. Her paintings represent and embody the fluid nature of boundaries, reflecting phenomena that operate on visual, physical, environmental, and social levels.