Keri Halloran at Real Art Ways

  Utilizing the camera as a mark making tool, Keri Halloran creates images that exploit the painterly possibilities of photography. In this body of work, I bet burning alive would be beautiful., Halloran captures ambiguous images that exist in a liminal space between reality and fiction, literally blurring the lines between what is and is not recognizable. Combining this with a sensitivity to materials and installation methods, the result allows the viewer to engage in her photographs as objects, images, and an expansive collage on the wall. From her artist statement: “As each perspective gets layered onto one’s self, it has an affect on one’s perceived reality. The viewer receives from the disparate images emotions that are communicating with each other in a positive and negative way. The vagueness and ambiguity within the visuals lends itself to the vagueness that the self can embrace as well.” About the Artist Keri Halloran is an artist from Hartford, Connecticut who focuses on visual sensations within images. She received a Bachelors of Fine Arts in photography at Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford. Keri is actively showing throughout Connecticut while working full time in commercial photography. http://www.kerihalloran.com Instagram: @keri.halloran Real Wall is a series of wall mounted exhibitions taking place in between formal gallery spaces. Artists are invited to engage with the space in experimental ways meaningful to their practice in short-run exhibitions.

 

Real Art Ways is partnering with Visual AIDS and AIDSCT (ACT) on the 29th annual Day With(out) Art, for a one-night film screening of Alternate Endings, Activist Rising and a round table community discussion to follow.

Taking place in our video gallery, this is a special opportunity to compare and contrast the various methods and programs presented in the film with local organizers and activists here in Hartford.  Deputy Director of ACT, Shawn Lang and Real Art Ways Visual Arts Coordinator, Neil Daigle Orians will help lead the roundtable talk asking critical questions such as: How is the AIDS crisis still affecting us in Hartford and Connecticut, and what are people doing about it?  Visual AIDS is the only arts organization fully committed to raising AIDS awareness and creating dialogue around HIV issues today.  They produce and present work, assist artists living with HIV/AIDS, and have a commitment to preserving and honoring the work of artists with HIV/AIDS and the artistic contributions of the AIDS movement. ACT, with its partners, increases Connecticut’s capacity to ensure that all people impacted by HIV/AIDS and related health issues have access to health, housing and support services. Free Admission. All are invited to attend and add to the conversation. About the film Alternate Endings, Activist Rising highlights the impact of art in AIDS activism and advocacy today by commissioning compelling short videos from six inspiring community organizations and collectives—ACT UP NY, Positive Women’s Network, Sero Project, The SPOT, Tacoma Action Collective, and VOCAL NY. The program represents a wide range of organizational strategies, from direct action to grassroots service providers to nation-wide movement building, while considering the role of creative practices in activist responses to the ongoing AIDS crisis. The film seeks to reflect the persisting urgencies of today’s HIV/AIDS epidemic by pointing to pressing and intersecting political concerns, including: – HIV criminalization – Big Pharma – homelessness – and the disproportionate effects of HIV on marginalized communities. At a moment of growing interest in the histories of AIDS activism, Alternate Endings, Activist Rising foregrounds contemporary engagements between activists, artists, and cultural workers on the front lines.

  Group is a single-channel video installation; a monologue on repeat. Artist Statement The word “monologue” comes from the Greek monologos, which translates to “speaking alone”. Obvious but also; what an oxymoron. Each of the performers in Group are people I met in a group – “group therapy”, or group analysis, to be more precise. We rehearse every week. About the Artist Lauren Bakst is an artist and writer living in New York. She works in, with, and through dance to approach performances as an object of inquiry. She has recently held residencies at NARS and Chez Bushwick and has performed her work twice at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery. Her work has also been presented at Danspace Project, SculptureCenter, Pioneer Works, Movement Research at Judson Church, Abrons Arts Center and The Drawing Center, among other spaces. Lauren is the Managing Editor of the Movement Research Performance Journal and her writing was recently published in Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. She teaches in the School of Dance at University of the Arts. Image: Still from digital video, 41 min 59 sec.

  Using a technicolor palette, Noé Jimenez’ work creates layered connections ranging from pop culture references to pure abstraction. Organic compositions within his small paintings are then mimicked through his clustered installation on the wall. Alongside collage, the physicality of his painting fully exploits the fluid and viscous nature of his materials. Connecticut Art Review Nov 28 Studio Visit | Noé Jimenez About Noé Noe Jimenez lives and works in West River Arts Studios in Westville, CT. He graduated with a BFA in Painting from Paier College of Art in 2012, and has studied painting at Colegio de España, Salamanca, Spain, University of Urbino, Italy and Altos De Chavon, Dominican Republic. In 2014 he was a resident at Norðanbál on Hrisey Island in Iceland. His work has been included in solo and group shows in Connecticut, California, Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, and private collections. You can see more of his work by visiting his website or his Instagram. Real Wall is a series of wall mounted exhibitions taking place in between formal gallery spaces. Artists are invited to engage with the space in experimental ways meaningful to their practice in short-run exhibitions.

  An Artist Talk & Reception will be held on Saturday, Nov. 10, 3 – 5 PM. Visual Arts Coordinator, Neil Daigle Orians will engage with Plater in a dialogue surrounding her work and process. Real Art Ways is pleased to present Sofia Plater, one of six recipients of the 2018 Real Art Awards, a project supported in part by an award from the National Endowment of the Arts. To learn more about this project, click here. Plater’s work utilizes found objects and textures to create sculptural installations, forming dialogues between the original objects and newly cast pieces. Construction materials, cardboard, and other miscellania form a cohesive aesthetic that is simultaneously organic and synthetic. To learn more about Sofia Plater’s work, visit her website here. Connecticut Art Review Nov 27 Essay on Sofia Plater: The Resurrection of Salvaged Goods About Sofia Sofia Plater is a mixed-media artist from Boston, Massachusetts. She received her MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in 2018 and her BFA in Fine Arts from Boston College in 2011. While enrolled in the Master’s degree program, Sofia received the Montague Travel grant, allowing her to travel and research in Scotland in early 2018. The same month, she curated her first solo show featuring nineteen sculptural works at Factory Mark Gallery in Framingham, MA. In the past year, Sofia has participated in numerous group exhibitions, and was featured in a twenty-two-page article for Peripheral ARTeries Art Review Magazine. Sofia was the first artist in residence at the 77Art program, in Rutland, Vermont for the month of August 2018. Before pursuing her Master’s of Fine Arts degree, she was the art program director and art instructor at The New Britain Youth Museum, in central Connecticut.

  Utilizing high and low-brow technologies, Balam Soto creates interactive sculptures and installations. Soto creates custom software for his pieces, bridging physical objects with coded data, resulting in experiential works that are never the same twice. Intuitive, tactile surfaces allow the viewer to interact and create their own experience in the gallery. Curated by David Borawski, Intangible Proximity opens Thursday, October 18 6-8 PM during Creative Cocktail Hour. To learn more about Soto’s work, click here to visit his website. About the Artist An award-winning, new media artist, Balam Soto has exhibited in fine art venues worldwide. Venues include the New Zealand Art Festival; Brooklyn Academy of Music; Creative Tech Week in NY; the AluCine Latin Media Festival in Toronto, Canada;  World Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science Museum in Queens, NY; El Museo del Barrio in Manhattan, NY; Gallery of Oi Futuro in Brazil; Queens Museum of Art in Queens, NY; Everhart Museum of Natural History, Science & Art in Scranton, PA; the Centre Cultural in Brussels, Belgium; the National Library of Cameroon in West Africa; and the Art and Technology Corridor at the Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh, PA  among numerous others. Balam has received six Editor’s Choice awards and one Best in Class award from the World Maker Faire held at the New York Hall of Science Museum in 2010 – 2016.  In 2016, Balam was Officially Recognized by the Hartford City Council (CT) for the positive impact his work has had on the region. In 2009, he was awarded the Latino de Oro [Golden Latino] Award for Arts & Culture in Connecticut; he has also received Official Citations from the Mayor of the City of Hartford, CT and the Governors of Rhode Island and Massachusetts.  In April 2008, Balam was honored with a Diploma of Recognition as a “Maestro,” a Master of Visual Arts, by the National Congress of Guatemala for “being a valuable and outstanding artist with international success.” Balam is the owner of Balam Soto Studio and co-owner of Open Wire Lab, both located in Hartford, Connecticut.

  Mixing biology, ecology, and fantasy, Maggie Nowinski’s DRAWN wHOLE presents a series of drawn works that explore systems, both social and biological. Her linework mimics both historic woodcut illustrations and scientific illustrations, creating new specimens out of recognizable shapes and parts. Nowinski says, “I imagine they are specimens in a kind of empirical study and simultaneously examine them as I construct them. As they emerge I am aware that the lived experience in my body is vast and enigmatic and I think about the interplay of resilience and ache in these specimens – triumphant adaptations and self-sufficient, sometimes toxic, systems.” Curated by David Borawski, DRAWN wHOLE opens Thursday, October 18 from 6-8 PM during Creative Cocktail Hour. For more information about Nowinski and her work, click here to visit her website. Connecticut Art Review Oct 24 Review | Maggie Nowinski: Drawn wHole About the Artist Maggie Nowinski is an interdisciplinary visual artist, arts educator and curator who lives and works in Western Massachusetts and has an active exhibition record, showing work regionally, nationally and abroad. She is the recipient of numerous LCC grants through the Massachusetts Cultural Council. In 2017, she was the recipient of the Berkshire Taconic Foundation Artist Resource Trust Fellowship which partially supports her work in this current exhibition. She received her BFA in 1997 and her MFA in 2007. While her process is rooted in drawing, her artworks frequently take the format of installation and combine traditional and unusual media, audio, video and performative processes. Her work often responds specifically to site or material, and her process is embodied by an awareness of the conceptual and political inevitability of art making. She is also fond of collaborations. Nowinski is adjunct faculty at Westfield State University in Massachusetts and Manchester Community College in Connecticut and is Artist-Mentor with Vermont College of Fine Arts in the MFA/Visual Arts Program.

  In her Plate to Platelet series of paintings, Mia Brownell combines diagrammatic space with a stark black/white/gray palette that graphically delineates the ambiguous and contradictory spaces she is constructing. Occupying positions within these spaces are collections of fruit painted in a meticulous, illusionistic style. Sometimes the still life elements rest upon the fragments of shelves that lean and turn in space, alternately fixed, floating or falling. The shelves frequently cast shadows onto their indefinite surroundings, encouraging the viewer to read them simultaneously as space and surface. Connecting the otherwise isolated images are linear devices that resemble vines, umbilical cords or arteries. The relationships indicated by the linear elements evoke the kinds of systems represented by organizational flow charts. Brownell says, “These paintings dissect and interweave fundamental elements of nature, food, and culture – of movement, and impulse – that might be labeled theatric. My motivations stem from the confluences between the seductive excesses of food culture, the vanity and illusionism of traditional still life painting, and the constructed spaces of computer generated scientific imaging.” Curated by David Borawski About the Artist Mia Brownell was born in Chicago, Illinois to a sculptor and biophysicist. She uses the conventions of the the painted food still life as a means to comment on contemporary issues surrounding food. Her paintings simultaneously reference 17th century Dutch Realism and the coiling configurations of molecular imaging. Mia has had solo exhibitions in major American cities including New York, Boston and Washington, DC. Mia’s paintings are in several private, corporate, and public art collections including Wellington Management, Fidelity Investments and the National Academy of Sciences. Her work has been reviewed and published in numerous publications including The Boston Globe, The Village Voice, New York Times, HiFructose and Artnet Magazine. Mia’s paintings have been included in over 130 group exhibitions worldwide where she has exhibited with several celebrated artists counting Robert Gober, Cindy Sherman, and Alexis Rockman. She teaches painting and drawing in New Haven at Southern Connecticut State University. Featured image: Plate to Platelet VII, 2017. Oil on linen, 30″ x 36″

  Noah Loesberg explores our interaction with architecture and objects on a personal level. Starting with familiar objects – in this case traffic barriers – he injects shifts in scale, materials or context to create varying levels of abstraction. According to Loesberg, “I approach my sculpture as a set of substitutions; materials stand in for other materials, forms for other forms, at varying levels of dissonance or consonance.” Night Work includes sculpture and drawing. The exhibition will be on view through Sunday, September 23. About the Artist Noah Loesberg was raised in Huntington, Long Island, a suburb of New York City. He studied art and music at Bennington College, and earned an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Loesberg lives in Brooklyn and maintains a studio in Ridgewood, Queens. Artist Statement “Architecture is rich with cultural intentions. In my work I represent what I experience in the built environment. I am interested in the objects, structures, and decorative devices that we navigate daily, those of the living room, the hallway, and the street outside. Although facades are usually what we think about when architecture is mentioned, looking at buildings is more akin to viewing mountains or forests; The man-made structures seem to arise like feats of nature. I focus on a much lower order of minutia, the smaller details of interior design and street level construction, where our interactions with architecture are personal. I start with a familiar object, and through shifts in scale, materials and context lead to varying levels of abstraction. Examples of my work include a street curb, which wraps the base of the gallery walls and can’t be stepped over, a huge smoke detector, which quietly intones weather reports, and a radiator, which uses the ironic visual warmth of wood instead of actual heat.” Sponsored by

  This exhibition catalogues the process of the students’ work with artist/faculty Mary Mattingly to create a public art project for Hartford inspired by the Park River. The Park River’s North Branch runs through campus before being engineered to run beneath Downtown Hartford. This river has served as inspiration for an ongoing blog, individual artworks, activities based on co-education and learning, and a Fluxus-inspired toolkit that encourages a deeper engagement with rivers. Nomad/9 MFA: Interdisciplinary, is a low-residency program at Hartford Art School, focusing on sustainable culture and cross-disciplinary art practices. These events and artworks have been created by graduating students Rachel Dennis, Kay Douglas, Megan Driving Hawk, Désirée Duell, Susan Hackett, Benjamin Hao, Andrew Oesch, Jess Porzuczek, Rory Sparks and Tathy Yazigi. Real Art Ways has a longstanding relationship with the Hartford Art School going back to RAW’s founding in 1975. One of Real Art Ways’ missions is to provide opportunities and exposure for emerging artists.