Recent Shows at the Gallery at Still River Editions

Ball Players
Drawings by Chris Durante

March 11 - May 31, 2013

Chris Durante: Untitled Ball Player #1, Untitled Ball Player #2 © 2013

Ball Players is a solo exhibition of new drawings by Chris Durante of Redding, Connecticut. Durante uses ink and collage elements to express his nearly life-long interest in all things baseball, in particular the characters that inhabit the "cathedrals of baseball". The stylized figures convey the attitude and soul of players past and present, real and imaginary.

Artist Statement

I think my first out-of-body experience occurred when I was eight years old. My dad took me to Yankee Stadium for the first time to see the Yankees play the Senators. Nothing prepared me for that first walk through the tunnel. Every light was on, illuminating the field, mocking the efficiency of the sun on that cloudless, clear day. I didn’t know anything could be that big or green. I mean GREEN. I was both above it and in it. Time slowed. My sense of sound was heightened, turning into frequencies that were new, yet familiar; everything was amped. The sensation halted only by my dad asking me what I wanted on my dog.

I had never imagined anything so perfect.

And then there were giants.

I got up close to the visitors dugout where Frank Howard was signing autographs. He was huge but did not seem to be dwarfed by the scale of the stadium. He, and the other players who were taking batting practice, seemed right at home. I had been reading Greek myths and this setting gave me a visual to put with the stories of Ajax and Hercules. Nothing would ever be the same.

I love the game of baseball, its lore, history, and aesthetic. Statistics and teams, while interesting, are secondary considerations. I am equally at home in a sold out cathedral of baseball or watching a group of kids hash it out in an abandoned lot.

It seems that our lives are spent trying to regain the innocence of that first experience when everything was new, mythic and unsullied by quotidian demands. These drawings are my attempt to get back to that place.

Chris Durante
Spring 2013

Biography

I was born in the Bronx under the watchful gaze of the Eisenhower administration. It was summer, and the Yankees were in first place. Somehow I have managed to make it through to the current debacle. During this time I have attended school, watched a lot of television, gained and lost about a thousand pounds, made and spent money, fallen in and out of love, suffered through George Steinbrenner, Billy Martin and A-Rod, made a lot of drawings (some of which reside at addresses far more tony than mine), been witness to miracles large and small, broken bread with scoundrels and sages (often at the same meal) seen walk-off home runs and ninth-inning strike outs, met and fell in love with the woman who is my wife, started a business, taught, read too many books, eaten too many pastrami sandwiches and not enough broccoli rabe, said yes when no would have been better and vice versa, etc. All my experience and education has led me to one immutable truth: life is a coin flip—one side you get to buy candy, the other you have to pay the dentist.

Seriously, I graduated from Western Connecticut State University in 1981 with a bachelor of arts in graphic design.  Three years of evening extension classes at the School for Visual Arts in New York helped me make the transition from commercial to fine art. Since 1981, I have operated my own framing and art handling business in Danbury. My clients include the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, the State of Connecticut Prison Arts Program, and many local and international artists. I have been teaching drawing at Norwalk Community College since 2001. I also work with the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum as a preparatory, framer, educator, and sometime lender and sponsor. The hard fact of having to put food on one’s table has made me see the wisdom of coupling one’s artistic endeavors with a sense of business.

Chris Durante
January 2013

"ORANGE": Connecticut ASMP Photography Exhibition


January 3 - February 28, 2013

Participants: Nikki Alekson, Rich Pomerantz, Christine Chiocchio, Jim Fiora, Richard Freeda, Carl Vernlund, Liz Calvi, Edwina Stevenson, Donna Callighan, Christopher Beuchamp, Gale Zucker, Michael Garner, Ronald L. Glassman, Barry Hyman, Jane Schauck, Phil Nelson, Peter Wnek, and Pam Rouleau.

CT ASMP

2nd Annual Affordable Art Exhibition: Photography Group exhibition

October 6 - December 21, 2012
Opening Reception Saturday, October 6, 4 - 6 p.m.

This invitational photography show gathered some of the area’s best photographers to celebrate Connecticut Photographics’ and Still River Editions’ 25th anniversary. 

The photographers are Shona Curtis (New Milford), Paul Berger (Newtown), David Blackett (Stratford), Garry Burdick (Southbury), Karl Decker (Monroe), Tony Donovan (Ivoryton), David Haislip (Danbury), Keith Johnson (Hamden), Paul Jones (New Britain), Ben Larrabee (Darien), Jay Misencik (Monroe), Karen Neems (Stamford), Ann Reeves (Redding), Michele Russell (Stamford), Graham Scott (Deep River), Marko Susla (Edison, NJ), and Dennis Yates (Woodbury).

The photographs were archivally printed by Still River Editions. Each is sized at 16”x20” and priced at $100.

ORIENTATION
Selected Works by Bernard Boffi

July 9 - September 28, 2012

ORIENTATION is a solo exhibition of archival digital fine art prints by Bernard Boffi, whose monograph of the same name was published in 2010. Boffi is a painter, photographer, printmaker, filmmaker, and arts educator from Kent Lakes, NY. In his foreword to the book, critic Donald Kuspit describes Bernard Boffi's prints as "masterpieces of what might be called expressionistic surrealism."

The prints included in the exhibit ORIENTATION are classic prints based on Boffi's work as a painter, and stamp prints, which are collage works he says are "in the manner of Robert Rauschenberg that use postage stamps as elements like those in a still life." His classic prints, "have to do with things in nature that are invisible. Natural phenomena – like the idea of polarity is something that we know but we can't see, and is used for us to navigate through time and space."

FULL PRESS RELEASE (pdf)

THESE WORKS ARE AN EXPLORATION…
A CELEBRATION OF THE INVISIBLE,
WHERE THE STRENGTH OF ITS HIDDEN ARCHITECTURE
LIES IN A WINDOW TO OUR DREAMS
THE SLEEPWALKING NEEDED,
LIVING UNDER THE INVISIBLE… AWAKE
BERNARD BOFFI

Bernard Boffi was born in Greenwich Village in New York City in 1943. He attended the School of Visual Arts and graduated in 1966. The same year, he married the artist Ingrid Soltner. In 1967, he worked on his first portfolio of paintings when he and Soltner moved to Germany, where they spent a year traveling. Upon returning to New York City, they lived on 2nd St. next to Claes Oldenburg's famous store front, the scene of early performance art including the film Hippodrome Hardware. This fostered Boffi's interest in Avant-garde film; he began making films in the early 70s into the early 80s. The peak creation of this period was Boffi's film Photoplays, which the filmmaker Kenneth Anger described as "deliciously dangerous." Boffi was one of the founders of one of the first alternative schools in the country where he developed an art program based on the Avant-garde in NYC. Boffi became an early adopter of digital printmaking. He has two sons, Oliver and Andreas, and now maintains a studio in Kent, NY.

Intellectual Property: New Work by Gene Gort

April 5 - June 29, 2012

"Intellectual Property: Stolen #3" © Gene Gort, 2011

The exhibition Intellectual Property at the Gallery at Still River Editions features archival digital print editions of new work by multi-disciplinary artist Gene Gort. His new series reveals a hidden beauty that emerges from his interaction with the technology meant to keep people from illegally copying movies. Some of the prints have elements that look familiar, while others are pure geometric abstracts.

The entire Intellectual Property series, as well as his other work, can been seen at www.genegort.com.

Artist Statement

"I have recently become interested in NOISE; visual and sonic. The current project, "Intellectual Property", focuses on the visual noise generated from attempting to extract video from copyright encrypted commercial DVD's. As an educator who uses video clips as a mainstay of my classroom practice, I am always showing samples from various sources.

Recently, while attempting to extract sequences from mainstream movies, I was struck by the endless variation of intentional visual noise this process generates in order to keep me and everyone else from illegally copying movies. Through various encoding and decoding software, I found that the variability and randomness of the encryption algorithms produced remarkably unpredictable distortions and abstractions of the images. So much so that it was nearly impossible to get the same results twice.

The images in this series are screen-grabs from this process; a kind of performance that I do responding to the real-time events I am watching on screen. The titles are an ironic pairing of "intellectual property" and the film title, like "Stolen", "Catch Me If You Can",  "Precious", "Babel" or "Gone with the Wind". The work has nothing to do with plot or characters depicted in the movies nor do they mimic any of the imagery or scenes.

The images here represent a visual equivalent to the collision of the video, computer code, encryption algorithm and extraction process,  my aesthetic sensibility and performance acumen - an equivalency that is independent of the content of the original source."

Biography

Gene Gort is a visual artist whose artistic practice is concerned with making the ordinary significant. He is keenly aware of the role of whatever medium he uses in this process be it video production, installation, digital printmaking or multi-media performance.

His work has been recognized by the Connecticut Commission on the Arts with a Fellowship for video in 2001; he has received two MacDowell Colony residencies in 2003 and 2006; two nominations for Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships in 1999 and 2003; a Pollack - Krasner Foundation Fellowship in 1997; and a New Works Grant from the Edward C. & Ann T. Roberts Foundation with composer and collaborator, Ken Steen in 2005; among others. His work has been screened and exhibited internationall y including the Boston Cyberarts Festival (2009); Connecticut Biennial, Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, CT (2008); "50,000 Beds" project, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum/Real Art Ways/Artspace (2007); DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park (1999); The Black Maria Film and Video Festival (2011, 2001, 1998, 1997); Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool, UK (2006); Impakt Festival, Casco Gallery, Utrecht, Holland (2005), among others. His videotape, "Narcissus O.C.D.", was purchased in 2010 by the Connecticut State Art Collection.

He received his MFA from the University of California, San Diego and his BFA from Hartford Art School, University of Hartford where he is currently Professor of Media Arts, a program he designed and directs.

Fourteen Threadless Needles
Photographs by Vito Pasquale

January 5 - March 30, 2012
Opening reception Saturday, January 28, 2012 4-6 pm*

*Snow date: Saturday, February 4, 2012, 4 - 6 pm

Vito Pasquale is a photographer and writer from Mount Kisco, NY. He is one of those people who, upon retiring from the full-time job he'd done in corporate America for almost thirty years, began to "peek down, as Frost would call it, 'the road not taken'". In 2008, Pasquale returned to writing after a long hiatus, and in 2009 he began taking photographs that reflected some of the themes in his writing. His book of poetry, Fourteen Threadless Needles, was published in 2011.

Many of Pasquale's photographs are abstracts and photo-manipulations that go beyond taking the world at face value. In his poem, "(Somewhere) After Silence (and) Before Regret", Pasquale refers to ". . .the surprisingly elastic properties of a dream." The photographs dance around that dream-state in the everyday.

Pasquale says about his photographs, "I believe it is healthy to have a casual disregard for authority. In some cases it might even be necessary to have a determined disregard – please don't tell my kids. In any case, the sky that is saturated and yellow, the off-kilter street scene, the blackened hills, the something there is that doesn't love a happy ending, these are the approaches that I take. I believe in the pretty picture, but only if it's very, very pretty, which means it's probably a flower and the bloom is fading away."

Included in the show are several photographs that relate to Pasquale's history in the Danbury area. He grew up in Mount Kisco, NY and his father worked in Danbury until 1966 at a construction company that was located near the site of the train station just up Liberty Street. Coincidentally, this is a short distance from the Gallery at Still River Editions.

The fourteen photographs are connected to poems posted online via QR codes, which viewers can scan using their smart phones, or look at online in the gallery.

Tangents
by Vito Pasquale

If life
didn't
have
tangents,
it wouldn't
have any
direction
at all.

Link to photograph and another poem

Solo Exhibits
"Mount Kisco in 4.8 Seconds" Mount Kisco, New York Public Library, January 2011
"A City of (Second) Guesses" Harrison, New York Public Library, February 2011.

Selected Group Exhibits
Hudson Valley Hospital Center "Art for Health" program, Peekskill, NY June 2011 – January 2012
Westchester Land Trust 2011 group photo show "Heaven on Earth," ArtsWestchester Gallery, White Plains, New York, awarded second prize for the photo "Tulip" (J. Henry Fair, juror), February, 2011

Affordable Art Print Exhibition and Sale
Group exhibition of fine giclée prints

November 1 - December 23, 2011

The Gallery at Still River Editions is pleased to announce its first Affordable Art Print Exhibition and Sale, an invitational group exhibition of fine giclée prints of artwork by fourteen Connecticut artists.

The artists are Betty Christensen (watercolor, Newtown, CT), Grace McEnaney (Newtown, CT), Florence Froeder (watercolor, New Fairfield, CT), Tatiana Golovnya (mixed media, Redding, CT), Nancy Lasar (monotype, Washington Depot, CT), Marge Malwitz (gouache, Brookfield, CT), Adele Moros (acrylic painting, Bethel, CT), Edith Borax-Morrison (ink, Trumbull, CT), Mike Morshuk (mixed media, New Milford, CT), Ruth Newquist (watercolor, Newtown, CT), Banjie Nicholas (egg tempera, Warren, CT), Linda Pickwick (watercolor, Newtown, CT), Vicki Stevens (watercolor, Danbury, CT), and Claire Tuffereau (watercolor, New Fairfield, CT)

Moments of Grace^®: Portraits by Ben Larrabee
August 30 - October 28, 2011

Artists' reception Thursday, September 8, 2011 5:30 - 7:30 pm

Ben Larrabee is a portrait and fine art photographer from Darien, CT.

Ben Larrabee's artist statement:

My goal is to be authentic and honest, not merely different. My approach is based on letting go of expectations and assumptions about how people should look or behave. I want to go past formal poses and pretenses. I want to use the photographic experience as a way of finding truth and connection. My work is not about my camera: I really want to make the camera itself disappear so that I'm performing effortlessly and my subjects are acting naturally unselfconsciously, expressing their spirit and their love for one another.

I am dedicated as an artist to recognizing and recording those fleeting yet memorable glimpses of life that we take for granted, moments every family has but rarely sees revealed in photographs. I call them Moments of Grace®: when two and two equals five; when truth, spirit, love and even humor come together to create a whole that is infinitely greater than the sum of its parts. In addition to portraits I also photograph landscapes and nudes.

Press release for Moments of Grace®: Portraits by Ben Larrabee

Facebook event page for artist's reception on September 8, 2011

Photographs by Keith Johnson and Mark Savoia
June 11 - August 26, 2011

"Kannapolis" © Keith Johnson

"The Bush Presidency" © Mark Savoia

Open House Day, Saturday, June 11, 2011 (in conjunction with Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism)
Special gallery hours 11 am - 4 pm

Artists' reception Thursday, June 23, 2011 5:30 - 7:30 pm

Keith Johnson is a photographic educator and fine artist from Hamden, CT

Keith Johnson's artist's statement

Re: Man(ufactured) Space started in 2004 as a response to the construction in Boston and New Haven; the places I work and live. I am interested in the way that we claim, construct, create and recreate space in the pursuit of development,and attracted to the intermediate stages of projects where the end is not in sight but the form is beginning to show. We do some marvelously goofy things trying to get stuff right. My job seems to be to observe and report. I have photographed the social landscape for 30 years now and I think I am beginning to understand the landscape, the sociology and the beauty of a work in progress. The photographs are printed 24"x30" on Crane Museo Silver Rag using Epson UltraChrome ink, by the artist, in an edition of fifteen with five artist proofs.

Mark Savoia is a fine artist and co-owner of Still River Editions and Connecticut Photographics

Mark Savoia's artist's statement

I have been working on a portfolio of photographs of found curiosities during my travels throughout New England for the past four years. The goal of this new body of work is to evoke not only humor, but the irony visible in encounters with everyday situations. I have a tongue-in-cheek view of Americana and I am constantly looking for evidence that below the surface something is not quite right in this country. It is what visually perplexes me that draws my eye, and then becomes a compelling photograph. Through the camera's selective view, I juxtapose what is considered normal in society against an increasing lack of taste. I am not attempting two-dimensional slapstick, rather satire laced with a few Freudian slips. I attempt to make no judgment when I come across these scenes. I am here to document evidence and if the viewer finds something as humorous as I do, then I have succeeded.

Facebook event page for opening

About the Gallery at Still River Editions

The Gallery at Still River Editions has hosted national and regional photographers and artists since 1989. In spring 2011, after a brief hiatus from exhibiting new work, the gallery returned to hosting shows on a quarterly basis. The Gallery's mission is to show traditional and digital prints of photographs and fine artwork, and to be a center of creativity and connection in the Danbury area.

The Gallery at Still River Editions is open during normal business hours 8:30 am - 5 pm Monday through Friday, and during posted hours for special events. The Gallery does not accept unsolicited submissions at this time.

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