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"The
Arts Project operates one of the best art galleries in the area…” - The Chronicle,
Glens Falls, NY.
“So
often it’s the smaller galleries tucked in surprising places that offer up
the best art exhibitions. The Courthouse Gallery in Lake George is no exception.” -
The
Saratoga Post,
Saratoga Springs, NY.
Thanks to a generous grant from the Charles R. Wood Foundation
the Courthouse Gallery now has a new hardwood floor!
2007 Exhibition Schedule
Chloe Kettlewell, January 20 – February 23, 2007.
Chloe Kettlewell’s small, postcard size paintings
capture intimate, quiet, interior domestic scenes such as a stack of dirty
dishes, an empty laundry basket seen through an open door, or a light
filled screen porch. Because she views her home as an extension of
herself, and an expression of her choices, feelings and memories, she also
views these paintings as a type of “self-portrait.” She says: “I
relate my work to Dutch painters like Pieter de Hooch who felt God’s
presence in peaceful domestic life. In carefully selected fragmentary
views, in which messes are often more suggestive than order, I find
beautiful arrangements of form, and the expressive lighting effects of
sacred spaces.”
Chloe Kettlewell
received her Master of Science in Art Education from the
College of
St. Rose,
Albany NY, and her B.A. in
Studio Art from Skidmore
College,
Saratoga Springs, NY. She also
studied Theater Arts at Boston
University. Her work has
been exhibited at the Saratoga County Council on the Arts and Framework,
both in Saratoga Springs; the
College of
St. Rose Art
Gallery in Albany; and the
Arnot
Art Museum,
Elmira, NY. For fifteen
years she worked as a gold leaf frame and oil painting restorer. She lives
in Saratoga Springs and currently
teaches at the College of
St. Rose in
Albany, NY.
James
Dustin, March 17 – April 20, 2007.
 
James Dustin integrates painting, drawing, and photography in
his studies of architecture, landscape, space and light. For the last
several years he has been designing and building small architectural
pavilion models, which he photographs outside. The photographs document the
changing light and views of the surrounding landscape seen through the open
spaces of in models. His paintings and drawings are based on these photos,
and are exhibited with the models. He says: “The Pavilion Models
investigate the principles of pure space and are designed to present clean
empty space, un-encumbered by any architectural program considerations of
daily use. My interest is in presenting things in multiples, so that one
may better understand something through re-examination. With the Pavilion
Paintings, a model is designed and constructed with various openings in the
walls and the roof to allow the penetration of light, as well as to frame
the views outside of the model. The model is viewed in a variety of ways;
the light and changing shadows documenting the passage of time. The
individual panels provide a framework that allows the subtle differences
between images to emerge.”
James Dustin received his B.F.A. from Maine College
of Art, Portland, ME. He has had solo exhibitions at
numerous institutions including The Phillips Museum of Art at Franklin
Marshall College, Lancaster, PA.; the Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville,
TN.; The Herter Art Gallery, University of
Massachusetts, Amherst; and the University Art Gallery, Indiana State
University, Terre Haute. His works are included in many corporate and
private collections around the country. After living in
Brooklyn, NY, for more than 20 years, he
relocated his home and studio to a historic federal house in the
Hudson Valley region.
Elizabeth Emery, May 12 – June 15, 2007.
  
Ceramic artist Elizabeth Emery says working with
the ancient medium of clay grounds her to “natural processes, scientific
principles and the continuity of life”. Her small glazed porcelain
sculptures, sensual and complex, blend strange and familiar forms together.
Her work is inspired by traditional techniques, art history, cultural
references, and her personal narrative. She says: “I am fascinated by
the physicality of clay, its forgiving nature, and ability to take any
form. I am enticed by the colorful glamour of the juicy, luscious,
flowing glazes. My hope is that the viewer is seduced by the
sculptures’ physical qualities, and is momentarily confused by the variety
of elements, only to then find an organization within and a calm offered as
an antithesis to the chaos.”
Elizabeth Emery received her B.F.A. from The NY State
College of Ceramics at Alfred University, Alfred NY, and B.A. in Art
History and Italian Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. She has exhibited at
Francis Marion University, Florence, SC; The Hyde Park Gallery,
El Cajon, CA; the Rhodes Room Gallery and
the Robert Turner Gallery in Alfred, NY; and the Harwood Art Center,
NM. Her awards include a “Kiki Smith
Scholarship” at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts,
and a New York Foundation for the Arts Special Opportunity Grant. She
presently teaches Art History at Alfred University, Alfred, NY.
Clayton
Merrell, July 7 – August 10, 2007.
 
Clayton Merrell’s paintings explore
the familiar, the mysterious, and the sublime found in nature and the
landscape, as well as ideas about how we perceive and interpret the
landscape. Many of the works in the exhibition are reflections of the
desert of New Mexico. In 2005 Merrell
was awarded a 12 month residency at the Roswell Artist-In-Residence
Program, a privately funded program providing visual artists time and space
to concentrate on their work. He says: “as a result, many of my
recent paintings are about conflicts between the fantasy and the reality of
“landscape” in the American West. I continue to harbor a romanticized image
of the great open land – unspoiled, un-owned and sublimely indifferent to
human presence, but the reality was that I could go almost nowhere in the
American West without trespassing, and that most of the land has gone
through multiple types of human use, forever altering its form. The layers
of history, exploitation and symbolism that accrue to places are as much a
part of their reality as their natural beauty. I make paintings that try to
include all of this conflicting information, by both celebrating the
natural world and acknowledging that it only truly exists in fantasy.
I also continue to be intrigued by the ways that our visual perception is
heavily influenced by psychological and physiological factors. Optical
information is messy, imprecise and fraught with contradictions. Often my
paintings are attempts to look straight at this self-contradictory visual
experience and enjoy its indeterminacy, duplicity, and oddity. Sometimes
this consists of placing the viewer at the center of an uncompromising
perspective that bends the world to the curve of vision, simultaneously
creating stability and instability, calm and unease, the sensation of
flying and of falling. In my work, the earth and sky are often folded in on
themselves, bent, split, doubled, shifted, slipped and broken while
retaining a basic and crucial unity. I strive to make paintings that embody
these dualities and contradictions”.
Clayton Merrell received his M.F.A. from Yale School of
Art, New Haven, CT, and B.F.A. from
Brigham Young University, Provo, UT. He also studied at
Chautauqua School of Art and Parson’s School of Design. He recently had solo
exhibitions at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts,
Pittsburgh, PA;
Roswell Museum and
Art Center, Roswell, NM;
Fairmont State University, Fairmont, WV;
Tyler Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; and Juniata College Museum of
Art, Huntingdon, PA. His many awards include a
12 month residency at the Roswell Artist-In-Residence Foundation,
Roswell, NM, as well as residencies at
Blue Mountain Center, Blue Mountain Lake, NY; The Millay
Colony, Austerlitz, NY; and a Fulbright Grant for 12
months in Oaxaca, Mexico. He currently lives in
Pittsburgh, PA.
Carla Aurich and Soonae Tark, September 1 – October 5, 2007.
  
Carla Aurich
 
Soonae Tark
Carla Aurich’s
colorful abstract paintings are inspired by investigations of space,
changing light, atmosphere, and how one’s particular relationship to a
place shapes that memory. “Using a vocabulary of horizontal and
vertical forms to reference architecture and light, I am interested in
spaces that bridge, connect and frame parts of the landscape…The use of
color and surface in my work reflect the textures and colors of various
landscapes as experienced through time and memory. Saturated color and
reduced formal elements merge to capture the essence of a particular
moment.” Carla Aurich received her M.F.A.
from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, and her B.F.A. from the
University of Montana, Missoula, MT. Her work has been
exhibited at the Weill Gallery at the 92nd Street
Y; the Elsa Mott Ives Gallery; and Paisley Art Space, all in New York City;
the Silvermine Guild, New Canaan, CT; as well as
various Galleries in States of Washington, Iowa and Massachusetts.
Her awards include a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts 9/11
Relief Fund, and a Peltzer-Lynch Fellowship from
the School of Art and Art History at the
University of Iowa.
Soonae Tark's clean
abstract paintings depict meticulously arranged stacks of flat color shapes
perfectly balanced on solid colored backdrops. She says: “Rather than a
representation of the external, my work is an expression of my existence.
Much as one day follows another, I repeat the same action over and over.
Within this there is always a longing for the absent, akin to enlightenment,
to the rosary, to placing a stone on a mountaintop cairn with a prayer. It
is the flow of my life through daily practice. I like to work with flat
color surfaces that convey piles of shapes. These piles have at the same
time balance, imbalance and continuity depending on the weight of the
color.” Soonae Tark
received her B.F.A. from Dongduk Women’s University,
Seoul, Korea, and M.F.A. from Ecole des Beaux Arts de Lyon, France. Her recent exhibitions include solo shows
at the David Allen Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Temple Gallery, Tyler School of
Art at Temple University, Philadelphia, PA; and group exhibitions at the
Alexandria Museum of Art in Alexandria, LA; the Kauffman Gallery at
Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, PA; Gallery Korea and the Asian
American Art Center, New York, NY; and the Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah,
NY. Her awards include a grant from the Pollock-Krasner
Foundation and 1st Place Award at the National Compact
Competition at Louisiana Sate University, Baton Rouge.
This
exhibition is underwritten by
Cynthia Schira, November 3 – December 14, 2007.
 
Cynthia Schira
is one of the contemporary textile world’s most influential figures. She has
been using computerized looms since 1983 to create complex woven textile
structures and was one of the first fiber artists to fully appreciate the
potential of computerization for the handweaver.
Her weavings contain a mix
of visual languages, markings, motifs, signs and symbols, which overlap and
merge, creating new complex graphic relationships. She says: “I am
fascinated by the visual notational methods or systems specific to different
professions. The staff of written music; the graph markings of the weaver;
the layout of the architect; the equations of a mathematician – all are
meaningful to the practitioners within the particular field but are often
are an indecipherable code to others… In combining and juxtaposing parts of
these various systems, new patterns and forms develop provoking in my mind
new allusions to follow.”
Cynthia Schira earned her
B.FA. from the Rhode Island School of Design and
her M.F.A. from the University of Kansas, where she taught from 1976 to
1999, and is professor emerita. Schira was awarded two prestigious grants from National
Endowment for the Arts Craftsman's Fellowships, in 1974 and 1983. In 2000
she received the Gold Medal from the College of Fellows of the American Craft Council,
in recognition of her lifetime of achievement, and an Honorary Doctorate of
Fine Arts from RISD in 1989. A recent solo show of her work traveled
from University of Nebraska, to
Bowling Green State University, to
University of North Texas, and concluded at the Surface
Design Association Biennial Conference in Kansas City. She has been exhibiting
nationally and internationally for many years, including shows at the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal; The Textile Museum, Washington, D.C.;
Museum of Art and Design, Helsinki; and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York
City. In addition to the Wichita Art Museum, her work can be found in
the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of
Art, Chicago Art Institute, and many others. She currently lives and
works in Westport, NY.
This
exhibition is underwritten by
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