New exhibitions
Playing with Time & Space
A Mughal nawab gestures with the wooden arm of a Hispanic santo. A young 19th-century girl wears cool sneakers. A dashing gentleman in top hat is paired with a Renaissance lace bedecked lady. Armed with what he calls his “image arsenal,” Gerald (Jerry) Barnes’s collages employ painting and a treasure trove of ephemera—old stamps and banknotes, photographs, cutout images, calligraphy—to create scenes transcending cultural and temporal boundaries. Distorted, enlarged, and diminished people and body parts add to the visual delight (or discomfort). Jerry claims there is no intended narrative. Juxtapositions of color and form drive his compositions. You are cordially invited to create stories of your own.
CONJURING IN GLASS & CLAY
“Conjured” is an apt description of Robert Sherman’s mosaic creations—a potent mix of glass, clay, photography, politics, poetry, pandemic, and religion. Created with emotion, they evoke the same in the viewer. Sherman was an actor as a young man. Not surprisingly, there’s an almost performative quality to his current work. Though inspired by the glittering Byzantine glass mosaics of Ravenna and Gaudi’s monumental Barcelona clay mosaics, it also manifests psychic and literal flashbacks to his earlier highly respected mask-making days. Sherman feels the ancient firing technique of raku made those masks “come alive.” Light and shadow conspire in this work to create the same effect.