Tom Burckhardt, Becca Lowry, and Ruth Hiller

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Abstract, ART, Becca Lowry, contemporary, FREDGIAMPIETROGALLERY, Painting, Ruth Hiller, Sculpture, Tom Burckhardt, Works on paper

Works by Tom Burckhardt, Becca Lowry, and Ruth Hiller

Open now through April 2, 2016

FRED.GIAMPIETRO Gallery 1064 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT

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Becca Lowry

“These pieces are built to protect. They are shields, force fields, and talismans, each custom-made to safeguard against a particular threat: One will ward off an impending storm, another will scatter daemons, a third will hold tight to your heart while you do something ridiculously, recklessly brave. These shields tend not to be combative – the pointy edges are more like the decorative fringe of a rug than they are the point of a spear. I think, instead, they’re meant to hold a person up, to bolster strength and resolution in a moment of great uncertainty. And then, when the coast is most certainly clear, they are meant to be hung, quietly, carefully, back on the wall.” – Becca Lowry

Lowry received her Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Smith College in North Hampton, MA. Becca’s work has been exhibited throughout New England and can be found in many prestigious private collections. Lowry’s work will be exhibited at this years VOLTA NY, March 2 – 6th.

Click here to watch the Gorky’s Granddaughter’s 2014 interview with Becca

Click here to view Becca’s most recent work

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 Tom Burckhardt

In a recent statement, Tom Burckhardt describes his work, “At my core I am an abstractionist, but one who has some inherent distrust of its historical elitism and lack of humor. I think I have always tried to find ways to infuse it with a sense of it’s own absurdity, and poke some fun at it while showing my affection for it’s strength and ambition. I’ve also felt the need to resist a sense of purism and find ways of including elements of figuration, although often bleeding them of their literal realism to find an accommodation of the two spheres. In my “Cast” paintings I’m interested in creating a kind of false beginning, for the paintings with the support being fashioned as a faux sculpture. Once the inherent “quality” of paintings is reduced I feel the space has been cleared for me to invest my personal sense of integrity and attitude into the works. In these pieces I have cast all of the supports in plastic. I consider this good-natured humiliation a great place to start, almost like embedding doubt in the physical material of the support, and from this point the paintings proceed in a very abstract-intuitive way.”

 

Burckhardt received his BFA from the State University of New York in addition to attending Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Tom has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and has been awarded many prestigious awards including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, the Guggenheim Foundation Grant, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and many more. Burckhardt’s most recent exhibitions have been featured in The New York Times and Hyperalergic.

Click here to watch the Gorky’s Granddaughter’s 2012 interview with Tom

Click here to view Tom’s work on exhibit at FRED.GIAMPIETRO Gallery

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Ruth Hiller

“I am obsessed with mass production, technology and industry. How do I reconcile these things that overwhelm and excite me?

Living in nature, as well as in an urban environment, have compelled me to create work that appears plastic, tactile and machine made with hints of my surroundings. The visual conversation between the paint and forms culminates in my softly linear objects– evocative of industry and nature.”

Ruth Hiller received her BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CT. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States. Hiller has been awarded residencies and many prestigious awards.

Click here to view Ruth’s work on exhibit at FRED.GIAMPIETRO Gallery

Becca Lowry at VOLTA NY 2016

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Abstract, Becca Lowry, FREDGIAMPIETROGALLERY, VoltaNY

Becca Lowry will be exhibiting with FRED.GIAMPIETRO Gallery at VOLTA NY 2016

Becca Lowry received her Bachelor of Arts in Economics with a certificate in African Studies from Smith College in North Hampton, MA. Becca’s work has been exhibited throughout New England and can be found in many prestigious private collections. Lowry’s work will be exhibited at VOLTA NY 2016 and in an exhibition with Tom Burckhardt at FRED.GIAMPIETRO Gallery, February 27 – April 2, 2016.

 

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VOLTA NY, MARCH 2–6, 2016

PIER 90, WEST 50TH STREET AT 12TH AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY 10036

PUBLIC HOURS

THURSDAY – SATURDAY, MARCH 3 – 5

12 – 8 pm

SUNDAY, MARCH 6

12 – 6 pm

For more information about VOLTA please click here

Click here for more information on Becca’s upcoming exhibition with Tom Burckhardt

Becca Lowry on view this Feb – April in New Haven and at VOLTA NY 2016

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Becca Lowry, New Haven, Sculpture

Becca Lowry’s work will be on view at VOLTA NY (March 2 – 6) and in an exhibition with Tom Burckhardt (Feb. 27 – April 2) Check out the great review written by Oana Sanziana Marian for ARTFORUM included in the January 2015 issue. 

Becca Lowry

AUTHOR: OANA SANZIANA MARIAN

ARTFORUM January 2015 Issue

“She was the Angelina Jolie of wolves.” So said one of Yellowstone’s biologists of the gray wolf they called the ’06 Female, to whom Becca Lowry dedicated RIP 06 (all works 2014), one of the six sculptural pieces exhibited in her first solo show. In a series of carvings, Lowry trenched and scored the work with an angle grinder, a skill saw, chisels, and, eventually, a rasp; inlaid it with steel; spray- and handpainted it; and, finally, scraped it with a razor. RIP 06’s most delicate element—a vertebraic column down its middle—serves as its center of gravity. Winglike panels extend from the spine like leaves of a book catching a draft of air, while the fringed rectrices of the wall-mounted work’s lower anatomy dangle below them. This centrifugal movement transfixes, like a starburst. The ’06 Female (the wolf), too, seemed to transfix and transform all who saw her. She was killed—legally, it must be said—by a hunter in December 2012, but not before garnering legendary status among the biologists who tracked her, for her beauty and unusually large size, and for jilting five able suitors (extraordinary behavior for a wild wolf) in favor of hunting alone (dangerous for even the largest males), before starting a pack with two inexperienced males of inferior size, which the ’06 Female groomed into skillful hunters, and whose pack still runs strong.

In addition to the six carved works in this show, titled “be me I’ll be you,” there were four works on paper, the most striking of which, Mountains on Mountains, arrests the viewer with repeating ranges of bright orange and blue triangles. As with the sculptures, some areas are cut out and scraped with intricate patterns, while others are layered, here with translucent paint and bits of rice paper in lieu of steel and spray paint. Although Lowry’s works on paper often begin with rubbings from her sculptural works, she has never made any traditional prints. Yet, as with an etching, the history of marks remains embedded, if not wholly visible, within the work’s surface.

“Spiritual” works of art are often of a sticky substance, ways of describing them even stickier. And though Lowry does not explicitly describe the works in this way, they do feel spiritually attuned. Somatic, playful, reminiscent of the combustible forms and colors of Kandinsky and Klee, the pieces in “be me I’ll be you” are what the poet Adrienne Rich might have called “instruments for embodied experience.” Evoking a strip of flesh here, a rib, a phalanx there, they point to their own haptic necessities—asking to be touched, picked up, weighed—but the works also possess the power to stir latent imperatives in the viewer. This leap of faith seems more plausible when you consider the physically brutal process (an embodied experience in itself) of their construction.

Lowry wasn’t thinking of the ’06 Female when she began RIP 06, but after she learned of the wolf, the work assumed an elegiac force, and the artist started to see the object she was making as a shield for those who stand alone and burn. “If these shields actually worked,” Lowry says, “if, like Spider-Man’s suit, they fused to the body of the vulnerable and awakened superhuman strength and courage . . . I would be obliged, and you would be obliged, to stop whatever it is we’re doing right now and mass-produce these things.” The power of this redirected cabinetry lies in the realization that protection can come from the most vulnerable forms. No one can say with certainty by what alchemy vulnerability becomes a shield, but mystics and theologians have tried.

—Oana Sanziana Marian