Westbeth Project Room: GWEN FABRICANT and SIMON CARR

February 15 – April 30, 2014
The Westbeth Project Room hours are 24/7

Simon Carr flower paintings

SIMON CARR is a painter and printmaker, who lives and works in Westbeth. For more information go to simoncarrstudio.com

Gwen Farbricant compost assemblages

GWEN FABRICANT is a visual artist in painting, works on paper and assemblage. She lives, and has her studio in Westbeth. For more information go to: gwenfabricant.com

REVIEW BY MARTICA SAWIN

SIMON CARR
Although Simon Carr is best known for densely painted subway scenes and dramatic narratives from the Biblical Book of Acts, flowers, whether dappling the surface of a meadow or gathered in a vase, have long been part of his repertoire. In this series of intimately scaled still-lifes, flowers in glass jars, single or in conversational groups are placed in front of windows in otherwise dimly lit interiors. Against the stark light/dark drama the flowers, sometimes back lit by the window, sometimes screened from the light by a panel, offer a delicate counterpoint. Clusters of knowing touches of the brush evoke hydrangeas, jonquils, gladioli, and deep madder carnations, their colors echoed by the reflections that mingle with the stalks and flashes of light in the water-filled jars. In some paintings a landscape beckons beyond the window, juxtaposing the open and closed, hinting at the origin of the captive flowers. An animated, playful quality is generated when the flowers in three or four containers seem to interact, while there is an element of poignancy to a single stalk of goldenrod protruding from a solitary bottle. Compressed into these small formats is a wealth of painting knowledge deployed to bring drama and staying power to the simplest of subjects.

GWEN FABRICANT
I like to think of Gwen Fabricant in her role as a mycologist. She understands the secretive ways of mushrooms, knows their likely hiding places, and how to coax their spores into an artwork. Walking through a forest or along the shore, she will pause to pull a wrinkled fungus from a dead tree trunk or pick up a piece of tasseled kelp–nothing is too insignificant to claim her attention. Back in the studio the gleanings in her knapsack will be stored away until they claim a place in a painting or become part of a relief-like assemblage. The latter she calls “composts,” because they originated with the fruit and vegetable waste from her kitchen, to which she added materials from her scavenging. The organic matter is more dried than decayed and its components retain their identities as seedpods, berries, rose hips, bones, tiny eggs, dried minnows or blossoms from a Crown of Thorns, all of which have a role to play, like singers taking different parts in a chorus. At first the synthesizing eye sees a richly textured composition in the subtly varied tans and browns of dried vegetation. Then the con- stituent parts begin to reveal themselves as vital players in nature’s transformational process from seed to leaf to blossom to pod to dust. In this way the “composts” become celebrations of that magical phenomenon in which all existence partakes.

WESTBETH PROJECT ROOM is located at the inner courtyard entrance to Westbeth Artists Housing 155 Bank Street, New York NY. Alternate entrance is at 55 Bethune Street, New York NY