Karen Cappotto, Rebecca Doughty, Jefferson Hayman, Jane Henry, Deborah Martin, Vicky Tomayko, Jessica Straus

The Schoolhouse Gallery Presents:
Karen Cappotto, Rebecca Doughty, Jefferson Hayman, Jane Henry, Deborah Martin, Vicky Tomayko, Jessica Straus
Project: Robert Rindler
September 2-21, 2011
Reception: Friday, September 2, 7-10 PM

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KAREN CAPPOTTO lives and works in Provincetown and exhibits throughout the US and Europe. She makes oil paintings on canvas and wood panels and is well known for her intimate collages layered with paint, graphite and ink. Originally from Syracuse, she has been a summer resident of Provincetown since 1988. Cappotto studied at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Ma., Boston College, and Oxford University. Her work is in various public and private collections and she has received multiple awards and prizes for her mixed media constructions. Recently she was awarded joint first prize in the 2010 international Picture Works Competition in Ireland.  In March 2011 she was included in a three-person exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association & Museum titled, ‘Beyond Surface‘. Her subject is place, the resonance of place and the texture of memory. She will present new works in oil on wood and mixed media on paper.The animal characters that inhabit

REBECCA DOUGHTY’s work navigate life’s comic and tragic journeys. Doughty creates psychologically charged narratives with deceptively simple images, layered and scraped surfaces, and spare line drawings. In a kind of 2-dimensional miniature theatre, stories are told through subtle gestures, or through the gazes that travel between the characters, their maker, and the viewer.

“Over many years of making paintings, I often find myself revisiting old ways of working. It’s a sort of continuous cycle, in which the old become new and surprising again with all that’s accumulated in the meantime. In these new paintings, Nearly Nots, I wanted to make complex, active surfaces which would challenge my creature companions to find ways to live in them, in what seemed like inhospitable territory. As in most of my paintings, there is a narrative, but in these, that act of trying to exist– little dramas of appearing and disappearing– becomes their story.” 

Rebecca’s paintings and drawings have been exhibited widely since the 1980′s, including The Drawing Center in New York, The Boston Drawing Project, DeCordova Museum, Rose Art Museum, and the Courthouse Gallery in Co. Mayo, Ireland. She has received fellowships and awards from the Ucross Foundation, The Ballinglen Arts Foundation, The Massachusetts Cultural Council, The Blanche E. Colman Foundation, The A.R.T Grant Fund, and an AICA Boston Best Show Award. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, DeCordova Museum, Simmons College, Wellington Management, Fidelity Investments, The Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ucross Foundation, and private collections in many countries.

JEFFERSON HAYMAN is an artist that works with the themes of nostalgia, common symbols and memory. He lives and works in Tappan, NY a small town located minutes outside of Manhattan and filled with the history of the American War of Independence. From his training and environment Hayman has forged an individual visual sensibility. His photographs are handcrafted silver gelatin & platinum prints that seem historically timeless, captured with a delicacy of tonality that harks back to the highest traditions of graphic art. The works are then paired with antique or artist made frames which place each piece into the realm of unique statements. His work can be found in many private and public collections, most notably The Museum of Modern Art , The New York Public Library, President Bill Clinton , Robert DeNiro, The Boston Athenaeum and Ralph Lauren.

A native New Yorker, born in 1965, JANE HENRY’s works range from twisted ballet dancers to quirky critters to fanciful, if strange scenarios, presenting her individual take on the wonders and foibles of us all. The multimedia works appear meant to both charm and to puzzle; to both perplex and to delight. Henry’s work as a gilder and restorer of antiques enamored her to the materials she uses and influenced her permutation into the three-dimensional. She began with elaborate boxes and dioramas, which were, in effect, stage sets for the figures she eventually began to fashion. Henry will exhibit a series of works on podiums.

Jane Henry is a graduate of the Cooper Union School of Art. Her work was included in the recent Sculpture Invitational exhibited at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.  Her sculpture has also been shown in Manhattan at the National Academy of Design, the Schoenberg Center, G.W. Einstein Gallery, Atlantic Gallery and Ceres Gallery.

DEBORAH MARTIN is a Los Angeles-and Southern Mojave based contemporary realist painter, fine art photographer and curator. A site-specific artist, her work eulogizes the abandoned habitats and domestic landscapes of small town America. Much of her practice emerges in collaborative conversation with writers and video artists, and takes form through exhibitions, installations and publications. She is recognized for several pivotal bodies of work: Narrow Lands (Provincetown, MA), Home on the Strange (Salton Sea, CA), and America (U.S.) Her book Home on the Strange: In Search of the Salton Sea was written by Amy Sather Smith and published by Catalysis Projects in Spring 2010. Currently, Deborah is documenting the unincorporated town of Wonder Valley located in Southern California’s Mojave Desert.

Deborah has exhibited in galleries and Museums in New York, Provincetown, Boston and Los Angeles. Her work has sold in auction at Sotheby’s and been featured in distinguished fine art magazines including the Fine Art Photography Publication of Light Leaks Magazine, Blue Canvas Magazine, Fabrik Magazine and the Pacific Coast West Edition of New American Paintings Magazine. Martin received her BFA and BS Masters of Arts in Teaching, Art Education from The Museum School of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University.

She will present new work from the Narrowlands Series.

VICKY TOMAYKO is an artist and printmaker who works with a variety of techniques to create one-of-a-kind prints. She teaches at Cape Cod Community College, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown Summer Program. She manages the print studio for the Fine Arts Work Center during the 7 month Residency Program, and for the Massachusetts College of Art Low Residency Masters Program, providing workshops and one-on-one instruction. She was an Artist-in-Residence at the Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School in Orleans for ten years. Tomayko was assistant professor of printmaking at Connecticut College, 1979 through 1981, and was awarded a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in 1985. She received an MFA in printmaking from Western Michigan University, and has been the recipient of two Ford Foundation Grants. She is represented by the Schoolhouse Gallery and has been included in exhibitions in New York, Boston, Miami, Los Angeles, Basel,Venice, Istanbul, Basel, and Melbourne.

For this exhibition she will present a suite of new prints on paper.

JESSICA STRAUS is a sculptor from the Boston area. Working primarily in carved and painted wood and incorporating found objects, she explores the poetry of unexpected juxtapositions between recognizable and invented forms. Alternating between narrative and abstraction, Straus’s well crafted sculpture is infused with a quirky, yet subtle, humor and a finely tuned sense of aesthetics. Her studio is in the Brickbottom Artists Building in Somerville, MA.

The Schoolhouse Gallery is located at 494 Commercial Street in the heart of Provincetown¹s East End Gallery District. For information and press contact Mike Carroll at 508.487.4800 or email mike@schoolhouseprovincetown.com.