Mark Adams, Steve Alexander, Marty Davis, Joe Fiorello, Ron Rumford

The Schoolhouse Gallery Presents:
MARK ADAMS, STEVE ALEXANDER, MARTY DAVIS, JOE FIORELLO, RON RUMFORD
September 23 – October 26, 2011

Reception: Friday, September 23 , 6 – 9 PM

MARK ADAMS is a painter, printmaker, and a cartographer with the National Park Service based on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard since 1987. He exhibits regularly at The Schoolhouse Gallery where he has focused on works of art that use layered images of maps, personal notebook pages, text, data and images of animals and friends in light accumulation on paper and wood panels. Adams harvests curiosity and wonderment as source material and mixes in a little biology so that data is part of what is diagrammatic about the work. Recent work includes paintings on Mylar of fishing lures and paintings of birds on wood that are part of an ongoing discussion in Adam’s work about things that imperfectly represent the nature to our society.Adams has taught at the Provincetown Art Association, Castle Hill Center for the Arts (Truro MA), and the Provincetown School Academy program and as a guest in the MFA program of the Fine Arts Work Center/Massachusetts College of Art. He has studied ecology, landscape architecture, printmaking and photography at University of California, Berkeley, California College of Arts and Crafts and studied with artists at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He also worked as a wildlife field biologist, scientific illustrator, forest fire fighter, gymnastics coach. His current interests include geologic time, taxonomies, coordinate systems and layering of information in maps.

Steve Alexander, 78 degrees, 38 x 42"

STEVE ALEXANDER lives and works in Boston, Ma and makes his mosaic paintings from works of art that have been rescued from junk heaps and other places where they have been discarded or forgotten. He follows a tradition of landscape where a place is visited and memorized and then created again later in the studio from the artist’s chosen materials. Alexander also looks at classical images from art history and offers a similar treatment. His reclaimed sources are cut into mosaic ’tiles’ and arranged into a palette of colors, textures and tones and then reapplied into new images that are densely layered with intricate spaces, lively colors and unique shapes. He is always a storyteller and includes references from the personal to historic and universal themes of love, conflict, rescue, peace and friendship.

Marty Davis

MARTY DAVIS studied printmaking at UNC Chapel Hill, The Corcoran College of Art & Design, Pratt Institute, and Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center. She works with collage, paint, etching, photo etching, drypoint, aquatint and monotypes. Ms. Davis has exhibited widely throughout the northeast and is represented in collections in Washington, New York and Boston.

Davis works primarily on paper producing images that range from small and intimate to larger explorations of gesture and tone. Recent work includes a series of paintings on Claybord panels that
reflect the imagery and mark making systems seen in her prints, used alongside tones, textures, light and space reserved for the metal printing plates themselves, effectively making works that occupy a space between the printmaking plates, etchings and paintings while addressing all three possibilities.

Joyful and sensual, this new series can be seen as a reflection of nature and the fleeting color found in garden spaces and bodies of water. Davis has left her ongoing exploration of black as a color to delight us with a warm rich palette seen in earlier print and collage work that is reminiscent of morning blooms,
deep pools, calligraphy and animal  motion contained in a soft light similar to that of a morning or evening sky. These are paintings of possibility; of things in a state of becoming.

Joe Fiorello, nine

JOE FIORELLO is a sculptor and painter who lives and works in Truro, Ma. and Sarasota, Florida. He makes work from found materials including welded steel, paper, paint, wood and wax. Joe’s great grandfather, Pasquale Fiorello, and his great uncle Giuseppe Fiorello were both liturgical sculptors; together they created numerous works used in churches throughout Sicily. He visited several of his ancestors’ homes in Sicily in 2007. Sicily is rich in Greek antiquities. Joe has always been fascinated and influenced by Greek sculpture and architecture. He spent two summers Greece in the 1970’s where he was able to view first hand, Cycladic and Minoan sculptures and artifacts as found in the ruins near Knossos, Agios Nicholaus and Glyfada on Crete. He has admired the simplicity and form of these early sculptures and the minimal shapes and mass which have influenced his work. Other artists he finds have influenced his work are Louise Nevelson, Martin Puryear and Donald Judd.For this exhibition he will present one metal piece and a group of new sculpture made from paper and wood.

Ron Rumford, noon shadows, 2011, linocut and engraving with chine colle, image/sheet: 13 3/4 x 38 1/2"

RON RUMFORD sees his prints as maps or tracings of abstract journeys. They can be metaphors for real, physical travels, or completely imagined. He likes the tension that develops between the line and the shapes the line makes. The irregular shapes of the printing plates further imply that time and space are distorted and are never what we think they are. He does not want to prescribe how the prints should be viewed. His best hope is that the viewer will simply think less, and therefore see more. Mr. Rumford received a B.F.A. at the University of the Arts and studied at the Tyler School of Art, Rome, Italy. He lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. Rumford was recently included in the International Print Center, New York’s summer exhibition, Heat, and Art of State, at the Pennsylvania Sate Museum, and Contemporary Voices at the Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia.

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.