Bet They Collect Things Like Ashtrays and Art

Reception: Saturday August 26, 4 - 6 PM, public invited

Artist talk with Donna Sharrett Saturday September 9, 2-3 PM

Gallery hours: Thursday – Saturday 11:00 – 5:30, Sunday 12 – 4

Kenise Barnes Fine Art is pleased to announce a new exhibition featuring three artists whose work shares discovering, collecting and an exploring materiality. Through investigating the innate, implied, and distinctive qualities of physical substances each artist coaxes transformation through meaning, desire, accumulation, and pattern.

Drawing from an arsenal of materials, aesthetic choices, and techniques, Kathleen Kucka pushes the boundaries of traditional painting. By experimenting with unconventional techniques, such as burning, pouring, or cutting the canvas, she creates works that blur the line between two and three-dimensional art. This exhibition features four paintings made with flashe (paint) and burns on canvas. The paintings’ layered compositions and jewel-toned paint yield to burned lines and open portals of raw canvas. For Kucka, burning is a pathway to accessing psychological, personal, and universal ideas of destruction and rebirth.

Kucka’s work is in private and public collections including the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL, The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, The Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL, and Borusan Contemporary Collection, Istanbul, Turkey, among others. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Art News, Gay City News, Time Out, and Studio Conversations: Seventeen Women Talk about Art by Stephanie Buhmann, as well as other publications. Kathleen Kucka has been awarded residencies at The Bemis Foundation, Omaha, NB and the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT. Kathleen Kucka earned a BFA from Cooper Union, New York, NY and an MFA from Hunter College, New York, NY.

Donna Sharrett’s newest series the Tailored Herbaria memorializes leaves of beloved tree species threatened by climate change, invasive plants, and disease. In her artist’s statement Sharrett says, “I work under the influence of that which I am by inheritance: artist, environmentalist, gardener, seamstress and activist”. Sharrett was raised to love and steward nature and is a Master Gardener and an advocate for responsible policy changes to strengthen protections of natural resources all of which influenced the creation of the Tailored Herbaria series. The works in this series, made of donated and vintage fabrics and notions, are both portraits and evidence of place within a specific time. Leaves serve to represent trees, the ancestors of ancient inhabitants of the places we now occupy and with whom we co-exist, their presence often underappreciated or unseen.

Sharett’s work is in numerous collections including The Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, MO, Fidelity Financial Services, Boston, MA, JP Morgan Chase, New York, NY, Londoner Macau Hotel, Macau, China, Museum of Contemporary Arts & Design, New York, NY, Pfizer, Inc., New York, NY, United States Department of State, U.S. Embassy, Valletta, Malta. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Newsday, Fiberarts, The Village Voice, Art & Antiques, and numerous others. Sharrett has been a resident at Millay Colony for the Arts Residency, Austerlitz, NY, Smack Mellon, NY, NY, Habitat for Artists, Arts Brookfield, World Financial Center, New York, NY. She earned a BFA at The School of Visual Arts, New York, NY.

Eleanor White’s current work on paper is directly drawn from her background as a sculptor. The tactility of her materials is wide ranging and each poses unique challenges. White states that the more unusual the material the better to stimulate her interest and the problem solving around it. Textured, granulated, fibrous, powdery, glossy, chunky, and sharp qualities of crushed gemstones, bonded copper, iron pyrite, wood ash, dog hair, shed snakeskins, feathers, sand, and porcupine quills and more appear in her densely layered work.  Many of her works use casting, inlay, collage, stenciling, and painting to deepen the complexity and prompt inquiry. The amalgamation of mixed, layered, and composed matter references patterns in textiles, sacred geometry, fractals, and the elements in nature.

Eleanor White’s work has been shown widely including at The Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT, Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, NY. Her work is in the collections of Montefiore Medical Center Fine Art Program and Collection, Bronx, NY, Deutsche Bank Art Collection, New York, NY, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE to name a few. White has been a resident at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sweet Briar, VA, and others. White earned a BA from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA and MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD.

Please contact Kenise Barnes, Kenise@kbfa.com with inquires or to arrange a preview of the exhibition.