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Cool & Collected '23

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4

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Date: 
Saturday, 21 January 2023 to Sunday, 5 March 2023
Opening: 
Saturday, 21 January 2023 - 4:00pm to 6:00pm

With all the world away
The cozy hearth intensified
By gloom of outer day. 
- Ruby Archer

Kenise Barnes Fine Art is pleased to present the 2023 iteration of our emerging artist exhibition series Cool & Collected, curated by associate director Lani Holloway. Featuring Amanda Acker, the estate of Yayoi Asoma, Kirstin Lamb, and Mary Tooley Parker, the exhibition explores the notion of comfort conveyed in cozy interiors, pictorial hooked rug tapestries, painted embroidery, and the nostalgia of winter lights. As we collectively navigate the third pandemic winter, images carrying associations of warm memories and the sanctuary of home become all the more poignant.

Amanda Acker’s nuanced oil paintings on panel give a glimpse into moments and spaces from real life. The outdoor garden scenes hiss with the buzzing of lawns in summer months, while the interior still life paintings capture quiet moments within the peace of home. On the opposite side of the calendar year, a nighttime view peering out from a covered porch dressed up in twinkling lights evinces the magic of winter. The result is carefully painted, captivating work that is both universally recognizable, reflecting a feeling of the everyday, and deeply personal, evocative of pastimes and lives lived.

Born in Illinois, Acker has been featured in The English Room’s Artist Spotlight Series and the MADE Series on Anthow Circus, and has exhibited at The Provincial, Kaleva, MI, and BLK MRKT in Traverse City, MI and elsewhere in the US. The artist lives and works in her home on a country road in Onekama, Michigan, near the shores of Portage Lake.

In Yayoi Asoma’s painted interiors, lively with pattern, plants, vibrant furniture and colorful rugs, the artist speaks to the familiarity of home, spaces of our daily existence, deeply entwined with memories and associations rife with our personal experience. Within these dynamic, maximalist interior spaces, the concept of home becomes more an idea than a physical dwelling. It becomes a safe haven, a refuge, an experience more than a place. Through Asoma’s paintings, we are compelled to reflect on how our selfhood and stories of self-identity are tied to the spaces we occupy, from memories of one’s childhood home to the dwellings we reside in through our lives. By slightly distorting scale and toying with the expected perspective within the interiors, the artist examines the impossibility of an idealized notion of home.

Born in New York City to Japanese parents, Asoma received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Asoma’s work has been exhibited in NYC, Hudson, NY, San Francisco, CA, Albany, NY and Washington, CT, to name a few.

Kirstin Lamb’s gridded, meticulously detailed paintings on transparent acetate are labor-intensive paintings of labor-intensive textiles and patterns. To create these embroidery paintings, Lamb starts by generating a digitized grid and painstakingly painting each individual gridded stitch by hand using acrylic and gouache on a wet media acetate. The process creates a one-to-one relationship of mark to stitch, the act of each brushstroke serving for the stitch of a needle. Lamb’s embroidery paintings draw patterns from French floral wallpaper of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, while others draw inspiration from vintage embroidery patterns from the 1950s, ’60s, and ‘70s or from the artist’s own photography, often interiors, landscapes, and portraits. In this sense, the work is a documentation of patterns spanning history, transferred to intentionally cropped compositions that read as both woven and pixelated, reframing the subject matter as distinctly contemporary.

Lamb received a BFA from Brown University and an MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been exhibited throughout the US and in Berlin, Germany, featured in Hyperallergic and other publications, and is in the collection of Fidelity Investments, Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, MA, and in Providence College, Providence, RI, among others. The artist lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.

Mary Tooley Parker is a true fiber artist. Her hooked rug tapestries evoke people, places and objects that resonate deeply with the shared human experience. Employing a traditional folk art medium, Parker’s tableaus, with their lively colors, palpable humor, thoughtful details and use of exotic fibers turn hooked rugs into lush textile paintings. The work is as inviting as it is tactile. In this exhibition, Parker’s hooked rug pictures depict a cozy canine beside a mug of a hot drink, a snuggled sleeper wrapped in a patterned blanket, a circle of grandmas suggesting lifelong friendship and community, and a chromatically cheerful boudoir. The images are heart-warming, charming and whimsical.

Parker's work has been exhibited internationally, including in New York, London, and Denmark, and is held in public and private collections. The artist resides in Yorktown Heights, NY.

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

This exhibition is dedicated in memoriam to Yayoi Asoma (March 12, 1980 – January 1, 2023)

Curator :

Telephone: 
8605920220
Venue ( Address ): 

7 Fulling Lane, Kent, CT 06757

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