“Unmapped” exhibit at Brentwood Arts Exchange features work by Ellyn Weiss, Pat Goslee and Sally Resnik Rockriver. January 12 – February 28, 2015
Artists Pat Goslee, Ellyn Weiss, and Sally Resnik Rockriver each use art as a method of discovery, responding to forms and materials and then exploring their qualities as method of expression. Whether it’s finding the balance in giving up control to a chemical reaction, investigating material properties, or the conscious act of constructing energetic movement through paint, all three artists make provocative statements about the ways that meaning is created through the interaction of process with form. The Brentwood Arts Exchange presents an exhibition of the three artists works titled “Unmapped” which runs January 12 – February 28, 2015.
The three distinguished artists in the show each work in a variety of mediums. Pat Goslee works with layer upon layer of delicately painted forms and color on canvas and on gesso board. Ellyn Weiss works in a wide variety of media; one recent solo show was composed of paintings made entirely of tar. Much of her recent work is encaustic – wax with oil pigment. Sally Resnick Rockriver works primarily in glass – generating chemical reactions in blown glass and ceramics to create new forms.
Sally Resnick Rockriver
Sally Resnick Rockriver’s glass sculpture is intriguing. She mixes ceramic glazes with hot glass, where the glazes fuse, melt, and crystallize, creating a thermal reactivity.
Ms Rockriver’s sculpture introduces or allows for rough edges, chance arrangements and a clash of smooth and rough surfaces. By employing the peculiar materials and their specific properties, she moves glass away from the traditional studio glass aesthetic. In careful but surprising ways, she molds incongruous materials, often making their formal properties almost contradictions of themselves. Geometry seems to disintegrate away from the formalizations of precision in a whimsical and disarming manner.
Sally Resnick Rockriver “Thermal Quake” 40 inches wide
Sally Rockriver said of her invented geology: “The works in UNMAPPED deal with mapping new geologies of unfound planets. I have always thought that my processes could exist on other planets. I generate chemical reactions by combining ceramic materials with hot glass. The release of gases causes an expansion of self- blown spheres. I imagine this event could occur on a glass lake while salts and silica are falling from the sky. Recently NASA discovered a planet that that has an atmospheric glass rain. In this exhibit, works refer to thermal storms and tectonic quakes on Planet Azure and the specimens we might find there. Kiln bricks are the remains of architecture from a past civilization that did not survive the hot glass rains. In this fantasy, crystallized glass growths overtake the destruction from a traumatic event.”
The uncanny materiality of each of the artist’s works play off each other in this exhibit, where each artist invites us to open up to things we don’t know, to things that aren’t written out first then repeated as art, and to where our paradigms don’t fit – in other words, areas Unmapped.
January 12 – February 28, 2015, Opening Reception Saturday, January 17, 5-8 pm
3901 Rhode Island Avenue, Brentwood, MD 20722