Take Nine: Artes Mixtes de Nuevo England

March 12-April 12, 2007

Centro Cultural Costarricense Norteamericano

San Jose, Costa Rica

Curator's Statement

In 2005 Director Manuel Arces and Gallery Director Juan Diego Roldan asked me to curate an exhibition for the Costa Rican-North American Cultural Center. I chose work that related to my impressions of Costa Rica, especially tine spent in Punta Islita with local artists and the project we created for the Contemporary Outdoor Museum. These artworks move me in the way of childhood experience: joy, glee, and awe, coupled with the creative eye, aware of the act of seeing and wanting to respond in an interpretive way.

When I was three years old my mother took me on a train trip from Dallas, Texas to Little Rock, Arkansas. This is what I remember: dazzling attenuated blocks of sunlight flow through the window's Venetian blind slats and fall on the empty seat opposite me. This diagonal pattern makes solid columns of white light alive with swirling dust motes, alternating with deep black velvety voids. This is my first memory of conscious delight in “seeing” physical properties, where the ordinary becomes extraordinary and the instant becomes timeless. In retrospect it forms a magical thread through my life as an artist.

Curator's Statement continued

The thread that weaves through the work of the artists in this exhibition is the ability to realize, as Judy Haberl says “images born in the mind’s eye”. These works all emphasize the materiality of the elements they are made of, but undergo an alchemy that turns these physical facts into images that speak to us of parallel universes, dream worlds, cosmic connections, the links between the macrocosm and the microcosm. Through considering the elements of fire, ice, metal, fiber, gravity, light and its absence; and what these parts can make, we fall under these magicians’ spells and enter their imaginative realms.The show's title is a play on double take, and reference to iterations of work in music where each "take" is a chance to begin again for a new invention and a new chance to play it all.

Jane Goldman, March 2007

Artists in the Exhibition

Judy Haberl

There are places that can only be imagined, which are born in the mind’s eye.

Curator's Statement

Judith Larsen

My work incorporates the figure as an empty vessel or blank slate which is then infused with a series of images from the history of Art and Science. The projected images examine various organizing systems, including language, mapping and microscopy, as shadowed testimony to an unknown light source. The viewer or audience is invited to look beyond the “apparent” and imagine the implications of these symbolically clad vessels.

As the figure and imagery merge, the body begins to shed its epidermal shield and inhabit its own metaphors.This figurative work is as much about stillness as it is about the constant metamorphosis of possibility. It dwells in suspended opposition between the enduring vitality of the flesh and its fragile impermanence.

Peter Laytin

My photographs are intended to give an impression of an experience rather than to describe a given location or space. In doing so, I use the camera not so much as a tool for documenting, but instead as a vehicle for transforming the sensory relationship of the moment.

These photographs attempt to celebrate the magic and power of locations or objects I've been drawn to. When I don't respond with camera at a specific location, the experience often finds its expression later, triggered by another place and time.

Peter Laytin

David Prifti

I am interested in the elusive, imperfect nature of memory. These assemblages come from my desire to explore my life through the things that have shaped me; relationships, family bonds, memories, loss and death.

Technical Information

Using both my own photographs, and copies of pictures from my families’ albums, I use a liquid photographic emulsion to print images onto wood, metal and ceramic fragments."

Lois Russell

As an artist, I can’t work flat. No matter what I am doing, it seems to turn into a vessel. I am always drawn to vessels. They seem such universal and powerful objects; they keep things in and they keep things out. To my mind the first basket was two hands cupped together. There is no end to the possibilities.

The rich traditions of basket-making from around the world provide the architecture and the countless fiber techniques invite playing with color and texture. I try to make baskets that invite people to look more closely, to think about inside and outside; and I am at my happiest when someone can’t resist picking one up and holding it in their hands.

Jane Goldman and Lois Russell

Jane Goldman and Lois Russell

Jill Slosberg-Ackerman

Josh Simpson

The last thing I do before I go to bed is walk out to my studio to check the furnaces. Seeing an aurora borealis, or watching a thunderstorm develop down the valley, or just looking up at the sky on a perfect summer night inspires me to translate some of the wonder of the universe into my glass.

Along with the natural world, my motivation comes directly from the material itself. Glass is an alchemic blend of sand and metallic oxides combined with extraordinary, blinding heat. The result is a material that flows and drips like honey. When it's hot, glass is alive. It moves gracefully and inexorably in response to gravity and centrifugal force. It possesses an inner light and transcendent radiant heat that makes it simultaneously one of the most frustrating - and one of the most rewarding - materials to work with. I attempt to coax it; all it wants to do is drip on the floor. Most of my work reflects a compromise between me and the glass; the finished piece is the moment in time when we agree.

Elizabeth Tuttle

My subjects are common architectural details; the compositions derive from my photographs of public spaces. I simplify these images by excluding much of the detail and rendering them in imaginary color. Using single crochet and bunches of cotton thread I develop subtle tone gradations by changing one color for another in each successive row

My intent is to transform mundane surroundings into the idealized places of my imagination.

Elizabet Tuttle

CCCN Gallery Director Juan Diego Roldan and Jane Goldman