Skim, Skimp, Skip by Hannah Schutzengel
Puck’s Dream by Elaine Fleck
Intertwined: Complex Surfaces
featuring work by Elaine Fleck & Hannah Schutzengel
July 14- September 1
Openings July 19 from 6-8pm
August 16 from 6-8pm
Mixed Media artists Elaine Fleck and Hannah Schutzengel explore the relationship that textiles have to storytelling, history and nature. The work of these two artists uses the intertwining of textiles to deepen the dimensions of their narratives, creating a unique visual experience that is intricate, detailed, and purposeful in its creation.
Elaine Fleck, creates whimsical and vibrant imagery with layering oil paint and textiles, exploring folk lore, tapestries and texture. Her works are complex and encourage the viewer to look deeper than the surface level and engage in the story she weaves about being alive and the spirit of all living things.
Hannah Schutzengel combines resin, textiles, and paint to make intentional and expressive work that showcases the influence of modernist history and her own personal voice. Her work is an accumulation of delicate marks into varied and playful surfaces, each one deliberate in movement, composition, and exploration of form.
Hannah Schutzengel Artist Statement:
I make mixed-media paintings from cast resin, textiles, paper, and other materials. My paintings explore the surface as a record of action:
holding the imprint of an impressed thread, a brushstroke, a cut, or a fold.
Each painting is made through casting resin into a flexible mold, allowing me
to create irregular, unpredictable surfaces on which to paint. I then add to
the surfaces in layers of paint and collage with fabric, thread, and paper.
Each painting is a layered accumulation of slow, intentional marks. Through
this process, I emphasize the qualities of attention, mindful action, and care.
I am most interested in the permeability and mutability of the surface – considering at what point a single thread becomes a cloth, a cloth
becomes a surface, or a surface becomes a picture plane. To this end, I have
recently incorporated both knitting and net-making into my artwork, creating
textiles which I then both use as molds and embed into the resin surface
itself. This process speaks to the labor and history of textile and craft work
as well as the grid’s modernist history. My work explores ways of incorporating
fluidity and openness into these formal, rigid structures.
Elaine Fleck Artist Statement:
Textures are my passion, particularly the patterns of nature. With the use of printed, multi-layered fabric, I have formulated a technique that allows me to accomplish my vision of merging my fascination with the compositions and designs of nature, with my love of painting. What were originally hand embroidered scenes are now paintings with a background of man-made prints, with favorites consisting of Indian batiks, insect prints, bird and plant prints, vivid flower prints, and even snowflakes and ocean waves. Each painting has a textured quality. As the painting unfolds, with the help of a preliminary drawing to guide me, I meticulously incorporate the patterns in the cloth with oil paints to bring the image into focus.
Inspirations come from the natural arrangements in nature, whether the lines on an armadillo’s skin, the patterns in a seashell, or the six-fold symmetry of a snowflake. There is an endless array of motifs and designs in the natural world, and I continue to be inspired and fascinated by this process of merging them with paint.