convergence

CCNOA is pleased to present a group exhibition curated by New York based curator / gallerist Florence Lynch. The exhibition will feature painting, sculpture, photography, works on paper and video works by eight (8) artists, including Tiong Ang, Luisa Caldwell, Janet Echelman, Carlo Ferraris, Craig Fisher, Christa Maiwald, Maria Morganti, and Linda Van Boven. While the exhibition does not include all of Ms. Lynch's gallery artists, it gives a comprehensive overview of her curatorial focus and her gallery’s programming, which could be summarized as an eclectic, unconventional multi-media program including cutting-edge video and performance installations as well as painting, sculpture and photography exhibitions. Bringing new talent to the forefront and initiating relationships with emerging and established artists and creating a comprehensive dialogue between the works of local, national and international artists, Ms. Lynch, has worked as an independent curator since leaving the Salvatore Ala Gallery in 1994. She has worked extensively in Japan, Germany, France, The Netherlands, and Italy; and has done numerous curatorial projects in commercial and non-profit spaces in New York City. b

Artists: In his videos Tiong Ang functions as the distanced outsider while remaining engaged through the act of looking. His straight-forward 'observational' images, taken during his peripatetic travels around the world, are moved from the realm of documentary portraiture of the Other to that of a dream-like self-portrait through the creation of unlikely pairings and by the way his editing mediates their relationships.

Luisa Caldwell’s installation consists of 300 strands of candywrappers tied bow-like with nylon thread. The sculpture deals with transforming the everyday, the ephemeral, into a fantasy environment. While not over looking the social and cultural implication of the work, its aesthetic impact is intense. Consumption, abundance, and wastefulness are implied contexts.

Carlo Ferraris’ videos prepares us for a visceral viewing experience with works that represent both the literal and metaphorical and address a spatial or perceptual experience and its psychological implication to everyday life and objects. In the works, all legends, knowledge, and invention, all heritage and messages, all the avant-garde inventors of every era and tradition, all of it becomes a series of metaphysical creation of contemporary gadgets.

In these new paintings, Craig Fisher grappling with the difficulties of distracted and interrupted concentration. The informal and process orientation of his previous work proves to be a fertile ground…and the paintings become ever more anti-compositional and improvised. Somehow, through their continuous movement and unexpected changes, the painting manage to hang together, to find again what is fresh as well as intimate in painting.

Janet Echelman has been working on three important public sculpture projects completed or conceived in the past year, starting with her biggest commission to date currently under construction on the Atlantic coastline in Porto, Portugal. Rising 14 stories to visually connect a city park and a popular beach, the work suspends multiple 150-foot-diameter sculptural nets over a 3-lane highway roundabout. The CCONA exhibition will include a series of prints, Portugal Drawing Series I & II, of computer generated images on that commission.

Christa Maiwald’s embroidery pieces, hand sewn on cotton and linen handkerchiefs, are executed with a richly detailed elegance reminiscent of early Christian mosaics, but the delicacy of technique and materials is offset by images that are funny, mysterious, crude - at times all three. For the past four years, she has been photographing adolescents and creating embroidered portraits of them. The exhibition will include her largest embroideries to date, presented in the US Pavilion at the Luena Biennale in Sweden in the summer 2003.

Maria Morganti presents a floor to ceiling installation of works on paper which aptly display her continued interest in color, movement, and form. The strong tonal variations transcend an essentially chromatic theme and create a mysterious effect of forms and shapes hovering in an ambiguously defined space. The works’ surface, structure, form, and scale, interplay as well on their four-year span.

Linda Van Boven presents a series of photographs of sequential images, charged with emotions. Rhythmic in content and structure, the images range from clay to actual figures. A dynamism and range of emotions are condensed in the clay figures cloaked by chiaroscuro: intensely pensive figures play or sit round a table, one isolated figure writhes in pain, other figures are engaged in vigorous conversation or arguments. In the works Van Boven emphasizes the interplay of psychological battles and social patterns in everyday life. Pressetext

convergence
Tiong Ang, Luisa Caldwell, Janet Echelman, Carlo Ferraris, Craig Fisher, Christa Maiwald, Maria Morganti, Linda Van Boven
Kurator: Florence Lynch