You Floats Above by Charlotte Schulz
(FRENCHTOWN, NJ) -- ArtYard presents two new solo exhibitions — Charlotte Schulz: A Constellation of Small Events and Alvaro Catalán de Ocón: Plasticity and the opening of I Just Want to Know, featuring works by Katie House and Cindy Gosselin, the third collaborative exhibition between ArtYard and Studio Route 29, as well as Aqualumina Workshop, a makerspace dedicated to the creation of aquatic costumes and objects for the Aqualumina Festival on May 18.
Charlotte Schulz: A Constellation of Small Events (February 17 to June 2, 2024) - Intermingling land, sea, and sky with fragments of domestic interiors, artist Charlotte Schulz’s drawings are dream-like spaces with no clear horizon to anchor them. Rendered using charcoal that she blends with her fingertips and shapes with delicate erasure, she creates compositions illuminated by foreboding light and weather. While the imagery is minutely scaled, the works themselves are up to three by four feet — so that each one is made up of a network of distinct and interlocking vignettes — a constellation of small events.
Peppered with symbolic objects — a bed, a telescope, an airplane and often populated with a lone animal or tree — Schulz’s works are laden with emotional resonance. A single animal stranded in a shallow pond acts metaphorically to show us how land and mind are inextricably linked.
The exhibition also includes a video produced at ArtYard which takes the viewer on a journey across the undulating surfaces of Schulz’s drawings. Filmed using a macros lens, the perspective is lilliputian with folds in the paper becoming mountain ranges or icebergs. The large scale of the video projection immerses the viewer in the artist’s surreal landscapes.
Schulz will offer gallery talks on three Sunday mornings at 11:00am, beginning with the week after the opening on Sunday, February 25, followed by talks on March 17 and April 28.
This exhibition is part of (re)FOCUS, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts/1974, a citywide festival recognizing women artists. Visit refocus2024.org/events and follow #refocus2024 for upcoming events.
Plasticity Indus by Alvaro Catalán de Ocón
Alvaro Catalán de Ocón: Plasticity (February 17 to May 26, 2024) - Plasticity brings together works by Spanish designer Alvaro Catalán de Ocón. At first glance, the everyday objects belie the contradictory social and environmental histories contained in their fabrication. Catalán de Ocón’s Plastic Rivers project employs Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic waste that is recycled into yarn and woven pixel by pixel using a hand-tufted technique into large maps using Google Earth panoramas of the Ganges, Niger, Yangtze, and Indus endangered river systems. His PET Lamp project has engaged community weaving collectives in Australia, Chile, Colombia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Japan, and Thailand to make use of PET bottles. Over time, the project has unfolded as an anthropological study of different indigenous weaving traditions, highlighting the role that craft knowledge can play in preserving community. The 22 PET lamps in this exhibition are strung together into a single fixture that communicates this shared vulnerability and exuberant diversity.
Catalán de Ocón’s beautiful works are manifestos about an ugly truthabout plastic contamination and the global commercialization of waste.“Recycling is not the solution,” he says. “The solution lies in being responsible users of the resources at our disposal and thinking of future ready solutions.”
Catalán de Ocón will visit ArtYard from his native Spain for the opening reception and offer an artist's talk and tour of Plasticity on Sunday, February 18 at 11:00am.
I Just Want to Know (February 17 to June 2, 2024), featuring works by Katie House and Cindy Gosselin - I Just Want to Know features work by two artists who cover found objects in color, Katie House and Cindy Gosselin. House, an artist and jeweler from Studio Route 29, brings color and a curious hand to found photographs, framing them in an intense chromatic surface and immersing specific moments into buoyant light. Gosselin, an artist and musician from Philadelphia-based Center for Creative Works, creates her bound sculptures with a focused, obsessive intensity. Pulling various found objects into cocoon-like forms, from wooden spools to house keys, they continue to morph and grow until Gosselin deems them “too heavy.” This exhibition is curated by Studio Route 29.
Aqualumina Workshop (February 17 to May 18, 2024) - Aqualumina is a biennial riverside lantern festival involving music, dance, and illumination along the river’s edge. Set for May 18, this year’s festival is a celebration of water itself — as a vulnerable resource, necessity, bellwether, thing of beauty, and mirror of the sky.
In the leadup to the festival, ArtYard will launch the Aqualumina Workshop, featuring a maker’s workspace dedicated to the creation of glow-in-the-dark fish puppets, crochet coral reef hats, and other aquatic costumes and objects for the springtime parade. Laura Bernstein, Nicole Strafaci, and Em Rae are among the guest artists facilitating workshops in the Aqualumina Workshop. Visit artyard.org to learn more and register for workshops.
Registration for the February 17 opening reception and artist talks are at artyard.org.
ArtYard is located at 13 Front Street in Frenchtown, New Jersey. Free public hours are Wednesday through Sunday from 11:00am to 5:00pm and late night Thursdays until 7:00pm.
ArtYard is an incubator for creative expression and a catalyst for collaborations that reveal the transformational power of art. Its campus includes an arts center featuring exhibition space and a state-of-the-art theater as well as two buildings housing its residency program.
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