Works on Paper
Lyell Castonguay, Henry Ferreira, Elizabeth Ferrill, Megan Foster, Jonathan Palmer, and Brian Shure.
Wednesday March 30th-Sunday May 1st
Artists Reception Saturday April 2nd 5-7pm
Dedee Shattuck Gallery is pleased to present Works on Paper, the debut exhibition for its 2016 season. This exhibition features a variety of printmaking techniques and thematic explorations by six different printmakers living and working throughout the region and across the country: Lyell Castonguay, Henry Ferreira, Elizabeth Ferrill, Megan Foster, Jonathan Palmer, and Brian Shure. All of the featured artists in Works on Paper investigate some aspect of basic human behavior. Each describes experience, either real or imagined, by examining the self and one’s relation to the natural world, by seeking knowledge through detachment or communal participation, or by isolating specific imagery that represents the constructed, material world.
Lyell Castonguay
Lyell Castonguay is a printmaker creating narrative woodcuts that incorporate transparent colors and complex, hand carved patterning. Castonguay’s current body of work depicts the familiar imagery of birds in portraiture and masses, but they are distorted into allegorical beasts. The artist’s interest in avian subjects began six years ago when he was given two juvenile society finches. As they grew, he became fascinated with their distinct personalities. Castonguay eagerly observed them communicating with one another and watched them huddle together at night. These unassuming finches prompted an ongoing series focused on the emotional variety of birds, including: ferocity, restlessness, and uncertainty. Depictions of animals by artists such as Baskin, Frasconi, and Audubon have been a guiding force in this project’s development. Ultimately, Castonguay hopes to compile his growing bestiary of larger-than-life birds into a publication.
BIOGRAPHY
Lyell Castonguay teaches woodcut at print studios throughout New England. He is also the director of BIG INK (bigink.org), a collaborative project that encourages other artists to practice large woodcut. Castonguay received his BFA from the New Hampshire Institute of Art in 2010 and resides in Easthampton, MA. A forthcoming exhibit will be at Castle Agliè, Turin, Italy. Past exhibits include the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea; Fine Art Works Center, Provincetown, MA; Western New England University, Springfield, MA; Bromfield Gallery, Boston, MA; and the D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, MA.
Henry Ferreira
Striking a balance between teaching, family, and studio can be frustrating if not impossible, but I can’t think of much I‘d change. The fact is it all adds up to who I am, and ultimately, the foundation of my work. One’s life can be said to be the foundation for his or her work, but sometimes the influence is more direct. About five years ago I spent a lot of time rebuilding my studio. I removed, repaired, and replaced the floor, rebuilt the walls, put up new lights, ran new wiring, and installed the counter and sink. Soon after the studio was finished, I began to think about building with dimensional wood framing – how it relates to matrixes, layering, stacking – much like the printmaking process. I began to explore the motif of houses. Sometimes the house is used as a metaphor, and a basic idea can be married to process and image. When the process of making takes precedent, the idea is more fluid and open-ended. I approach the work with an idea, and it literally takes shape on the paper through the playing and making, the content and form.
BIOGRAPHY
Henry Ferreira’s work is built on a deep respect for craft. Acquired skills, absorbed through years of practice, are used as methods of exploration to execute content-driven pieces. His work always begins with observation and grows through process, while the medium and materials help form the piece. His latest body of work is more direct, processdriven, and less pre-visualized, using printmaking to build through matrix and repeat. Ferreira aims to balance thinking with making, intertwining content and form in an effort to grow his work. Ferreira works in the studio he built, located in a two hundred year old farmhouse in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, where he lives with his family. He received his MFA from the Rhode Island School Design in 1980. In the years prior, Ferreira was in the inaugural class at Bristol Community College in Fall River, Massachusetts, before completing his BFA in 1972 at Southeastern Massachusetts University (now the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth). He has been teaching at RISD since 1981 and has taught printmaking in Pont-Aven, France; San Miguel and Cuernavaca, Mexico; and Rome, Italy. He presently heads the Printmaking Department at the RISD and serves as President of RISD’s Faculty Association/Union.
Elizabeth Ferrill
The vast solitude of the American landscape is the subject matter of my work, particularly places that seem cold but emotionally charged, dehumanizing yet full of personal experience. This includes empty public places that are usually packed with people, spaces that remain tensely suspended within a quiet moment between what has occurred in the past and what will occur in the future. I utilize the pochoir technique to create my works on paper. Pochoir is a printmaking/painting method traditionally used to hand color images in books. This stencil medium that employs cutout shapes and gouache creates solid, often overlapping forms that converge into hard-edged compositions. Each overlay of shape and color responds to the simplified and functional architectural properties of airports, motels, border crossings, bus stops, and other publicly utilized institutions. The stencil functions as a layer of mediation that implements a control system to my mark-making process. The subjects in the work are all familiar yet underexamined peripheries of the American vista. The pieces exist as simplifications of the complex and paradoxical atmosphere of the public world. I explore public spaces with a sincere quest for beauty while at the same time acknowledging their tension, functionality, and ability to inherently make a statement about our behavior as human beings.
BIOGRAPHY
A native of Seattle, WA, Elizabeth Ferrill received her BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. She received her MFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Elizabeth has had solo exhibitions nationally and internationally including in Aspen, CO; Nashville, TN; Omaha, NE; Peoria, IL; Reno, NV and Berlin, Germany. She was an artist in residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE. She taught in the printmaking departments of the University of Nevada, Reno and the Rhode Island School of Design. Elizabeth is the Artistic Director of Painting, Drawing, and Printmaking and Chair of the Artists-In-Residence program at Anderson Ranch Arts Center.
Megan Foster
Deceptively simple, my work suggests a narrative by presenting a frozen moment in time. I aim to preserve and give authority to the everyday experience through a mix of art, architecture, design and science. Using appropriated images, film stills, magazine clippings, and staged photographs as a starting point, I depict banal scenes that have the potential to be spectacular and fantastic. I portray often-overinflated expectations of the way we live and how we try to better ourselves from previous generations. “Supernature” is how I look at nature in art, science, design and the future. Motivated by Margaret Atwood’s apocalyptic novels Oryx and Crake, Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam, I am interested in crossbred animals, plants and hybrid technology. The now-defunct SkyMall has often been a source for my work. The quarterly-published magazine contained a “broad selection of unique products, gifts and cool gadgets from catalog companies and specialty retailers.” The magazine appeals to the buyer’s need for simplicity, a need for new technology, and a need for consuming. Several items caught my eye year after year while passing time on the tarmac, the Real Rock Fake Rock Covers and the solar garden decorations. One caption read, “these glowing rocks could create a mysterious, otherworldly atmosphere.” After seeing a retrospective exhibition of Eadweard Muybridge at the Tate Britain, I was inspired to buy the catalog only to cut up as a series of sketches. I struggled finding inspired “otherworldly atmospheres” and was drawn to the true monumentality of his photographs of Yosemite National Park. Since working with the Muybridge photos, travel has become an integral part of my working process as I search for extremes in landscape and light. Naturally occurring spectacles, such as the red tide, the Northern Lights, or simply fields of fireflies have become a new focus and backdrop to create collaborations between nature, science and technology.
BIOGRAPHY
Megan Foster’s work focuses on painting and printmaking as a medium to explore the idea of super nature. Her work aims to preserve and give authority to the everyday experience. Using appropriated material, she depicts images that have the potential to be spectacular, fantastic and sublime. has been included in national and international exhibitions, such as Black and White Art Gallery, Sideshow Gallery, and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, all in New York; San Jose Museum of Art; Liverpool Biennale; and the Inside Out Art Museum, Beijing. Megan received her B.F.A in printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design and her M.F.A from Columbia University. She lives and works in New York City and currently teaches printmaking at The City College of New York.
Jonathan Palmer
My art examines concepts of identity by challenging assumptions, stereotypes and myths of the human experience. I am interested in understanding how our beliefs and misperceptions guide our judgments. My work juxtaposes contrasting phenomenon such as perfection and mutation, desire and repulsion, or impairment and idolatry. By dissecting such ontological misgivings and cultural ideals as disparate and homogenous my art discusses difference and the indifference of judgment. Whether it is a hyperbolic notion of celebrity or in how we identify someone as other, how does that judgment affect our individuality and in turn reflect upon contemporary society? Popular culture remains captivated by stature as well as the myth of the freak. The attraction for either is a fetishized desire that feeds our need for the popular or the outsider and contorts our understanding of self. My work is a visceral response rooted in personal experience as well as being a commentary on American culture. Taking a peripheral view of the human condition offers an extraordinary scene that, on one end, may appear godly and on the other, wretched. Two of the prints presented in the Works on Paper show were created in 2012 using invasive species of plants as a trope. The metaphor reflects on the displacement and recreation of self. The two drawings and the print (2015-16) exhibited use concepts related to Georges Bataille’s book “Visions of Excess”.
BIOGRAPHY
Jonathan Palmer received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2013. He has exhibited his work throughout the United States including New York City, San Francisco, Baton Rouge, and Providence, and internationally in Japan. He teaches painting, drawing and printmaking classes at Mendocino College and the San Francisco Art Institute. He currently lives in Northern California with his wife and daughter.
Brian Shure
My subject matter is public space—a projection of our ideas about civility—and the people who use them. These quotidian scenes, lacking in outward drama if not at times without an undercurrent of tension, represent an ideal of mutual respect, tolerance and collective unregulated activity. I’m interested in the calm dignity and quiet pleasure of people taking part in an ongoing, casual utopian experiment in peaceful co-existence. The possibility of playing, or walking—or just being—without fear, in a public space seems increasingly rare in our highly mediated, surveilled world. An eclectic mix of images from the past informs my work. I’m fascinated by Giambattista Tiepolo’s illusionistic space and the lively brushwork in his paintings and ink drawings, as well as the energetic, wavering lines unique to his etchings. And in Chinese ink paintings by Southern Song painter Li Sung—which celebrate the lives of common villagers, and the earlier 12th century, Northern Sun scroll by Zhang Zeduan depicting people taking part in a river festival, I admire the reserved, often dry brushwork that evokes a sense of bland stillness within the ceaselessly changing phenomena that is the often-anxious, moment-bymoment experience of life in which we are immersed.
BIOGRAPHY
Brian Shure is a painter and printmaker working with representations of people in public spaces. He received a BA from Antioch College, apprenticed with Ernest DeSoto at Collectors Press in San Francisco and worked as a professional lithographer for 15 years. He has published and printed editions under the Smalltree Press imprint, and was a Master Printer and Coordinator of the China Woodblock Program at Crown Point Press from 1987 to 1994. His etchings of Ise-Jingu were printed in 2000 when he was a resident artist at Tokugenji Press in Nara, Japan. In 2004 he completed a group of murals for the Pittsburgh Federal Courthouse. In the winter of 2013 he created a suite of prints while in Residence at David Krut Projects at Arts on Main, in Johannesburg, South Africa, and in the summer of 2015 he researched the woodblock process and completed a print project at Rongbaozhai in Beijing. He has taught as a visiting artist at Brown and Cornell Universities, has given workshops in the U.S., Japan, and Mexico, and has been teaching in the Printmaking Department at the Rhode Island School of Design since 1996. He is a member of the advisory board of Highpoint Press in Minneapolis, and the author of two books on chine collé: Magical Secrets about Chine Collé, and Chine Collé, A Printer’s Handbook. He is currently Printmaking graduate program director at RISD.
Dedeeshattuckgallery@gmail.com | 508. 636. 4177 | 1 Partners' Lane, Westport, MA 02790 | W - Sat, 10 - 5, Sun 12 - 5