
Vensel’s work considers relationships, timing, and the randomness of life and the backlit landscape of social media, where photos of friends’ children coexist in the same space as political posts and horrifying news stories. About her work, she says:
“Using concrete trowels, large knives and rubber squeegees, I swirl, drag and scrape acrylic paint in taped-off sections on the canvas. Each section progresses at a different rate and accumulates its own particular history of marks and textures. And like events in life, these parts may relate to or interrupt each other.”
In the East Gallery, Tim Prentice’s Gone with the Wind featured kinetic sculptures that stirred in the wind created by viewers walking by, movements that cast dancing shadows on the gallery walls, shadows that almost became their own artworks, even as they were a part of the sculpture. Prentice tries to concentrate on the movement, rather than the object created. From his statement:
“The engineer in me wants to minimize friction to make the air visible.
The architect studies matters of scale and proportion
The sailor wants to know the strength and direction of the wind.
The artist wants to understand its changing shape. Meanwhile the child wants to play.”
In the TDP Gallery, Edith Skiba LaMonica’s Elemental Rhythms immersed the viewer in an environment inspired by her observations of the woodland pond behind her studio. She’s interested in combining realistic and abstract elements to create a sense of something that is both familiar and mysterious. She’s also interested in changes that happen in the environment, and how “wild crowding plants, water and sky entwine, confounding the real and the illusory.”
The current exhibit, our third of the year, features Petricia Carrigan’s Headlands in the West Gallery, Eva Stengade”s Diversity—Speed Inside in the East Gallery, and Cat Balco’s Watch Your Step! in the TDP Gallery. The exhibit opened on Friday, March 31. The artist talk is Friday, April 21, at 6 PM.
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Located in a historic downtown building, Five Points Gallery (FPG) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit contemporary art gallery showcasing professional regional, national and international visual artists. The gallery presents exhibitions in three beautifully renovated exhibition spaces, and has earned the reputation as one of Connecticut’s outstanding contemporary art venues.
Five Points Center For The Visual Arts is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. “with support from the Department of Economic and Community Development, Connecticut Office of the Arts, which also receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.”