Biography

Tamara Dimitri is a visual artist with a background in sculpture, woodworking, and architectural drafting. She received her BFA from Arizona State University and her MFA from Cornell University. Tamara grew up in Nebraska and Arizona and currently lives and works in Connecticut. Since 2005, she has worked as a Program Specialist for the Connecticut Office of the Arts with a focus on public art, grants administration, and accessibility programing.

Artist Statement

Landscape and the environment are central themes in my work.

I have lived in three distinct regions: mid-west farmland, desert southwest, and currently coastal New England and the attributes of each ecosystem weave into my thoughts and ultimately into my work.

I approach my work from a perspective that appreciates the beauty of the natural world while simultaneously maintaining an awareness of the human footprint on our land, water systems and atmosphere. My work takes shape through various processes and structures that I establish while developing a series, or a larger installation. Repetition and crafted components often come together to form a larger piece that begins to approach human scale. This work may include traditional sculptural materials, but often I am drawn towards inferior materials that are recycled and repurposed into crafted objects. For me, the process of making, and engaging with a finished installation, serves as an escape into new and different landscapes that draw upon familiar places. 

Biography

Nancy Hayes is an artist who has brought her own personal vision to many mediums including terra-cotta clay, acrylic paint and watercolor. No matter the medium a consistent theme emerges. That theme speaks to how her brain organizes space, pattern, color, and form. Although considered abstract, both her sculptures and paintings seem to depict worlds yet unseen. Rather than an expression of frenzy they depict highly organized ecosystems where each part is dependent on the whole. The unity and interdependencies speak to the building blocks of matter as well as a spiritual presence that leaves us wondering.

Hayes worked in terra cotta clay for over twenty five years as a Ceramic Sculptor before bringing her imagination and unique way of expressing it to painting. She has received many awards and grants including a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant in the crafts category, a New Bedford Cultural Council Grant, and a Society of Arts and Crafts Artist Award. Her work is included in the collections of the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the Danforth Museum and the New Bedford Libraries as well as many private collections.

Artist Statement

Painting permits direct access into my own personal laboratory where I develop forms and visual landscapes built from my imagination. I work with color, line, pattern and shape, arranging and rearranging until I am inspired to elaborate on a composition, going deeper into its texture, its biology.

As a writer does, I am building my own characters, their personalities and context in which they live. Just as a
reader injects their own personal knowledge into a story, enriching the plot, my objective is to allow the viewer to explore their own visual narrative, enhancing the forms with their imagination.

Assemblage Paintings  2020-22

These past few years I have been creating a series of multi-panel works. My new Assemblage series comprises multi-panels of different sizes and shapes, all inter-connected. The negative space of the white wall interplays with the varying shapes and depths of the panels.

Both organic and geometric forms coexist in a world that is in continuous motion. Color, both muted and intense, as well as linear elements, weave in and out of these panels, adding to the spacial conundrum.

Movement and connection drive our lives and my paintings.

Artist Statement

These paintings are grounded in previous extensive explorations of portraiture. The subjects, situated within swirling worlds of pattern, texture, and color, have now been  subsumed by them, giving birth to lively abstract forms. They have shifted from realistic  imagery to shapes, dots, and splashes of color that weave and layer together into a  tapestry. The focus shifts from the figures themselves to the shapes around them. 

They depict an interior mental landscape, mingling the personal with the abstract. The  process of building and working within parameters—the outlines of human forms, or an  irregular grid—allows oblique, autobiographical references to emerge. Scattered dots  break out of the grid, creating a sense of movement, light and space, as if a seeing a  garden within a galaxy.

Biography

Lisa Warren is a painter based in Connecticut who has shown nationally, including Standard Space Gallery in Sharon, Connecticut, the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Connecticut and Five Points Gallery in Torrington, Connecticut. Ms. Warren was a Fellow at Yaddo and DNA residency, Freight and Volume Gallery, New York during the autumn of 2021 and has attended numerous Fellowships nationally throughout her career, including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Ms. Warren received her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University.

Biography

Ms. Wheeler is a contemporary American artist. Her painting and textiles comment on the state of the natural world and its reflection in her psyche. She studied painting and psychology and has a Master’s degree in art therapy. This is evident in the way that her art reflects the exploration of her life’s experiences, memories and emotions. 

Ms. Wheeler is a recipient of the State of Connecticut Artist Fellowship Grant. She has exhibited in multiple galleries and museums and has been represented by Monique Knowlton Gallery in Soho, featured on the cover of Gallery Guide, listed in Art in America’s guide to contemporary artists, and exhibited in other NY galleries including AHA Fine Art,Exit Art, First Run Gallery, Broadway Windows, the Works on Paper Show at the Armory, and the Outsider Art Show in Soho.  

Her work has been featured in solo or group shows in the following museums:  New Britain Museum of American Art, Stamford Museum and Nature Center, Discovery Museum, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Mattatuck Museum, the Barnum Museum, and Shore Institute for Contemporary Arts.   She is an artist member of Silvermine Guild of Artists and the National Association of Women Artists.

Ms. Wheeler resides and maintains her studio in CT.

Artist Statement

My art is about the relationship of man to the natural world.  I use depictions of the natural world to explore my conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions.  My art expresses a longing to merge with the natural world and a belief that our experience with flora and fauna was once far more instinctual and comprehensive. While creating, I express my concern about man’s destruction of the natural world, hybridization of species and the disappearance of natural habitats.