On January 25, The Gallery of Contemporary Art at Sacred Heart University will present an exhibition entitled, “Uncommon Portraits, Uncommon Views.” The exhibit runs through March 4, 2004, and is open to the public. There is no charge for admission.

Deborah Frizzell, Ph. D., the curator of the exhibition, has selected four ground-breaking contemporary artists from the area to help expand our perception of the limits of portraiture: June Ahrens, (who divides her time between New Canaan, CT and NYC), Ellen K. Levy (New York City), Debra Pearlman (Brooklyn, NY) and Duston Spear (Pound Ridge, NY).

In this exhibit, Dr. Frizzell's selections seek to answer such questions as, “What does it mean to compose a ‘portrait'? What are the revealing characteristic elements that we look for in considering this artistic genre? What new perspectives, strategies, techniques and forms do contemporary artists explore in order to present fresh views of portraiture?”

Frizzell points out that “by breaking through the established conventions and parameters of traditional portraiture, these contemporary artists examine the singular vision of individuals intersecting with both collective histories and social/cultural conditions. The focus in this exhibition is on four contemporary artists who stretch the boundaries of portraiture to disclose multiple ‘uncommon views.' They seek to create evocations of physical, metaphorical or allegorical ‘likenesses' via unconventional means and materials. Rather than rendering a unified, naturalistic

appearance, these artists convey a fragmented archaeology of the cultural present.”
The included artists offer a range of thoroughly realized and highly personal answers to these intriguing questions.
June Ahrens' studio is ten blocks from the former site of the Twin Towers. Her most recent series, One After the Other, explores issues of fragility, pain and survival. She uses everyday and often discarded items as materials to create her sculpture. “My work takes on an obsessive spirit as it is created, and allows a space for meditation,” she says, pointing out that “safety pins are the primary material used in this series. Each pin is connected individually and manipulated instinctually until form and shape start to emerge. The repetitive nature of the work also acts as an anchor and begins to take on associations and meanings that reflect today's society.”

The color in the works comes from the different colors of the thousands of safety pins that are connected to form minimal yet powerful shapes that we experience as symbolic. According to Frizzell, “Burst (2003) is an explosion of two conjoined primary forms: a smoky-black ‘cloud', composed of looped and gathered strips of window screening, hovering over a ‘fallout' of linked rows of black safety pins The rising and collapsing ‘mushroom cloud' is eerily evocative, issuing deadly fringes of sparkling sequin-like pins.”

Frizzell selected Ellen K. Levy for inclusion because “she seeks to intersect the languages of art and science to create ‘uncommon views' and complex cultural/technological portraits. Her series of ‘portraits of the artist' picture her dramatis personae as an artist/astronaut exploring the links between the structural patterns evolving in both nature and culture. Structure and Failure (2003), a digital print from this series, employs collaged technical drawings and photos of spacecraft construction to achieve a density of colliding spaces and relationships, implying multiple timeframes within the mutations of hybrid forms and pivoting axes.

“The impetus for Structure and Failure has its roots in Levy's earlier paintings, in particular, a commission by NASA, Challenger (1986). The artist was asked to respond to the Challenger spacecraft disaster by examining the component systems involved in structural failure, while creating visual metaphors for the human tragedy resulting from failed interdependent systems.”

Debra Pearlman uses the human figure to create psychological portraits that she has meticulously staged. She says, “The core of my work resides in the printing process. Work is printed, reprinted, recycled, reproduced, repeated and reoriented, disoriented, stateless, ambiguous and fragmentary. The work can begin with an image a title or a phrase. Loss of potential, vulnerability, particularly that of children are frequent concerns.”

Two of her Sweet Chariot series of sleeping girls are included in the exhibition. Photographed from above, two girls are shown on a flowered background in nightclothes with their bodies spooned together foot to head, forming an sinuous “S”. These large Iris prints are black and white, with a wide range of grey tones that present us with a soft and vulnerable image. The sweetness of the image seems layered with some sense of loss or subtle danger that is reflected in the old African-American spiritual that gives the work its title.

Frizzell's fourth choice to round out the exhibit is Duston Spear, whose works have often included performance and collaborations with other artists and non-artists in vigils to protest human rights violations and war. Frizzell notes, “More recently, Spear has focused on the war poems of Stephen Crane (1871-1900) as points of departure for her paintings on canvas, paper scrolls and artist's books. Writing on the carnage and destruction of the Civil War, the poet's starkly modernist themes and austere form are redolent with mocking irony and deep pessimism. Spear ventriloquizes Crane's war poems in word-image conjunctions, reenacting the poet's ironic language in scrawled lines and emerging, ghostly forms. By transcribing Crane's poems into pictorial form, Spear renders the poet's words calligraphic and conjoins them with emblematic images, as she does in her painting, Bitter Heart (2003).”

Each of these works evokes contemporary reflections and expands the definition of portraiture by evoking contemporary states of mind, as they relate to the continuing changes in our society and culture.

All four of the featured artists will join curator Deborah Frizzell for a panel discussion in the Gallery on February 12, at 7 pm. The event is free and the public is cordially invited to attend.

Gallery hours are Monday – Thursday from 12-5 pm, and Sundays from 12 – 4 pm. The Gallery will be closed President's Day weekend. For further information, please call the Gallery Director, Sophia Gevas, at 203-365-7650.

Contact: Sophia Gevas (gevass@sacredheart.edu)

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