Osheen Harruthoonyan, Tina Tahir, Keijo Tapanainen, & Pedie Wolfond.

September 5 – October 14, 2018  –  Upper Gallery

Join us for the Opening Reception: Saturday, September 8, 2-5pm

A group exhibition of  paintings, photographs and mixed media works, exploring themes of materiality and memory.

Using hybrid, experimental darkroom techniques, Osheen Harruthoonyan traces his personal and ancestral relationship to the Armenian Genocides, his childhood experiences of war in the Middle East. The artist uses manual and chemical processes to alter, interrupt and enhance his photographs, creating unique, permanent images that render the fleetingness of experience and memory.

Keijo Tapanainen’s intimate hand-cut carbon paper figures capture the beauty and simplicity of the human form. Subjects are drawn from life. Using an almost sculptural reductive technique of cutting away elements to create a single composition, the artist attempts to capture the essence of the human figure through subtle distinctions in the subject’s body language.

Tina Tahir’s intricate mixed media pieces explore the relationship between beauty and destruction. Her renderings of ornate and sumptuous organic motifs evoke the pictorial tradition of the Memento Mori, designed to remind the viewer of the brevity and fragility of life. The artist’s fascination with the dual nature of flora is rooted in her lived experience after the nuclear meltdown at the Chernobyl plant in the Northern Ukraine – a disaster, which contaminated nature’s innocence and transformed the landscape into an insidious environment.

Pedie Wolfond’s abstract compositions on paper are lush and tactile. Applying thin coats of acrylic paint on heavy handmade paper, Wolfond’s pieces evoke the Helen Frankenthaler’s “soak-stain” technique. Her rich luminous color washes appear to merge with the paper. Her intuitive approach to abstraction embraces the material relationships between the paint and the surface of the paper, to conjure a deeply poetic visual experience.