Introverted and OCD

September 10 – October 12, 2019

Fed Gallery
17 Fountain St. NW
Grand Rapids, MI 49503

Curated by Mandy Cano Villalobos

Amidst social media bombardment and consumerist exchange, alienation overwhelms us and superficiality has become the norm. Pressed for time, we feel pressured to sacrifice those intangibles of existence that lack marketable value: intimacy, silence, and self-reflection. Yet a quiet protest has arisen. Introverted and OCD presents a collection of finely crafted works from artists who, mark by mark and incision by incision, grasp for a life of substance. Whether it’s the slow, constant crusade against the surge of impersonally digital hearts, likes, and emojis or the schizophrenic exertion to stay present in the moment, incessant repetition both distinguishes and unifies these artists’ processes.

Artists: Craig Dongoski, Marie N. Guex, Meg Hitchock, Lucha Rodriguez, Joseph Shelter, Alex Kvares, Kevin J. Lucey, Jeffry Mitchell, Maureen Nollette, Tia Weirenga, Jayoung Yoon

Organized by A R E A at The Yard
120 St James Ave
Boston, MA

A R E A presents a selection of works of geometric abstraction created in Boston today, a field that remains one of the most striking developments in the history of art.

The works included in Forms of Expression (painting, sculpture and photography) reveal either a dependence on logic and calculation or manifest an unedited expression of feeling. Each of them are geometric investigations characterized by precise, meticulous and rigorous explorations of form, shape, and color.

These artists find freedom in the confinement of a form or a shape through a wide range of colors (from primary to seductive neon colors) for expressive effects, giving in some cases a sense of order, and in others, a desire to disrupt unity. Focusing on material and process too, they address issues of complex spatial relationships.

This is not just fascination with form. A preoccupation with content links the artists represented here: political conditions, environmental changes, language structures, the human existence or the architecture of raw nature are among the references evoked in the exhibition.

Atlantic Wharf Gallery
290 Congress Street
Boston, MA 02210

Art is a useful critical tool for envisioning what the future could look like. Though a space of history and tradition, art is also conducive to radical experimentations that self-consciously depart from the past. In this way, art allows us to explore notions of futurity, both within the realm of aesthetics and beyond. Some artists–such as those associated with historical avant-garde movements from around the world–interrogate the visual and political systems constituting our primary reality with the aim of creating new realities. Much debate has centered on whether or not artists can even actualize new ways of being in the world. While unknowable, the future is certainly not unthinkable. In the Future… interrogates the past and present with artworks that imagine any number of potential futures. We encourage submissions in all media that have vision and which are visionary, i.e., speculative, open-ended projects anticipating that which is yet to come.

In the future… is guest curated by Mallory Ruymann. Mallory Ruymann is a Boston-based art historian, curator, and educator. She has recently held curatorial positions at Tufts University Art Galleries and the Bakalar & Paine Galleries at Massachusetts College of Arts & Design. Among other venues, her critical writing has appeared in Big Red & Shiny and The Rib. She received an M.A. in Art History from Tufts University and a B.A. in Art History from Washington & Lee University.

March 3 – March 31, 2018

Jane Deering Gallery
19 Pleasant Street
Gloucester, MA 01930

Beverly-based artist, Kevin Lucey approaches constructing a painting like the ritualistic nature of collecting and preserving. The artist camouflages personal letters, photos, tickets, and textiles beneath hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dots and dashes. Through his laborious process of repetitive mark making, Lucey reconstructs the surface of his paintings into a vessel that contains literal fragments of memories and encounters he seeks to conserve. Punctuated Gestures is a celebration of Lucey’s ability to create exceptional, tiny monuments to the modest mark.

Each painting begins with a memento intertwined with a significant experience, memory, or love story. The artist often feels as if the materials just “find him”, not unlike the way letters, notes, doodles from meaningful individuals find their way into our lives. While some choose to preserve an object of significance in a shoebox under the bed or in a scrapbook, Lucey preserves his sentimental materials by embedding them within his paintings. This autobiographical approach to his practice not only allows him to save something inherently meaningful, but also to work towards a metaphorical “period” on a significant experience. Lucey’s cathartic approach to painting transcends beyond achieving personal closure. The artist hopes the viewer also resonates with the work, like looking into a mirror at their own experiences or challenges to work through. Within each painting, Lucey demonstrates an awareness to think beyond himself and into the affections of others.

Lucey’s, “A Place To Get Back To” (2018) is the latest painting in this body of work. Twenty-five blue and teal-toned squares peppered with deep and light blues, orange, gold, and red hues, are each contained within a yellow border. These golden boundaries initially command and divide the composition, like fences keeping certain marks and sensations at bay. But upon further study it’s revealed that some of these these demarcations frame horizontal and vertical cuts or as Lucey refers to them, “incisions”. This reductive style of mark marking adds to Lucey’s repertoire of bold punctuation. Row two, second “square” from the left, the artist’s horizontal incision cuts just above the phrase, “Bright Days.” Like an inverted underline, the swift cut emphasizes the positive phrase like a highlighted passage from a memorable text.

The act of cutting is a pivotal shift from the artist’s rigorous, additive process and introduces a sculptural quality to the work. Upon noticing the somewhat random cuts throughout the painting, the once perceived borders or “fences” surpass categorical terms. They become memorable moments in their own right, incorporating dimension and movement and action into an otherwise controlled, ordered space. This new trajectory demonstrates Lucey’s ability to challenge painterly norms, and draw out richer conversations between his experiences and the viewer’s.

The title of the exhibition references Lucey’s power to boldly mark, or punctuate the surface of his meticulous paintings. While the term ‘punctuate’ typically connates ideas of finality and a definitive action, Lucey’s marks are intentional, yet gestural, nodding to the poetic nature of his practice and the materials that inspire it. All of Lucey’s paintings begin with collages sourced from personal materials. That initial layer is then veiled by concentric dots and dashes. While the artist’s intent is to somewhat bury these mementos beneath his rhythmic, ceremonial marks, Lucey leaves subtle evidence of the underlying materials to converse with his viewer. While they are deeply personal to the artist, Lucey acknowledges that the collage elements can evoke emotions and memories relatable to the viewer as well. Because of this mutual dialogue between the personal and public, Lucey’s paintings operate as both bold punctuations and quiet gestures.

- Pam Campanaro, exhibition curator

September 1 – September 29, 2017

The Captain's Daughters
384 Commercial Street
Provincetown, MA 02657

Overlaid & Underpinned

March 10 – April 7, 2017

www.curatingcontemporary.com

Overlaid & Underpinned
(Paolo Arao, Anthony Falcetta, Tim Hallinan, Vanessa Irzyk, Kevin Lucey, Samnang Riebe) 

Being made of physical stuff, and made over time, gives a painting a deep backstory -- a matrix, built of decisions and responses, that first depends on process and eventually comes to direct it. Everything counts and no element is truly lost, because its shape or absence is acknowledged by its replacement. The first thing we see is only the most recent change to the painter's first decision. 

Sometimes the underpinnings are discovered to be the point, and stay in sight from start to end, reinforced and reiterated until they seem to have been inevitable. Other times, the later layers seduce us; the face of the painting becomes a beaded curtain, a wrapper, a peekaboo game, a visible effect that still responds to now-hidden causes. Or, these overlays can be our guides, organizing things, directing us to look deeper, find remnants and rhymes, and make sense for ourselves. 

This show features a group of painters whose work relies on buried information, evolved structures, and superimposed patterns. Their paintings are anchored in the world by their materiality: growing by repeated moves and responses to changes, and depending on the rituals of moving paint around in real space. Yet they offer a painted reality which is augmented, holographic -- a space which painting can claim because of its unique relationships with substance, time, image, and object. These paintings are both/and. 

The pieces included here, while not specifically "about" technology, are aware of its constant presence and its visual vocabularies, and rely on similar tensions between material and symbolic, physical and pictorial, structural and graphical, accumulated and instantaneous. Heads-up displays, videogames, app-based colors and shapes, finger-swipe erasures, glitched GIFs, pixelated images, hovering scaffolds of text and pattern -- these emissaries from dataspace are absorbed into abstract paintspace like chair-caning into a Picasso. The underpinnings and over-layers of these works coexist in a way that preserves and elaborates, and so they achieve a breath and pulse which are elegantly engineered and also beautifully human. 

_________________________________ 

I'm so pleased to have made the acquaintance of the other artists in this group during the last year or so, whether "on Insta" or IRL. Thanks to each and all for their enthusiasm and conversation, their gorgeous and complex work, and their willingness to share it in this online project. Cheers! 

Anthony Falcetta (curator) 
Winter, 2017 

A Way Of Saying Goodbye

Dec 6, 2016 – Jan 14, 2017

Mingo Gallery & Custom Framing
284 Cabot St, Beverly, Massachusetts 01915

A Way Of Saying Goodbye features new work by Kevin Lucey. While the subject matter is implied by the title of the show and the included works, Lucey forges ahead in his signature style of laboriously layered abstract paintings. Each work initiates as a singular phrase from which he builds layer upon layer of dots and small strokes of paint. Through this process he effectively obliterates the text (it wasn't meant for the viewer anyway), to create visually rich and sometimes challenging works that read more closely to woven tapestries. Throughout the process, Lucey is also strongly influenced by color theory often implementing a play between an analogous and split compliment palette.

As a departure from previous works, Lucey has begun cutting into his paintings, sometimes in a similarly repetitive manner respondent to the painting itself, sometimes in a more haphazard way that disrupts the congruity of the pattern. This treatment results in giving these paintings a sculptural quality with the introduction of shadow-play and surface disruption.

Also included in this exhibit are less formal, smaller works on paper. In many ways these works act as windows into Lucey's process, most obviously in the heightened presence of legible text. These works aid in de-coding his interest in pattern and palette.

Lastly, A Way Of Saying Goodbye includes painted sculptures that posses Lucey's layered, pattern-oriented style, however in full effect as three dimensional objects. These works introduce unique visual rests for Lucey's patterns and text, but not without the absence visible labor through the construction of the sculpture itself.

Momentous Passage

March 19 – May 1, 2016

Marblehead Arts Association
8 Hooper St, Marblehead, MA 01945

Momentous Passage explores the work of three artists: Sam Donohoe, Morgan Dyer and Kevin Lucey. Recent graduates of Montserrat College of Art, these artists represent a new generation of artists under 30 who are responding to a world of ever-changing digital innovation that seems to be developing with astonishing speed. Donohoe, Dyer and Lucey’s work is demonstrative of their considered reactions to that world. Sometimes abstract and other times loosely representative of the idea or subject matter being explored, it may seem as if their collection of paintings are disparate and disjointed in style. But closer examination reveals that these artists are connected by the common thread of producing nostalgic, dreamlike imagery that succinctly captures moments in time, through the subconscious and careful probing of memories. 

Constellations 

Jan 11 – Jan 29, 2016

301 Gallery
301 Cabot Street, Beverly, MA 01915

Curated by Stacy Thomas-Vickory ’91, Constellations is a large multi-disciplinary exhibition featuring over 30 works created by Montserrat Alumni.

Thomas-Vickory had the idea of using the concept of a constellation to symbolize the connections that the alumni have with one another. She described this as follows: “The Constellation is an emblem of the connections that we make between individuals even though we may be spread across a huge distance of place and time. The uniting thread is that they were all here at Montserrat, with a shared experience and that we’ve taken that experience with us into the broader world.” The Constellation theme also references the role that social media plays in our lives, be it strengthening connections or forging new ones, but also is a reminder that we not forget the defining moments that helped spark those connections.

Participating Montserrat Alumni: Christine Bobek ‘74, Carly Brasier ‘15, Elizabeth Breder ‘15, Peter Brefini ‘07, Kathryn Brown ‘12, Devon Clapp ‘06, Alexandra Comfort ‘13, Dan DeRosato ‘14, Sarah Dineen ‘97, Richard Dolan ‘09, Corinne D’Orsi ‘15, Kevin Duffy ‘77, David Ferreira ‘98, Yetti Frenkel ‘82, Omer Gagnon ‘81, Albert Gray ‘08, Leonard Greco ‘03, Nathan Hayward ‘06,Rachel Hegburg Petruccillo ‘00, Deanne Jacome ‘15, Nicole Kircher ‘01, Mark Lies ‘03, Kevin Lucey ‘15, Tom Maio ‘13, Brett Mason ‘12, Sarah LL Milton ‘03, Kalimah Muhammad ‘11, Kevin Quinn ‘11, Suzanne Papin ‘00, Richard Pawlak ‘81, Alyssa Petit ‘15, Janet Souza ‘01, Christopher Stepler ‘09, Karen Tusinski ‘98, Stephanie Visciglia ‘15, Cory Wasnewsky ‘14, David Watson ‘07, Allison White ‘08, Amanda Woronecki ‘12, and Timothy Zerci ‘09.

Hive

Dec 12, 2015 – Jan 30, 2016

Mingo Gallery & Custom Framing
284 Cabot St, Beverly, Massachusetts 01915

Featured Artists- Corey Wasnewsky (Three Cheers Press), Chelsea Granger, Eben Kling, Maura O'connor, Morgan Dyer, Alyssa Watters, Emily Pardoe, Sam Donohoe, Aubrey Gauthier, Andy Curlowe, Anthony Falcetta, Marisa Rasum, Adria Sutter, Michelle Pardal, George Frary III, Sean Greene, Jani Zubkovs, Brian Maryansky, Kevin Lucey, Taylor Clough, Andrew Houle, Justin Durand, Jenni Sussman, Joe Lovasco, Joe Banda, Zachary Naylor, Mary O'Malley, Margaret Chiarelli, Michael Gundlach, Steve Zittel, Brett Mason, Jake Cassavoy, Alex Comfort

No Shake, Not Here

June  8 – June 12, 2015

Montserrat College of Art
23 Essex Street, Beverly, MA 01915