past shows

In the spirit of being here now, Fall 07 features three artists - Susan Aaron, Tim Barner and Rachel Mello - whose aesthetic philosophies have developed through career changes, experimentation and chance.

Susan Aaron set out to be an artist who would methodically plan drawings in her mind before committing them to paper. The results were frustration and a growing number of doodles and freeform experiments she had made to keep herself from putting down her pen and brush altogether. To Aaron's surprise in these diversions she found appealing, spontaneous forms and an unselfconscious relationship between them and their paper boundaries. This marked the beginning of Aaron as an explorer, which is well documented in her collection of drawings and watercolors included in Fall 07.

Tim Barner is a landscape architect whose abstract paintings are unbounded by the representational precision required by his day job. In Fall 07, Barner presents large and small oil paintings that document where he has traveled as an artist over the past two years. Opting primarily for the quickness of a palette knife, but not averse to using sticks, flower buds or his fingers as tools, Barner sometimes thinly stains his canvases and scratches images into them; other times he layers deep color fields that evoke images of the natural world without actually depicting them. At times reading like topographical maps in their texture, these paintings quite literally contain the world that continues to inspire Barner.

Rachel E. Mello began her artistic career as a set designer who cut and painted materials to create new worlds. She adapts this craft as a painter by building images onto surfaces that have been cut and shaped into silhouettes. The results are paintings in which space is physically real and the form of missing objects is emphasized. Recently Mello took her aesthetic explorations into the world of printmaking by using her cut canvases as ink surfaces. In the print Static Mirror II a woman enters a composition in which a man bends over groceries on his front porch. Printed in a single tone, the composition in one coherent silhouette is the mirror opposite of its parent painting, where solid objects are voids and space finds solidity.