Continuum

On view January 20 - March 15, 2024

Sat 1/20, 4-6 pm: Opening reception
Sat 2/10, 4-6 pm: Train of Thought - a conversation with the artists
Sat 3/2, 4-6 pm: Outside|In - artist talk with muralist Alex Cook

13FOREST Gallery is pleased to present Continuum, featuring new work from Coco Berkman, Joe Keinberger, Lindsey Kocur, Tanya Hayes Lee, Kenji Nakayama, Shannon Slattery and Dorothea Van Camp.

Composing a painting that consists of multiples, such as a diptych, presents a unique set of challenges for an artist. Unlike other works in series, paintings in a diptych must be in direct conversation with each other to function as a single piece of art. While the artist must consider what the work communicates as a whole, it is equally important that the component paintings present a strong individual identity. If the paintings contain a narrative, how is it divided over multiple canvases? If the work is abstract, what visual components are carried through each part of the work to make a coherent ensemble?

Seven artists take these questions head-on in our exhibition Continuum. The show's concept and title were inspired by Lindsey Kocur’s pentaptych of the same name. In it, Kocur tasked herself with creating a painting that flowed continuously across five panels. Though largely abstract, the paintings contain small representational details like architectural elements and tufts of grass that are carried through the swirling washes of color in each piece. Sinuous lines of negative space connect the panels to each other, creating one unified work of art. The artists in Continuum bring their own perspectives to the format of multi-part work, using fragmentation to tell a story, convey a vast seascape, or examine the components that form the letters of our alphabet. Playing with scale, orientation and the number of segments, the artists of Continuum demonstrate the exciting possibilities of working in multiples.

Preview Continuum

About the Artists

Gloucester artist and printmaker Coco Berkman utilizes her love of drawing and a literary inspired imagination along with Japanese carving tools, luxurious oil-based inks and beautiful cotton rag papers to create images that inspire a particular emotional effect. She has studied at several printmaking studios throughout the United States and Ireland.

Born in New York in 1974, Joe Keinberger moved to Massachusetts where he grew up in the one-and-a-half horse town of Hingham, before moving to Boston to attend Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He now lives in Somerville where he paints and illustrates out of his hidden studio deep below the earth's crust. His paintings are kind of strange, but kind of humorous, too.

Lindsey Kocur holds a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Kocur’s art practice centers on observing characteristics of the natural and built environments and translating them into inventive spaces through mixed media paintings, drawings and installations. The resulting images present unattainable worlds, devoid of the human figure, combined with moments inspired by meaningful places.

Tanya Hayes Lee is a visual artist who works primarily in oil in a modern abstract impressionist style. Her paintings convey the sublime in nature and are visual metaphors for our relationships to the world and to each other. Lee studied studio art at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Scottsdale Artist School, and Northern Arizona University. Lee lives and works in Cambridge.

Kenji Nakayama was born in Tomokomai, Japan in 1979. A mechanical engineer by education, Nakayama made a significant life change in 2005 with a move to Boston, Massachusetts to study traditional sign painting. Nakayama's diverse practice ranges from careful pinstriping and gilded lettering to multi-layered stencil paintings; and from abstract representations of Buddhist traditional beliefs to constructions of words and letters stripped down to their essential physical forms. Nakayama's work has been shown internationally and acquired by the collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York.

Shannon Slattery received her Bachelor of Science in Studio Art from Skidmore College and a Master of Science in Art Education from Massachusetts College of Art. She is currently a high school art teacher in Newton. Slattery uses drawing and painting, color, line, and texture as the means to describe what she sees and how she connects to her environment.

Dorothea Van Camp has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design, and attended the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning for graduate studies in printmaking. She has shown extensively in the northeast, and most recently her work was included in The Boston Printmakers North American Biennial. Van Camp uses intricate line work to reconcile an attraction to the etched or engraved line of printmaking, old master drawings, and moody chiaroscuro with our own era.