HUTSON GALLERY July 27,2012

above:  Blue Study Laffer; Finding  Witkowski

When: July 27 – August 9, 2012

Gallery hours: Daily

Reception: Friday, July 27, 2012 7:00 – 9:00 pm

Contact: Mary Feeley, Director

Hutson Gallery, 508-487-0915

hutsongallery@gmail.com

Hutson Gallery is pleased to announce the fourth exhibition in our fifth season featuring a duo show with recent paintings by Erik Laffer and Luanne E Witkowski.

Thirty-year-old Erik Laffer continues to amaze viewer with the colors and designs in oil on canvas. Erik Laffer, the seventh of eight children, was born in Smithtown, New York, in 1982. At the age of three, his family moved to a small town in upstate New York, where he lived until he was 14. The family moved again, to Delmar, a suburb of Albany, New York, and Erik has been moving ever since.

“Given my nomadic background, it’s almost natural that I’ve come to express myself—rather look to shape my identity and better understand myself—in maps. While my early landscapes and figurative works were influenced by the rural environment I grew up in, as well as the feelings of isolation I felt as a child with a learning disability, the representational abstracts that make up my current Cartography Series are not so much a study of emotion, as my earliest works were, but more of a logical and experimental exploration of where I’ve been, where I am now, and where I hope to be tomorrow.”

“My goal with the Cartography paintings is to, as J.B. Harley writes, “redescribe the world,” or at least the small world of Erik Laffer. And just as there is a language of map making, there is style and body of symbols in my paintings that define the landscape of each work and identify my struggle to understand self, family, home, and culture: boats, clocks, buildings, bridges, anatomy, arrows, and, among many others, lines, color, and texture.”

 

Luanne Witkowski’s art is strongly influenced by the shore and woodlands of outer Cape Cod, Maine, and Nova Scotia. Her ‘research sketchbook’ consists of documentary photography and video of environmental installations Luanne creates as references for her mixed and multi-media works in painting, photography, and video projection. Prismatic refraction, reflection, projection and mirroring/doubling are all used as strategies for creating a perceptual and spiritual relationship with Place as locus for recognition of and solace for the self. This traditional American approach to the identification of the individual with landscape is enlarged by a desire to discover and contact the particular indwelling essence or energy of a particular place. The energy of place is directly expressed in living ecosystems of plants and animals. Growth and interdependent activity are found in an infinite variety. The fragile systems of beauty and power that exist in the natural world are accessible through the creative process of perception and felt by us when we allow ourselves to relax and use our five senses.

Working intuitively to create abstract contemplative pieces that are rooted in and extracted from landscape and experience, Luanne’s work is process-driven, using traditional and nontraditional materials. Luanne incorporates the very elements that influence and inspire –clay, pigment, chemistry, technology– engaging her to embrace the impact, to understand, to mingle the place in the piece and piece in the place.

Luanne E Witkowski is a studio and environmental installation artist and consultant

(Boston, Wellfleet & Provincetown, MA) with works in collections throughout the United

States and abroad. She offers Basic Training Workshops for Artists and Creative People publicly and produced large scale environmental installations in Wellfleet & Provincetown MA; Deer Isle, ME; and Ingonish, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Luanne is the Communication Design Studio Manager at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, a faculty member of the Critical & Creative Thinking (CCT) graduate program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and an internet entrepreneur and business owner. The artist received a BFA from MassArt and an MA from the University ofMassachusetts. In 2010 she received a Commonwealth of Massachusetts Lifetime of Arts and Commercial Achievement Recognition.