WNY Gallery/Artists Guide Available

Thanks to some intrepid artists collectively known as "Artists in Buffalo," there's a terrific FREE guide to the galleries and artists who call the Buffalo-Niagara region home. The full color booklet printed on nice quality glossy paper proves (again!) why Buffalo is the #1 art city in the country (according to us, of course, and American Style Magazine). The Kenan Center is always proud to be counted among the fabulous venues that showcase our regional artists, and help keep them here and thriving through sales of their work. You can pick up the guide at the Kenan Center as well as at local tourism centers and many art and cultural venues around town. Artists in Buffalo also has a website--http://www.artistsinbuffalo.org/--where you can find a directory of artists and their studios. Go see some art today!

The Show Opens!

Feasting Eyes opened on Friday (Aug 29) on a perfectly beautiful evening when summer finally graced our region. The exhibit brought many of our friends from across the county border including a number of artists--both those in the show and those who wanted to come out and support their colleagues. Curator Jerry Mead even brought along packages of Skittles for artist James Paulsen to sign. A public tour with Mead takes place Saturday, Sept. 20 at 2:30pm and it promises to be fascinating. You really want to get the low-down on the video inside the refrigerator and what the story is behind Courtney Grim's 6 foot long photo of bacon. And it's free--come and join us!

Media on The Exhibit

Thanks to Ed Adamczyk for his story ART: Kenan Center Gets Hungry in Night & Day, the entertainment section of the Niagara County newspapers, August 28, 2008.

"You don’t go far without thinking about food.

There’s Wegmans, Emeril on television, backyard tomatoes, a good glass of wine, McDonalds. Baby food, Snickers and fried zucchini. The perfectly-set dinner table and the compost heap. By definition, it’s a universal topic.

Enter the artists whose work appears in “Feasting Eyes: Artists Take on Food,” an exhibit beginning today at the Kenan Center in Lockport."

Twenty-three local artists, including many of the foremost names in Western New York’s orbit of painting, photography, video and sculpture, take on the issue of food in a remarkable presentation of 56 works that offers commentary on the way we relate to our gardens, our tables and all the stuff we consider sustenance (including Skittles and licorice). Far beyond still-life bowls of just-so arranged fruit, the Kenan Center has mounted a new look at a compelling subject and its relationship to 21st-century life." Read the complete story.

Also, Colin Dabkowski, arts writer for The Buffalo News, did a great story for the August 29 issue of GUSTO, Artists share their culinary ruminations at Kenan Center.

"From the primitive cave drawings of Lascaux, France, to the cubist still-life paintings of Picasso and Braque, artists have been sapping inspiration from food since time immemorial.

The same goes for artists in Buffalo, who, every 15 years or so, converge to present their ever-evolving representations of food as artistic fuel. " Read the complete story.

Feasting Eyes: A Taste of What's in the Show

Shown here are representative pieces from the exhibit Feasting Eyes: Artists Take on Food, August 29-October 5. Of course, seeing the exhibit in person will give you an entirely different perspective,i.e., Courtney Grim's works are significantly larger in scale, and you can only enjoy Stefani Bardin's videos by coming to the gallery. Great party to enjoy on Friday evening so make a trek out to Lockport and see the show!

Soccer Players Shine During Annual Picnic

It was a great day for families to enjoy the summer sunshine on August 23 for the annual Chiavetta's Chicken BBQ and Picnic. Enjoy the photos!

Anatomy of An Exhibit, Part III: Making Sense of It

It's installation week for the Feasting Eyes exhibit. Our gallery space is challenging because it's a former residence and that means grouping works into some semblance of relationship and meaning. Curator Jerry Mead mulled over the possibilities and came up with a placement that has cohesiveness. As you enter the main doors, you're immediately confronted by a talking refrigerator that houses a video inside, two oversized paintings featuring Skittles packages and a trio of plastic containers on a pedestal. What connects them is the theme of packaging and what we know (and don't know) about what's in food. Step into the Living Room and the works are more recognizable--food in it's natural state, sans processing and additives. The Dining Room--the place next to the kitchen most associated with the ritual of eating--features traditional still lifes deftly and intricately painted by three local artists who, by anyone's estimation, are masters of the technique--John Yerger, Thomas Kegler and Coni Mennici. Here, food is glorified, even metaphorical. If you visit on Friday night when the exhibit opens, you'll spend a lot of time here as it's also where the food and wine are served.

The exhibit continues on the second floor where your first sight as you come up the winding staircase is of a larger-than-life photo of bacon slices by Courtney Grim. This space is given over to photographic imagery in which the artists play with scale, color and materials, using food as a subject. Take a left into the first of three bedrooms where you'll find another collection of photos that capture food's natural life cycle from farm to edible product to decay. Mixed media and assemblages are just across the hall, and are characterized by a sense of whimsy and a little ecopolitics. Finally, the last room holds some of the most thought-provoking pieces--a dining table of mixed parts and pieces, stark photos of fruit bearing the scars of surgical alteration, humorous takes on the ubiquitous take-out container, and another video focusing on what people eat.

Truly a buffet of visual intrigue.....come and see it! Feasting Eyes is on through October 5th.

Anatomy of an Exhibit, Part II

How the curator organizes a show and the common threads that unite the pieces are a thought process I doubt many gallery visitors get to glimpse. The curator's introduction tends to be the key illuminator, and I hope people take the time to read what a curator states about an exhibition as a prelude to seeing the work. A work taken out of context can be perplexing. You wonder what the artist is trying to say, or at worst, what was the curator thinking when they chose that piece? It would be like stepping mid-way into a movie and trying to understand why the characters all hated each other. So, following, is the intoduction to Feasting Eyes: Artists Take On Food by Gerald Mead: (then I strongly suggest you come and see the show so that the words take on meaning)

"The centuries spanning relationship between food and art has yielded artworks ranging from exquisitely rendered still lifes to conceptual works that address the multifarious roles that food and food products play in our lives. This exhibition consists of work by 23 established and emerging artists working in all media who have used food as reference in their artistic practice.

There are a number of artists in Western New York whose names have become synonymous with food themed work. These include photographer Biff Henrich who has used images of food and its consumption in various series over the years, Marion Faller, well known for her photo documents of cultural food displays, and A. J. Fries, widely recognized for his pop art inspired, vibrant paintings of pies and cakes. Fruit and vegetable use in the genre of still life is well represented through the exacting oil paintings of Thomas Kegler and John Yerger and luminous watercolors by Rita Argen Auerbach and Norine Spurling. The plastic fruit assemblages of Doreen DeBoth and whimsical ceramic works by Katherine Gullo share with Jackie Felix’s bold acrylic paintings an idiosyncratic, playful sensibility. In a related vein, Courtney Grim and James Paulsen use exaggerated scale to explore the commodification of food products. Michael Morgulis's digital scans of familiar (and some unfamiliar) foods, Priscilla Bowen’s atmospherically rendered drawings of root vegetables, Nancy Parisi’s artfully composed photographs and the delicate embroidered fiber “lettuce” sculptures by Barbara Murak all celebrate the textural beauty inherent in foods we often use in meal preparation. John Pfahl, through his iconic images of the compost pile, demonstrates that even the remnants of that preparation can be highly aesthetic.

Food's ability to function as a means of portraiture is a theme addressed in various ways by Coni Minneci, Kevin Charles Kline and Stefani Bardin. Minneci and Kline each use a single fruit as a “model.” Minneci’s pears in her A to Z Women Artists Series each represent the work/life of a single woman artist and Kline’s apples comment on human body image obsessions and related procedures such as abdominoplasty. Bardin’s “you are what you eat” thesis is expressed through her video portraits of individuals via the contents of their refrigerators, aptly projected from within an actual refrigerator.

Finally, Christy Rupp’s fictitious containers for genetically altered foods and Christopher Stangler’s fish paintings/assemblages both deal with serious environmental issues affecting what we eat, and sculptor Ryan Legassicke’s hybridized dining table (absent food) intersects the natural with the artificial and calls to mind the social aspects of food consumption.

Food is ubiquitous and contemporary artists continue to depict, define and interpret its nature and meaning. As a result, they offer unique commentaries on our visual and physical relationship with something we quite literally need to survive. "--Gerald Mead