Jennifer Goldfinger, Ellen LeBow & Julie Levesque Show Opens
The Rice Polak Gallery is excited to announce our forth feature exhibition of the 2024 season. We will be exhibiting the work of Jennifer Goldfinger, Ellen LeBow & Julie Levesque.
The show previews on Thursday August 15th and runs through Wednesday August 28th.. The Opening Reception is on Friday August 16 beginning at 7pm. Please join us at the gallery and meet all of the artists!
JENNIFER GOLDFINGER
Jennifer Goldfinger is a painter and fine artist as well as a children’s book author and illustrator. Jennifer works with wax, oil stick and photographs as well as other ingredients to juxtapose and present contemporary worlds with times and forms of the past. By using organic images and figures with contrast scratching, transfers and other building blocks, she energizes the figures and illustrates narrative elements such as frustration, solitary peace or active play. In the solitary figures Jennifer imagines the inner thoughts of the characters and pulls the story out with playful collage.
“The interaction between found antique images and my own photography bring forward modern design balanced with nostalgic subject matter,” said artist Jennifer Goldfinger. “Inspired by their posture and expressions, I layer encaustic paint and abstract drawing with other more traditional mediums combined with found vintage social artifacts like letters and yearbook messages. The accessibility and playfulness reflect my work in children’s literature as an imagined context unfolds into a story of the viewer’s own.”
ELLEN LEBOW
“Bestiary” is Ellen LeBow’s first chapter in an ongoing series of low relief sculpture, loosely inspired by animals depicted in medieval illuminated manuscripts and the feline deities Bastet and Sekhmet of Egyptian mythology.
“Since the beginning of human awareness cultures worldwide have endowed, or burdened, nature’s animals with the powers of archetypal, spiritual messengers. The ancient bestiary books of Europe, India and the Middle East were considered “scientific” catalogs of animals familiar, legendary and phantasmagoric while translating them into allegorical embodiments of human virtue and vice.
Composing these emotionally charged “entanglements” with everyday materials like clays and plaster compounds allows me a range of expressive textural choices from raw to refined, held together by line and volume, light and shadow.
JULIE LEVESQUE
Sculptor and installation artist Julie Levesque continues to attract critical acclaim for her work. “Dividing Lines”, explores the dual nature of boundaries in both two and three dimensions.
In her three-dimensional wall sculptures entitled Offshoots, organic forms evolve on opposite sides of a central horizontal plane or contain artificial delineations that reference maps. High contrast black and white photographic, Boundries, depict either energetic coils of fencing wire or spare strands that open the spatial plane to evoke landscapes.
“I find the discovery inherent in new materials and processes incredibly inspiring as I try to connect unusual media to a monochromatic physical form.”
The gallery is now open daily, Thursday, Friday & Saturday evenings, online and of course by appointment. Please visit our website where you now purchase artwork directly online. And if you are in town this Friday please stop by the gallery and experience this wonderful show in person.
