“I’ll Connect You Directly”: New Prints and Paintings by Zoárd Wells Tyeklár & C’naan Hamburger

 

October 3 - 11, 2014

Closing Reception: Saturday, October 11, 5-8 PM (Art Walk)

with reading by Sean Sawicki at 7pm

These prints by Zoárd Wells Tyeklár and paintings by C’naan Hamburger may seem worlds apart. Tyeklár’s relief prints are graphic, packed with figures on the edge of abstraction. Hamburger’s densely patterned and painted-over landscapes are delicate in comparison. And yet, the artists’ perspective is found so readily in this exhibition, so close to the surface. In this work, composition and construction are intimately linked to artistic intention.

Hamburger is a painter and former professional skateboarder whose landscapes echo the experience of skateboarding. Instead of offering an obvious entry point, Hamburger’s compositions invite the viewer to explore, sliding through her curving roads and colorful layers of overpainting.

Tyeklár’s prints reflect a disconnect and distance he sees in today’s personal relationships. This disconnect is mirrored in his printmaking process, where the image is reversed between the woodblock and the print, and also in the decoding required to interpret the symbols and imagery of each piece.

    –  Esther S White

Closing Reception photo by Zoárd Tyeklár

October 2014 Boston Compass

detail of Hamburger painting, photo by Zoárd Tyeklár

Sean Sawicki getting ready to read from Son Mountain and Other Poems, photo by Zoárd Tyeklár

Sean Sawicki reading from Son Mountain and Other Poems

Closing reception, photo by Zoárd Tyeklár

Zoárd Wells Tyeklár: Lately my work has been about the kind of disconnect that people worry about, the kind that over time causes people to fear one another.  With the great amount of effort and technologies put into creating numerous ways to keep people connected, I still feel like people barely know each other.  I think people prefer to remain vague and keep themselves at a distance even if this idea is generally, publicly frowned upon.  

But I think it's fine!  Hell, it makes sense.  It's kind of like a defense mechanism; get people comfortable, make them feel like they know you, while you don't really know yourself.  It's like a tombstone with just a surname on it.  It's like homonyms without enough context to even determine the appropriate language.

Anyway, I carve wood and make impressions with it.  Each impression is a mirror opposite from the one I drew into the wood.  It's this slight disconnect that allows me to see the image anew when I first pull the wet paper from the inked wood.  It's like discovering something you already knew, except, maybe, without feeling disappointed that you had to learn something twice to have it stick.

C'naan Hamburger is a former professional skateboarder, who won the Vans Triple Crown in 2000, and she studied and taught natural history, before becoming a painter. Her earlier passions and her love of art history have shaped Hamburger’s landscapes. This current series--both the drawings and the paintings--take structural cues from skateboarding by making compositions that do not direct the gaze of the viewer, but rather leave the eye to explore. In skateboarding, the instability of recognizable landscapes is fundamental, and Hamburger is deeply interested in the mind’s capacity to see things in many ways. Her love of the natural world, moreover, has led her to observe the patterned quality of landscapes--by observing, for example, that a tree or even a dandelion can be both unique and yet similar to myriad other trees or dandelions. This sort of combination of distinctiveness and repetition generates the patterns in landscapes. In pursuing this observation, her series draws on medieval illuminated manuscripts, Flemish landscape painting, the Nabis painters and Op art. 

Mentioned in the Hampshire Gazette on October 8, 2014