August 6-25, 2010. Reception Friday August 6, 7-10 PM. PETER ACHESON was born Washington, D.C., and in lives Ghent, NY. Acheson received his BFA from Yale University. Acheson’s paintings are a striking and refreshingly strange contrast to the slick Chelsea commodities we can become accustomed to. He rejects signature image and style for the pursuit of a level of mind deeper than language, a place where image and energy cannot be distinguished, where the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of painting are unified. What elevates Acheson’s paintings into their singularity is his ability to concentrate on perception while the paint is applied both directly and matter-of-factly. His visual language is familiar and remote, individual and nameless. Acheson works in a tradition that was explored by the Abstract Expressionists and such later figures as Forrest Bess. He has shown at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York City and his group exhibitions include a three-person show with Andrew Masullo and Chris Martin, and “Sense Ability,” curated by Cecily Kahn.
AMY ARBUS has published four books, including the award winning On the Street 1980-1990 and The Inconvenience of Being Born. The New Yorker called her most recent, The Fourth Wall, her masterpiece. Her photographs have appeared in over one hundred periodicals around the world, including New York Magazine, People, Dazed and Confused and The New York Times Magazine. She teaches portraiture at the International Center of Photography, Maine Media Workshops and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has had twenty-one solo exhibitions worldwide, and her photographs are a part of the collection of The New York Public Library and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. For this exhibition she will present new color photographs, part of her ongoing series, ‘Rites and Rituals,’ taken in 2009-10. The work is available to preview by contacting the gallery.
JEN BRADLEY use varied methods and mediums in her studio: printmaking, screen printing, oil paint, encaustic and drawing – with results that range in scale from very large to quite small. Although she continues her well known Gorilla Drawing Project at Boston’s Franklin Park Zoo, the work for this exhibition plays more broadly with the allegorical significance of her obsession with apes. In this series she pays homage to Gustave Courbet, a leader in the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. Bradley has created a new set of paintings that have a very beautiful painterly quality and Realist feel, while incorporating found pornography as a way of exploring the connection to Courbet and erotic images he painted; something she discovered and employed after she was well involved in making the work. The magazine paper is preserved and mounted on to board then many layers of image are applied using transparent glazes, oil paint, pigment, wax and screen print to create the final effect. As all these elements began to collide in the studio and became alive and visible in the work, she was forced to experiment with materials and technique, and how to manipulate the paint. As a result much of the work was executed at the point at which it could either fail or succeed completely; the dangerous and alive place of total commitment, risk and love.
Jen Bradley’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in the U.S and is in private collections both nationally and internationally. She received a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art in 1995. She has been awarded a C-Scape / National Seashore fellowship and a Margo Gelb Dune Shack Artist Residency. She is an establish member of the arts community in Provincetown and in Boston, Ma. where she currently works out of her studio.
ADAM DAVIES is a photographer whose work explores the edges of urban and rural landscapes. Using an 8 by 10 inch large-format camera to take color negatives that are then digitally scanned and printed, his working process bridges nineteenth century and contemporary methods. Adam has recently attended residences at Yaddo, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. He is currently a finalist for the 2010 Trawick Prize: Bethesda Contemporary Art Awards and has recently exhibited at Project Basho Photography Center, Westmoreland Museum of Art, and Hudson D. Walker Gallery in Provincetown. Adam has held teaching positions at Carnegie Mellon University, Robert Morris University, Harvard University, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Born in United Kingdom, Adam currently lives and works in Washington, DC.
A native of New York City, PAULA HORN KOTIS studied psychology at Hunter College, graduating in 1943. She learned photographic skills from her father in his Upper East Side portrait studio. Immersing herself in this work and eventually taking charge of the studio, Kotis began to produce and receive notice for her own pictures.
Ms. Kotis studied the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and others and commenced to produce a powerful body of photographs taken in New York and throughout Europe. In 1948 she made a remarkable series of images documenting the journey of Jewish Holocaust survivors for displaced persons camps near Famagusta, Cyprus to the port of Haifa in northern Israel.
Ms. Kotis moved to Greenwich Village in the early 1950′s where her friends were actors, musicians, artists and writers. She collaborated on projects with the novelist James Baldwin and the poet Frank O’Hara, and photographed jazz greats including Sarah Vaughan and Charlie Parker. Her work has appeared in Vogue, Ebony, Arts, Evergreen Review and U.S. Camera.
Paula Horn Kotis lives in New York City and Wellfleet, Massachusetts.
The Schoolhouse Gallery is located at 494 Commercial Street in the heart of Provincetown¹s East End Gallery District.