Reception At Aldrich Museum Celebrates The Opening Of Three New Exhibitions

By Anne Kugielsky

RIDGEFIELD — The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum has influenced many young artists over the years, through both education programs and direct experience of art. The exhibition “Homecoming” was conceived to champion the work of three such artists — Sarah Bostwick, Damian Loeb, and Doug Wada — who grew up in Ridgefield and came home to the town and the institution that played such formative roles in their lives.

With an opening reception on Sunday, March 26, the three artists also came together with another influence on all of them: their high school art teacher, Adam Salvo.

“He’s the only art teacher I ever had, and he made a huge impression on me,” said Mr Loeb as the three artists talked with their former teacher. The exhibition will be on view through August 6 at the museum, 258 Main Street (Route 35).

 Also honored at the March 26 opening were two additional installations: “Full Stop” by Tom Burckhardt, a full-scale replica of the quintessential artist’s studio made entirely of cardboard and black paint, and Mary Temple’s “Extended Afternoon,” a three-phase installation that was begun in October 2005, and will be on view through the beginning of August. The public reception marked the completion of phase three.

 “Homecoming” presents Sarah Bostwick’s elegant three-dimensional drawings that reference architectural and landscape space. Ms Bostwick, who graduated from Ridgefield High School in 1997, works primarily in Hydrocal, a hard, plasterlike material casting crisp, minimalist reliefs that combine the precision of architectural drafting with a sense of geometrical abstraction and are mounted seemingly within the walls of the gallery.

Damien Loeb, who worked as a guard at The Aldrich in the late 1980s while he was in high school, has become widely known for his realist paintings that appropriate images from both popular culture and high art. He is showing collages, photographs, and paintings tracing the trajectory of his work from the 1990s to the present. His paintings deal provocatively with both our collective visual memory of familiar images and the way the media constantly recycles and recasts well-known images to serve different ends.

Doug Wada left Ridgefield in 1984 to attend the School of Visual Art in New York. He has become recognized for paintings that depict common, everyday objects on a one-to-one scale. In “Homecoming,” Mr Wada is showing a new series of large paintings that depict head-on views of a Cadillac SUV against monochrome backgrounds of Washington, D.C.’s, familiar architecture.

Set on a long wall in the Aldrich’s large upstairs gallery, Mr Wada’s paintings reflect the familiar images of Washington’s most famous architecture within the windshield of the SUV.

Mary Temple’s three-phase installation is of an intense shaft of light that has made its way through the museum as late afternoon sun moves across a room. Her passages of light, however, are trompe l’oeil paintings of light falling across interior and exterior walls. Architecture and light play key roles in Ms Temple’s work, as she has traced “light” through the museum presenting painting an illusion in a credible but impossible situation.

 “Full Stop,” is a walk-through environment created by Tom Burckhardt for its premiere at Caren Golden Fine Art Gallery. To enter “Full Stop” is to enter the dilemma of a creative block — all the supplies yet none of the inspiration — it is both a playful and painful commentary of a perennial problem faced by all artists.

 

Already On View

In addition to the exhibitions that opened last weekend, The Aldrich already had three collections on view.

Through May 14, the photographer Catherine Opie is being celebrated with a presentation of two collections. The 2004 Larry Aldrich Award winner, Ms Opie is represented with “1999,” sweeping landscapes of her road trip across the country in the second half of 1999, while “In and Around Home” is a series of portraits of Ms Opie’s family and the neighborhood surrounding her home.

With “John Giglio: BlowHomes,” the museum continues its Main Street Sculpture Project. On view until May 31, this installation is an inflatable one-third scale replica of the Victorian house adjacent to the museum’s galleries — the original location of the Aldrich Museum galleries.

Finally, “Killamanta Kutimusaq (To The Moon and Back)” celebrates the memories of a 2003 excursion to South America and the relationship created between native Peruvians and the artist Jennifer Zackin. Works include “Hanaqpacha Intiq,” a hanging sculpture constructed out of a used military parachute covered with colorful woven pom poms based on the designs found in the Q’ero’s traditional hats.

The exhibition’s title piece, “Killamanta Kutimusaq,” is a freestanding sculpture that resembles both the Apollo space capsule and Apachetas, ritual stone piles built by both the Inca and the Q’ero to capture and focus natural energies. Ms Zackin’s collection is on view until June 18.

For more information, call 203-438-4519 or visit AldrichArt.org.