Abstract Paintings Also On View—

Fenn Gallery First CT Venue For Brooklyn Collage Artist

WOODBURY —  Fenn Gallery will celebrate the close of its third season with an exhibition featuring abstract painter Susan Monserud of Washington, Conn., and collage artist Erica Harris of Brooklyn, N.Y.

The show will run from December 13 to January 27. The public is invited to the opening reception planned on Saturday, December 15, from 4 to 6 pm.

Susan Monserud’s work reflects the process of abstraction by recalling, reinterpreting and re-creating natural forms. Elements of the landscape such as topography, grasses, moss, trees, or vines are reduced to their essential structures and rhythms and serve as points of departure. Simplified aspects of the natural world are explored through the interplay of line, color and brushwork/mark-making as well as through the patterns found in repetition.

Ms Monserud has a master of architecture degree from N.C. State University School of Design, Raleigh, N.C.; a certificate from the National School for Art and Education, Notodden, Norway; and a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Minnesota. She has been a visiting drawing critic at the Yale School of Architecture, and is presently a producer for a documentary film, Gramercy Stories.

Collage artist Erica Harris derives her materials and inspiration from the cultural artifacts of both the city in which she lives, as well as her extensive travel to South America and southeast Asia. Her experiences in the streets, neighborhoods and marketplaces of her travels are incorporated into the narratives of her art: people carrying towers of goods on their heads, toys constructed from tin cans and old bottles, houses and bird-feeders made of corroding metal bomb carcasses.

Having spent time in war-torn and impoverished countries, Ms Harris examines how everyday experiences and ordinary objects can relate to both destruction and survival. Combining discarded materials to make these narratives, such as a schoolgirl with a dress quilted from tea bags, waves of the ocean made from lines of a Thai newspaper, or a Cambodian woman with a crushed eggshell shawl, is like creating a shrine, she has said, or providing a sanctuary for people, places and objects that need mending.

Fenn Gallery is at 345 Main Street South (Route 6) in Woodbury; telephone 203-263-3449 or visit FennGallery.com. Winter hours are Thursday through Sunday, noon to 5 pm.