Aqua Art-Miami, Dec. 2 - 6, 1530 Collins Ave. Miami Beach

If you are in Miami this week please visit us at Aqua, room #112. Contact me for access to the fair.

Cara Enteles, Mirrors in the Garden, Opening Saturday, Nov. 14th, 5- 7 p.m.

Cara Enteles, Gone Wild, Oil on acrylic panel, 48” x 43"

Sara Nightingale Gallery is pleased to present Cara Enteles, Mirrors in the Garden, opening Saturday, November 14th, from 5 - 7 p.m.

In this selection of recent paintings Cara Enteles explores the impossibility of symmetry, order and exactness in nature. Drawing from Shakespeare’s line in Hamlet, “art holds a mirror up to nature”, she seeks to illustrate the dichotomy between organic, natural growth and the human gardener's attempt to control it. An avid gardener herself, Enteles splits her time between New York City and a home in the Catskills where access to the surrounding wilderness informs her work.

Enteles has long been addressing environmental issues in her work - oil spills, colony collapse disorder, and fracking are some examples - and her paintings allude to circumstances in which human activity threatens nature. Yet the work is neither sententious nor moralistic. In fact, the casual observer will find a collection of beautiful paintings of plants and animals, albeit with an unusual sheen in the surrounding water or an emphasis on “alternative pollinators” should the honey bees become extinct.

Because she paints on industrial supports, aluminum sheets and layers of plexiglas often bolted to the wall, Enteles’ work contains an inherent tension between the organic subject matter depicted and the materials with which they are constructed. Birds, butterflies, bees and flowers set against a backdrop of reflective plexiglas literally hold a mirror up to nature, while gold-toned plexiglas backings on her bee paintings evoke pollen. The transparency that plexiglas affords provides a means for three-dimensional representation - Enteles paints on both sides of the plexiglas - further reinforcing the realistic and imperative nature of her concerns, while also acknowledging the implicit contradiction that plexiglas is itself a man-made, petroleum based product.

Enteles received her BFA from Parsons School of Design. She exhibits internationally and her work is held in private and public collections including Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Microsoft and WilmerHale. Her work has been shown at Wave Hill, The HVCCA and The Islip Art Museum. This will be her third solo exhibition at the gallery.

The exhibition will run through December 14th.

For information or more images contact Sara Nightingale at 631-793-2256

Stephanie Brody-Lederman, Out Gallivanting, Opens Saturday, Nov. 14th, 5 - 7 p.m.

Sara Nightingale Gallery and guest curator Karyn Mannix are pleased to present Stephanie Brody-Lederman, Out Gallivanting, opening Saturday, November 14th from 5 - 7 p.m.

Stephanie Brody-Lederman’s paintings and mixed media works combine her observations and memories of visual occurrences with text gleaned from conversation, poetry and other sources. The works depict seemingly quotidian experiences and impressions of everyday life, and, indeed, their inspiration derives from simple objects or events such as a recollection of a woman’s scarf, a label on a can in a grocery store, or snippets of overheard conversations. Yet Brody-Lederman’s personal narratives are imbued with emotionally charged undertones that generate “impressionistic portraits of uncertain psychic atmospheres”*. It is this ambient concern for the mysteries of human nature and affairs of the heart that lends a universal context to the work.

It has been said that no two people can truly share a memory, even if the actual experience is shared, because each person forms his or her own version of what actually transpired. Likewise, an individual may have several versions of a private memory, and these can change and evolve over time. In theory, this feature of the human experience seems alienating, but it gives life to Brody-Lederman’s work as each viewer projects his or her own memories and emotions onto the canvasses, engaging in a dialogue with the artist’s experiences as well as their own.

Stephanie Brody-Lederman has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards and has exhibited internationally at galleries and museums, including OK Harris, Musee Bourdelle in Paris, The Museum of Modern Art, NY and The Cooper Hewitt. Her work is held in public collections such as Tate London, The Brooklyn Museum and MoMa, NY.

There will be an opening reception at Guild Hall in East Hampton for her solo exhibition, Dancing with Truffaut, on Saturday, October 24th, 4 - 6 p.m. The exhibition will run through Jan. 3rd.

On Saturday, Nov. 14th Brody-Lederman will give a talk about her work at Guild Hall, East Hampton at 11:30 a.m.

For more information and images contact Sara Nightingale (631)-793-2256 sara@saranightingale.com or Karyn Mannix (516) 318-0000 karynmannix@optonline.net.

*Edward M. Gomez, Art & Antiques, September 2012

image: Stephanie Brody-Lederman, In Perfect Bloom, oil and acrylic on canvas, 48" x 48"

Selected works from True Confections, Monica Banks and Christa Maiwald

                                          email sara@saranighitngale.com for more details

True Confections Opens Thursday, Aug. 6th, 6 - 8 p.m.

Sara Nightingale Gallery is pleased to present True Confections, Monica Banks, Christa Maiwald opening Thursday, Aug. 6th from 6:00 - 8:00 p.m. The exhibition runs through Sept. 3rd.

True Confections is a multimedia exhibition featuring sculpture, installation, photography, embroidery, performance, and edible sculpture. As mothers who are responsible for nurturing others and maintaining domestic life, Christa Maiwald and Monica Banks explore the surreal and emotional aspects of feeding others, honoring occasions, and witnessing life's transitions inside and outside the home. The artists share an ethos in their separate practices which reflects Flaubert’s declaration that “We are bourgeois in our lives so we can take chances in our work."

Monica Banks’ sculptures of miniature porcelain figures—humans as well as bees, mice, birds and teacups—depict organic forms on the threshold between life and death or figures who are suffering. The tiny scale of the works acknowledges the larger universe we inhabit and brings history and world events into the present moment. In True Confections, Banks creates porcelain cakes and cake stands as pedestals for her sculptures. The cakes are an homage to her experiences, which include the joys and playfulness of domesticity as well as the cruelty of nature, the despair of loss. Other works included in the exhibition are her swings, "Abject Pottery", which are playground swings crafted to hold miniature distressed dinnerware, a tribute to the fleeting nature of childhood.

Christa Maiwald will exhibit work from her ongoing Landscape Cake Series, in which she bakes elaborate cakes, then photographs them in nature. She will also present a cake performance at the opening reception. These performances, now becoming a convention in her practice, investigate the ritual of sharing her freshly baked cakes/confections with strangers. They also explore themes of consumption, ephemerality and craft, as well as gender roles (baking has long been associated with women’s work—as has embroidery, the other medium that Maiwald pursues with prolific obsession). The act of an artist cutting up his or her work and disseminating it among a crowd is subversive, but also generous. Slices of cake are given for free to willing participants, bypassing the traditional monetary exchange and commercialism associated with the art world. The exhibition will also include work from Maiwald’s hand-embroidered Cat Series, in which cats and humans engage in activities ranging from the sweet to the feral.

Monica Banks was born in in New York City and lives and works in East Hampton NY. She has exhibited sculpture at White Box in New York City, The University Museum of Contemporary Art at U Mass Amherst, The Carriage House at the Islip Art Museum in Islip NY, the Catherine Konner Sculpture Park in West Nyack NY, The Fells in Newbury New Hampshire, The Center for Architecture in New York City, The Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington NY and other venues. She created "Faces: Times Square", a block-long sculpture which stood in Times Square from 1996-2009, for which she won an award from The Public Design Commission of the City of New York. Her permanent public works are located in the Bronx, Binghamton NY, and Charlotte NC. She has been exhibiting sculpture and doing site-specific installations since 1989.

After earning her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1973, Christa Maiwald moved to New York, where she established herself as a video artist with solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Anthology Film Archives, Holly Solomon Gallery, and Franklin Furnace, among others, and was included in the 1979 Whitney Biennial. After a detour into screenwriting, children’s book illustration, cooking school, restaurant work, and starting a family, she resumed her career as an artist with paintings, sculpture, installations, and, since 2000, hand embroidery and photography. In addition to a one-artist exhibition at Guild Hall in 2013, her embroideries and photographs have been shown in solo and group shows internationally, including at the Museum of Art and Design in New York City, Galerie Houg in Lyon, France, the Parrish Art Museum, the Heckscher Museum of Art, and galleries in New York and on the East End. She has lived in East Hampton full time since 1985.

For more information or images contact Sara Nightingale at sara@saranightingale.com

There will be an artists’ talk with coffee and confections in the gallery on Sunday, Aug. 16 at 11:00 am.

Images: Top: Monica Banks, Tribute, porcelain, 10 1/4" x 7" x 7"
Bottom: Christa Maiwald, Sky Cake (Angel Food), archival pigment print, 16" x 20", edition 5

Review of Reinventing the Helm in EH Star. Thank you, Jennifer Landes!

http://easthamptonstar.com/Arts/2/NIghtingale-Gallery-Reimagines-Marine-Art-Water-Mill

Reinventing the Helm closes Monday, Aug. 3rd

Sara Nightingale Gallery is pleased to present Reinventing the Helm, June 6th - Aug. 3rd.

The artists in this invitational group exhibition examine the genres of traditional maritime and marine art using ship portraiture, seascapes, novels, folklore and ancient myths about the sea as inspiration. The obvious and straightforward have been mostly, but not altogether, thwarted here in deference to an updated and contemporary view of all things nautical. One painting by Perry Burns, whose swerving lines suggest the surface of the sea, was literally turned on its side and renamed “Waterfall” - a good metaphor for what one can expect from the exhibition.

While not specifically divided into categories, the works address several themes such as “lost souls”, meteorological events, marine life, nautical terminology and even edible “fruits of the sea”.
Seagull sculptures by Rossa Cole, fabricated from the plastic six-pack holders that endanger marine life, hover over a large scale sculpture of a wooden boat’s ribs by Simone Douglas. Peter Buchman’s rubbings/ stencils of manhole covers juxtapose one from New Orleans with one from Santa Monica, implicitly reminding us of the potential impact of too much or too little water. Dalton Portella’s White Water super-imposes images of multiple storms in one composite photograph, yielding a surreal depiction of waves, clouds and sunlight which, according to one viewer, “looks almost biblical”. A lighthouse made of reclaimed lumber by David McQueen aims its beacon through a gallery window toward the ocean, its light a guide for someone trying to return.

The list of artists includes those with international representation and museum exhibition history, as well as emerging artists from Brooklyn, Wynwood, the West Coast and Ireland. One can expect a plethora of boats, ships, sharks, clouds and even a cake, as well as characters who may or may not be schooled in the art of helmsmanship.

Reinventing the Helm opens on Saturday, June 6th from 6:00 - 8:00 p.m. and runs through Aug. 3rd.