November 4, 2019 - January 4, 2020

In this collection, one sees the actions of sewing and painting, cutting with scissors or saw, breaking apart, attaching, positioning, repositioning, repetition, and mimicry.

"Cut and Gather" implies an action that results in collecting the pieces of a thing that has been cut. The cutting has occurred first, the gathering comes after. One can imagine the artists sweeping up the pieces from the floor and using as material these deliberate scraps. Gathering is also a way to assemble things, ideas, people, or thoughts. In painting, an artist assembles colors and forms; in sewing, to "gather" is a folding of the cloth to make a pleat.

Using textiles or wood, cutting with scissors or saw, both artists employ position and reposition, a process used in creating the work. This way of assembling also has a visual organization reminiscent of crazy quilting; while the work detours the category of craft, it embodies its methods and techniques. Whether incorporating found textiles or meticulously creating their own, the repositioning and repurposing remove the material's historical utility while maintaining its aura.

Sollenberger makes work that reflects her philosophical belief in the value of what we already have. She is the proprietor of this beloved bookstore – Paper Nautilus- that offers new and used books, and some vintage items that one could buy for the home, arranged in ways that value their purposefulness and inherent beauty of the design. In a split panel fabric collage "There and Here," Sollenberger highlights a found textile and its previous owner’s overzealous repair by centering it and making it the point of inspection. She plays off this repairer’s act of repetition with petal-like shapes cut out of cloth in the lower half. Two circles - one bright red opposite an old white, locate these different efforts.

In "Hanger-on," Lewis also shows us two sections, each different sizes of wood, stacked one above the other. A patchwork of squares is painted on one and elongated ovals on the other. The painted ovals in shades of brown are reminiscent of old braided rugs made from repurposed cloth. She shows us the cut wood's messy sides and does not center the designs, giving the impression of being cut out of larger compositions, which she has done in other work. In this case, it intends to appear accidental, which makes this an interesting piece to study. The viewer will not see that there are old paintings on the backsides, or quick sketches in pencil, discarded but repurposed for new ideas on the front.

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Artist Bios

Richmond Lewis holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Her awards include the Florence Leif Prize for painting from RISD and a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship. Her longtime fascination with painting history has led her to study techniques such as traditional oil glaze painting, Tibetan thangka painting, Russian icon painting in egg tempera, and Japanese woodblock printmaking.

Her work has been exhibited at The Drawing Center (NY), Anne Plumb Gallery (NY), Avenue B Gallery (NY), Rutgers University (NJ), Massachusetts College of Art, Adelphi University (NY), and Periphery Space (RI).

Statement:

I made these painted constructions after a decade of working on large- scale egg tempera paintings. The beautiful surface and depth of egg tempera took months to achieve, and the often unforgiving nature of the medium made me want to “relax” and paint in the simplest, most malleable, least precious way I could think of. Scrap wood became my "paper" so I could "draw with paint" in a matter-of-fact, direct way. The physicality of wood and ease of editing through cutting, repositioning, mixing, and matching appealed to me. Throughout the process, a major change could happen with the cut of a saw and a dab of glue.

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Kristin Sollenberger moved to Providence in 1987 to attend Rhode Island School of Design. She graduated with honors in 1990 from the painting department. During her time at RISD, she became interested in using alternative materials in her work. First attempts attached objects to the canvas. The objects, manipulated from scraps, sometimes painted, however, soon replaced the canvas. Since then Sollenberger's work has been two and three-dimensional, both constructed from found materials. Obsessed with somehow preserving the broken, torn, and obsolete, Sollenberger imagines new purposes and pursues new plans for bridging the gaps. Her means to this end include the stitch, the hammer, several saws, ample whitewash, and memory.

Since 1996 Sollenberger has owned and operated Paper Nautilus (formerly Myopic Books), a secondhand bookshop in Wayland Square on the East Side of Providence. She currently lives with her husband, fellow artist Daniel Stupar, and daughter in South Kingstown, Rhode Island.

Statement:

Senseless scraps gather, nudged into place by invisible tides.

Award ribbons from past successes,

an old umbrella handed down,

faded cloth flowers,

a stained napkin,

ticking from an old pillowcase,

a handkerchief…

Their connections fade. I attempt to bring order to the scraps and in the process, to my thoughts. The ordering is, however, a fiction and only one of many possible outcomes. But in art and life order is a reassuring story and rebuttal of the constancy of ambiguity.