Providence, RI - Periphery Space @ Paper Nautilus is pleased to present Small Doses, artwork by fifteen artists with ties to Providence.

Small Doses will close out 2021 - a year of unpredictability but one of creative certainty and promise. This year of vaccines and boosters confirmed our commitment to each other, our collective well-being, and the beneficial importance of art.

Thank you for continuing to support Periphery Space and Paper Nautilus - we couldn't do this without you! We hope you'll take the time to visit the exhibit.

A big thank you to the artists in this show!

-Babs and Kristin

_________________________

The Artists and a short artist statement :

Mara Metcalf | About the Art

My pieces combine drawing and collage and are made with ink and acrylics on a material called Pellon. It’s a sheer cloth often used as interfacing between surfaces, but I love it for its floating and paper-like properties.

Many of the tools I use are a bit unusual. I have bamboo stakes from gardening, with brushes and pens attached to make a variety of strokes. And my sewing machine (from high school), is used as a way of "drawing" lines with stitches and collaging new forms.

With these fluid strategies, things easily get out of control. It is a dance between ideas and intuition; a back and forth between letting things happen and making them happen. All of these forces become pieced together in works that are both made and found.

Website

Instagram: @mara.metcalf

____________________________

Jacqueline Ott | About the Art

“Study for udo 05” is a preliminary work for a much larger painting. In the study, I’m working out the size of the grid, layering, brushstroke, and color.

Website

Instagram: @jac.que.line.ott

____________________________

Damon Campagna | About the Art

Nowadays we use digital fitness tracking devices to document our existence, breaking it down into discrete units of information, right? So, let’s say we consider mark-making one of the unique identifiers of the self, in the same sense as the heartbeat, blood pressure, running gait, glucose level, DNA, et cetera. I’m asking: if the mark could be reduced to metadata to be recorded and studied -- what would this reveal? Would this analysis of one’s mark-making enable one to establish any deeper, ontological “meaning” behind one’s art? Is it possible for the “self” to be distilled to mere statistics? Can the information embedded in the artist’s mark alone be used to decode some profound meaning? I can’t present answers to those questions, but I do challenge the viewer to consider the possibilities.

Website

Instagram: @discodamon

____________________________

Angel Dean | About the Art

Working with a large gel plate and hand-cut paper stencils, I made dozens upon dozens of oil monotypes on thin rice paper. After about a month of drying time, I cut the monotypes and started layering them with an encaustic medium. The result is a harmonious blending that appeals to both the musician in me and the artist.

Website

Instagram: @naed_legna

____________________________

Willa Von Nostrand | About the Art

My aim in painting is to create luminous surfaces that wrap, protrude and stretch to reflect my sensory state in accordance to my deepest and most sacred experiences of life and nature.

Part food fantasy, part abstracted still life, “Lemon Chiffon” is from an ongoing series of sculptural paintings inspired by experimenting with the visual dimensions of taste and digestion. I begin each painting by sketching a single gestural line across the canvas and then I scan my paint box for the right colors to activate the tone and mood of the line. I mix gouache, gel medium and gesso to build washes of color and I sculpt the paint with my palette knife for texture. Each color choice and brushstroke is an opportunity to mine my subconscious mind, an attempt to translate my natural stream of consciousness into visual, aesthetic terms. “Lemon Chiffon” is an ode to taste and how flavor can activate memory, comfort and a sense of place. Flavor, like aesthetic taste, is an individual experience and I’m fascinated by the ways in which food and art can appeal and delight one’s visual appetite.

Website

Instagram: @wnvm

____________________________

Josh Baptista | About the Art

This work is a search to discover what exists between reality, fantasy, the unknown, and the general uncertainty in creating a meaningful reflection of life in a global pandemic. There is an undeniable parallel between the familiar yet distorted structures and architecture, and the psychic distress of sitting alone with our uncomfortable thoughts, shrouded in grief, confusion, and turmoil. I see these pieces as my living reactions to environmental chaos conveyed carefully on soft, torn paper. The process of making each piece is highly intuitive, with every move informing the next until it starts to evolve into a space that looks familiar to me. The creation of these realms is reminiscent of the careful solitary crafting of an old blanket or quilt with the stark black ink weaving in and out like a uniting thread constructing a new reality.

Website

Instagram: @ joshuabaptista79

____________________________

Shari Weschler | About The Art

This small watercolor, Girl Emerging Girl Hiding, is from a substantial body of work that examines the state of humans evolving away from the natural source into an existence of technological dependencies. Within this complex journey of advancement, the collective consciousness grows more united, while the individual ego becomes increasingly aware of the many divisions. My imagery often runs parallel to where I am standing personally. At the time I was becoming increasingly aware of controlling parameters that were set upon me, how I was fighting to maintain strength within those boundaries and to eventually break free, shifting back into myself.

Website

Instagram: @sumobunni

____________________________

Lisa Perez | About the Art

My work is deeply rooted in the interconnection between the natural world, attention, perception, and creative inquiry. From sculptural painting to works on paper, this process takes a malleable approach to form and prompts a slowing down, and a nod to the immense importance of presence.

"I embrace the expressive, wobbling beauty of something made by hand. Color takes on form and light bounces. A horizontal line may hint at a landscape but then shift like a tectonic plate. Using canvas, wood, paper, and paint, I seek a place where these materials meet, overlap, unify and resonate. The geography of where this leads me is both familiar and as elusive as the space between seconds." - Lisa Perez

The works for Periphery's "Small Doses" offer a small glimpse of both sculptural painting and works on paper that are prevalent in my practice. These weave together my focus on light and color as form, evanescent and transient shadows, as well as infusing landscape more overtly into the work. The exquisite nature of light shifting at varying times of day and in a myriad of natural landscapes speaks through both mediums in very different ways. This ongoing investigation through presence and attention in the experiences of the natural world continues to evolve in, on, and through my work.

Website

Instagram: @lperezoo

____________________________

Becky Newsom | About the Art

I’ve made shaped, gouache drawings on paper since 2017. They are intentionally fast, flat, and small as opposed to my oil paintings that are time-consuming, laborious, and sculptural. The drawings are abstract, inspired by color and shape in nature, and explore the long history of non-rectangular painting.

Website

____________________________

Sonja Czekalski | About the Art

I am an interdisciplinary artist, driven to tell women’s stories. I consider the bloodline of my grandmother, my mother, my sister, the web of women who raised me, and Mother Earth herself. I consider the idea of visceral memory. A type of memory so deep, perhaps even cross-generational, that the mind cannot remember, yet the body can. Using natural materials and traditionally feminine craft materials and techniques passed down by my grandmother, I create each of my works from my own body and personal experience. I am interested in the interconnectedness between the physical, biological, and spiritual relationships between my body, my ancestry, and the earth herself.

I want the viewer to explore the female figure through an empathetic gaze. I invite the viewer to question the validity of the stereotyped feminine; to experience and respond to the emotional labor, embarrassment, shame, confusion, richness, and power of female sexuality, fertility, social expectation, and responsibility. Ultimately though my practice provides more questions and contradictions about feminism than answers, it gives voice to the raw experiences of womanhood.

Website

Instagram: @sonjaczekalski.art

____________________________

Lynn Mullins | About the Art

I'm fascinated by the precision, artificiality, and insanity of Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging. Ordering nature seems like a lost cause, yet Ikebana strives to express emotion through embodying branches with symbolic meaning. Those dueling forces, control, and freedom, similar to 21st-century society, pack a potent origin story for this artwork.

Instagram: @giantpompom

____________________________

Susan Strauss | About the Art

On a clear, bright day after heavy snow, I went out to look and paint. The yard was transformed by snow, light, and cold. The familiar was disappeared, replaced by a space that was being seen for the first time.

Website

Instagram: @susanstrausspainting

____________________________

Dan Wood | About the Art

I have been working with letterpress printing both as a commercial printer and in my artwork for over 25 years. As an artist dedicated to addressing and participating in the discussions of the day, I find letterpress printing, with its commitment to the democratic nature of the multiple, versus the single work of art, to be an ideal media within which to do this work. In practicing this trade, with its hugely important social history and impact, I hope to create contemporary work in a format that is relatable to the public, honest, and which can transcend and perhaps change our preconceptions of the subject at hand.

As a person heavily laden with nervous energy, I do find it interesting to be attracted to such a controlled and delicate process. I am still amazed, watching pristine sheets of clean white paper come into the chaos of the studio, travel through crazy machines covered in grease at high speed, and end up in nice, clean piles with ink and fingerprints only where they should be (generally speaking). It is this chaotic balance and the delicate intricacies of these printing processes that keep me working with prints. That, and the voice in my head which exclaims during every press run - Hey, it works!

Website

Instagram: @thelinotypedaily

____________________________

Barbara Pagh | About the Art

This handmade paper collage is part of an ongoing Horizon Series. I live near the coast and I walk frequently on the beach at Matunuck. I love the way the colors change, particularly the water and the sky at different times of the day and in varied weather conditions. I concentrate on remembering colors such as warm grey sky, green sea, and line of light at the horizon. Mostly I work the collages from memory, but sometimes I have referenced a photograph. The compositions are simplified to horizontal bands. Making paper has been part of my studio practice since the 1970s. I make buckets of colored pulp and then pour sheets of 7”x10” paper of various colors and textures. These will be torn down for the horizon collages.

Website

Instagramn:@barbarapagh

____________________________

Marjorie Hellman | About the Art

My work in collage and mixed media on paper stems from drawings I make in developing my paintings, although surface concerns could not be more different.

In my drawing process, observations from both the natural and manmade worlds combine to make abstractions that exist somewhere in the metaphysical realm. Ideas from other sources, such as scientific discovery enter in, adding an undercurrent of meaning to the visual. While my paintings (hard-edged geometric abstractions), seek to create a flat, brushstroke-free surface, where color juxtapositions are the focus, these small works employ visual elements that read like textures, sourced from an archive of my own drawings and other collected printed matter.

Using colored pencil and gouache, I alter the paper fragments, tuning color, and readability. Like my paintings, these small pieces deal with the ambiguity of space and structure. But while my paintings relate to human scale, these offer a world in miniature, in which the irregular perimeters offer a different emphasis on boundary and containment.

Website

Instagram: @marjoriehellman