September 14 - October 21, 2018

Trees by Marsha Kartzman and Soft Around The Middle by Susan Matthews are two works that share a common language. There is a witty conversation taking place with materials that have to do with imagination, amusement, and pleasure but also about peculiarity, unconventionality, and visual deception. One imagines the works saying to each other: “What are you? How did you come here? You look like me”. The artists themselves are speaking about color and objects in an eccentric room or landscape, richly embroidering and embellishing upon these places.

Where Marsha coils string or cuts up a cloth and adheres it to paper to make a series of swirled lines, she just as purposefully paints the same somewhere else. Her work makes one lean in with curiosity to determine how the delicate and intricate marks are made.

Susan builds three-dimensional shapes out of fabric, wood, clay, wire or wool. They are alive and playful, enticing the viewer with a curious texture and material. As Susan writes she “... intend(s) to question the ‘viewer’s’ comfort level and find the space between fear and silliness, playfulness and power-struggle. I use materials that are traditionally thought of as ‘craft’ mediums for the associations and familiarity they bring to the work as well as their intrinsic hard and soft, strong and fragile qualities”.

-B. Owen

Artist Bios

Marsha Kartzman

My work is defined by mark-making, color, and the interplay of one with the other. Though each medium is distinct from the other, they cross-pollinate and inform the totality, as well as providing continuous avenues for new challenges and explorations.  Color reflects the gestalt of my creative process - its emotional underpinnings.  My imagery comes from memories of landscapes deconstructed into abstraction.  I believe as Camus said that the oeuvre, the life-work, is the journey back to the simple great images on which the heart first opened.  For me, this is always the landscape.  

Marsha Kartzman came to the practice of art in an unconventional manner.  She had studied the Chinese language in college and learned Chinese calligraphy as part of this study.  Using the brush to make the characters fascinated her so much that she continued with the calligraphy even when learning the language ended.  Marsha began an intensive study of the fundamentals of calligraphy and Sumi-E painting with the painter, Judith Liniado, who was devoted to this art form.  After these beginnings, her studies expanded to regular classes at the Massachusetts College of Art.  While at MassArt, Marsha took a workshop from Gema Philips in monotype printing that led to a shift in her focus from painting to monotypes.  Using the monotypes as an outline, Marsha reworked the surface using water-based media, such as watercolors, watercolor and gouache pencil, and crayon adding lines, dots, and shapes over the image.  To give the piece more dimension, she began to cut and paste pieces from previous monotypes and eventually to incorporate thread and wire.  Using these materials has pushed the work to a different and distinctive place.  Marsha is currently exploring the dynamics of mark-making and its interaction with color in a series of pieces that no longer use a monotype as the basic building block, but rather paper painted with gouache as the ground.  Thread, wire, and collage are affixed as the means of “drawing” the marks.  This allows for the piece to be built out from the paper thus forcing a dimensionality, which had previously only been implied. The imagery of the pieces comes from memories of landscapes deconstructed into abstraction. 

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Susan Matthews

My primary artistic objectives are to better understand and illustrate how contradictions and variability can be integral to, and inherent in, a single entity as well as to create an experience of interaction; intimacy, or denial of intimacy.  With this experience, I intend to question the ‘viewer’s’ comfort level and find the space between fear and silliness, playfulness, and power-struggle.  I use materials that are traditionally thought of as ‘craft’ mediums for the associations and familiarity they bring to the work as well as their intrinsic hard and soft, strong and fragile qualities.

Susie Matthews is a multi-media artist, currently working primarily with ceramic and textile mediums.  She first moved to Rhode Island in order to attend college and received a BA in studio art from Brown University in 1995. She also studied wooden boatbuilding in the Northwest and earned her one hundred-ton captain’s license soon after graduation.  After working in the nautical world, she returned to graduate school and received her master’s degree in the art of teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998.  As she was teaching high school art in Bristol, she rediscovered her passion for ceramics and moved on to study at UMASS Dartmouth and RISD.  She received her MFA in ceramics from RISD in 2004. While focusing her energies on being a domestic goddess for the last decade, she also served for three years on the board of the Jamestown Arts Center and chaired the exhibition committee there. Her work has been shown in various venues, primarily in the Rhode Island area, including AS220’s reading room, the Newport Art Museum, the Jamestown Arts Center, the Warwick Museum of Art, and the South County Art Association. Susie lives with her family in Jamestown RI and works in her studio at the Shady Lea Mill in North Kingston.