R E A L F O R M

Thursday, December 28, 2006

FEATURED ARTIST LINKS

2003
CYNTHIA HARTLING
MARK POWER
GRACE ROSELLI

2004
KRISTIN ANDERSON
MARCY BRAFMAN
CAROLINE BURTON
AMY CHAIKLIN
LAURA FAYER
LIZ-N-VAL
MICHAEL NORKIN
FLAVIA SOUZA
NATASHA SWEETEN
RUTH WALDMAN

2005
MARCY BRAFMAN
KIM CONNERTON
VERONICA CROSS
KATHERINE DANIELS
GELAH PENN
MARY ANN STRANDELL
CINDY TOWER
SARAH TRIGG
CONRAD VOGEL
MELANIE VOTE

2006
LINDA BYRNE
JENNY CARPENTER
TARA GIANNINI
ROBERT GRANT
YULIYA LANINA
DEBRA STECKLER

2007
VICTORIA CALABRO
JENNY CARPENTER
EDUARDO CERVANTES
JAMIE CHIARELLO
JULIANNA DAIL
ULA EINSTEIN
EMMANUELLE GAUTHIER
ELIZABETH INSOGNA
MICHAEL NORKIN
MEGAN O'CONNOR
JEREMY OLSON
LEEMOUR PELLI
DEBORAH POHL
GRACE ROSELLI
MICHAEL SCHALL
CONRAD VOGEL

2008

CHRISTIE BLIZARD
JORDAN BUSCHUR
LING CHANG
MICHAEL YINGER
PAMELA GORDON
DEB KARPMAN
MARY MURPHY
SARAH OLSON
JENNIFER SITRON
AUSTIN THOMAS
FUMIKO TODA
KATHLEEN VANCE

Posted by David Gibson at 1:47 PM

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REALFORM ARTISTS

REALFORM: THE BACK STORY

In August of 2003, I began to curate a very special space in the heart of downtown Williamsburg. Only one hundred and eight square feet of space with one wall and windows on three sides, Realform Project Space was not a gallery but an incubator, where public and private met through a veil of shop-window glass. Prior to my stewardship it was curated by Larry Walczak of Eyewash Gallery, and before that it was just a dusty corner of the entrance vestibule of the Realform Girdle Building, housing various local businesses such as The Verb Cafe, UVA Wines, Spoonbill and Sugartown Bookshop, and The Bedford Cheese Shop.

What made Realform Project Space different from its predecessor is that I didn’t make a visible effort to establish it as a purely installation-oriented space, but also used it to showcase artists who made small-scale sculpture, painting, and drawings—works which would not necessarily translate into a larger exhibition in a big Chelsea gallery, for instance. Some of the best ideas are small ideas, ones that are allowed to hibernate in the mind until they hatch into grand schemes, or develop into subtler and more refined versions of themselves. I liked the idea of a space that would allow such ideas to be exhibited on their own terms.

With each exhibition mounted at Realform, I learned something new about how to choose and install artworks for a venue as intimate yet public as this one was. The result of a successful installation is a good show. Many different types of work was chosen to be exhibited at Realform, and I never regretted any of the choices we made. The first one was more of necessity, since it was important to hang something quickly for the month of August, and it had to be someone who was in favor of that. Since the venue was new, and people didn’t yet know about it, it had to be work that wasn’t usually seen in those corners.

I asked Grace Roselli to be the first artist. Grace is a painter whose work was at that time just turning the corner to a new subject matter and a new way of depicting it. For a few years she had been producing these large scale drawings that were basically portraits, drawn larger than life with a double image, either side by side facing forward, or with a larger image of the same person in back of the first. Her new work was less prosaic, and intertwined portraits with a personal mythology the comprehension of which, in any verbalized sense, was still taking shape. These were depictions of emotional sates, and of issues that reacted to femaleness, history, and issues if the painterly depiction of emotional issues. There was nothing slick and trendy about these images, nothing hip or ironic. They were personal yet sacred. I knew they would elicit a response from even the most casual passerby.

SEE LINKS TO FEATURED ARTISTS AT END OF BLOG

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