Alex Ferrone Gallery on the North Fork has opened its tenth summer season this past weekend with a solo exhibition of works by Sag Harbor artist Carolyn Conrad. “Affirmation of Place” highlights three series of photographic works and debuts a new body of paintings and drawings – all where the artist uses the “house” as inspiration and subject in her exploration of place.
A free public artist reception will be held this coming Saturday, June 11, from 5 to 8 PM at the Cutchogue gallery and an artist talk will take place on Sunday, July 10, at 1 PM. The show runs through July 10.
Gallery Director and Curator Alex Ferrone commented, “Over the past ten years of representing Carolyn Conrad’s work, we have enjoyed watching her progressive and successful search for affirmation of place within her narrative rural scenes, through her minimal, neutral, geometric settings, through her translucent remembered places, and to possibly finalizing place within her most recent imagined floor plans.”
Conrad spoke with Ferrone about her works in this exhibition, “From the years of creating these four bodies of work, I am pleased to have ‘taken the road less traveled’ in constructing a world, not with hammers and nails, but with pencil, paper, balsa wood, and paint in my continued search for a place of solace.”
“During the last several years, I created three bodies of photographic still lifes using hand-built architectural structures — specifically houses and barns. Arranged on a tabletop using only the natural light from my studio windows and skylights, my intention for the first two series was to compose familiar and much-loved landscapes that I found throughout New England and Long Island. The resulting rural scenes evoke a romantic impression and symbolize human loneliness and silence, although, the grouping, pairing, and merging of forms ironically dispels that mood, and suggests a dialogue and connection – an affirmation of place,” said the artist.