The Arts Center at Duck Creek presents Jesse McCloskey: Night Gallery, opening on Saturday, September 10, and on view through Sunday, October 16. A reception for the artist will be held from 5 to 7 PM on Saturday, September 10. The artist will speak about his work on site on Sunday, October 2 at 2 PM.
During the COVID-19 lockdown, Jesse McCloskey’s studio building in Brooklyn emptied out as many artists left the city. He spent this quiet, uninterrupted time assembling the series of works featured in “Night Gallery,” cutting and collaging shapes of paper and other mixed media together, looking for what de Kooning called the “Flickering Glimpse” of form. Inspired by de Kooning’s aforementioned aesthetic philosophy, McCloskey’s paintings wax and wane between representation and abstraction, the push and pull of form in painting of which Hans Hoffman also spoke.
“It’s a battle for clarity and surprise through form that has forced a distillation of my work down to a few themes: sex, death, and my studio,” McCloskey said. “While the subjects I choose to paint are a constant source of love, desire, and need, it’s the craving of something almost out of site — something I can’t see until it arrives in the paintings — that I really want, so I work them until it does. This is how they become heavily layered, excavated, then papered over again and again until the representational and the abstract come together.”
The Arts Center at Duck Creek presents Sally Richardson: Sculpture, opening on Saturday, September 10, and on view through Sunday, October 16. A reception for the artist will be held from 4 to 6 PM on Saturday, September 10.
The natural world is the driving force behind Sally Richardson’s sculptures, which explore human and plant-like forms and their connection to nature. Using only hand tools (mallets, chisels, and rasps), the artist carves both wood and stone. She approaches each piece of wood and block of stone with a reverence for its character and uniqueness. Throughout the subtractive carving process of each material — limestone, Carrara marble, local wood (mountain laurel, cherry and walnut) and totara (New Zealand native wood) — the artist imagines an inner life emerging from within.