Melanie Carr
Leslie Fandrich
Dan Gries
Brigid Kennedy
Henry Klimowicz
Tony Saunders
ECOCA’s Solos 2020 series highlights featured artists selected from our 2020 Open Call. These concurrent solos are presented in tandem with The (NotSo) Short Fest.
Public Opening
Monday, December 7
Zoom Virtual Reception
Sunday, December 13, 3 pm
KATHY CZEPIEL : DAILY NUTMEG
Solo Six | January 7, 2021
BRIAN SLATTERY : NEW HAVEN INDEPENDENT
Ely Center Goes Solo | December 22, 2020
Melanie Carr
"My work is an investigation of life. In my studio practice, I am concerned and consumed with touch, geometry, interactivity, and human experience, yet driven by intuition. As an avid observer in the way angles intersect, in all things, human and inanimate, I find that the collision of forms and materials cause pause for meaning. I pay attention to the way the body, my favorite object, moves, and love the mash-up of gestural and geometrical which is where my interests lay, in the joints, how we move, touch, see, breath – and experience. I study the world around me and represent it through abstract forms, shapes and colors that allow for a broad interpretation - one that takes thought, and imagination, on the part of the viewer. I make artwork that invites the mind to wander, and for the viewer to complete ones own meaning, especially if we keep our minds open and consider that looking is not seeing."
Leslie Fandrich
"My feminist, interdisciplinary art practice considers the interplay between subject and object and the liminal nature of our bodies. I create objects and spaces that may allow the viewer to re-experience and recall moments of transformation from childhood. I am interested in the boundaries of our bodies and how we are in relationship to our domestic spaces and to each other. I often use materials found in the home: blankets, pillows, clothing, furniture as well as books, paper ephemera and fabric patterns. I break these materials down and rebuild them into surreal and uncanny arrangements that are both familiar and strange. I think about the pregnant/nursing/mothering body and how it holds and cares for other bodies and how our bodies change, age and need repair."
Dan Gries
"I craft algorithms with computer code to produce high resolution archival prints, 3D printed objects, animations, and physical installations, and my background in mathematics often informs my work. I am particularly fascinated by imperfection and irregularity in shape, texture, color, and flow, and the human connection to this type of imperfection. My most recent work has focused on creating this kind of imperfection in simple line and circle shapes. In all of my work I employ random parameters so I can leave certain aspects of the images up to chance, and I can be surprised by the results. Variations in shape and color are turned over to the computer, and I become the curator of the results."
Brigid Kennedy
“I strive to carry the spirit of playfulness and exploration I had as a child into my work. I want the viewing of my work to raise more questions than it answers. I want my work to inform and delight. There is mystery in creation and there is technique. I endeavor to ensure that the technical does not overshadow the sense of mystery and surprise that lives in the work. I try to stay open to possibility, open to multiple solutions to a problem, open to solutions as they present themselves to me in the moment, during the creative process. I like to be surprised and I want the viewer to be surprised as well. My sculpture is a compact view, an intimate presentation of a large gesture. I deliberately choose to work with simple, everyday materials and transform them into revelation."
Henry Klimowicz
“We live in a world enveloped in thoughts of value. My use of cardboard, a valueless material, releases me from the heart of this cultural confine. My interest in nature envelops my work over the last 12 years. Each piece is built by growing out of itself. Much like a wasp builds its nest, I build each sculpture. The work often feels like the work of insects. The pieces build upon themselves. They show the nature of their construction or accumulation. My hand, eye or brain is secondary to their―the work’s― own natural sense of itself. Each piece grows out of the last. Each piece works individually but each is also part of a flow of possible visual outcomes. I am a strong believer in not knowing what the outcome will be. Looking back at the wasp as it begins the process of building its nest, I suspect that it is without a finished idea in its head. What it does have is a method for proceeding. I share this process with the wasp.”
Tony Saunders
"Painting presents a visual stimulus from which the viewer tries to “make sense,” looking for significance in patterns and trying to find a story even in the most abstract, or seemingly random, elements. My work is in the tradition of landscape painting, Japanese woodblock prints, 20-century abstraction, and street art, and aims to elicit the viewer’s tendency to derive narrative from painterly elements. Meaning is suggested but never explicit: The story takes place inside the viewer’s imagination, constructed when the materials at hand trigger the creative act of memory."