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SUE KATZ / CONSTELLATIONS Clusters of visual and verbal constructs February 4-26, 2022 Opening Reception February 4, 5-7:00 pm Art Forum on Zoom: Thursday, February 17, 7:30 pm (Click for video) |
CLICK TO SEE MORE Image Gallery Video of Zoom Forum Virtual Tour in 3-D Sue Katz Website |
SUE KATZ / CONSTELLATIONS
With CONSTELLATIONS, a 20-year anniversary and retrospective exhibition with clusters of verbal and visual constructs, Sue Katz looks back on two decades at Gallery A3. Some of the mixed media works date from the earliest days of this cooperative contemporary art gallery, while others were completed late in 2021, and have not been shown previously.
A founding member of A3, Katz devotes one wall of the gallery space to a retrospective of her mixed media work using encaustic, which is composed of beeswax, resin, and pigment. She melts the wax to apply layers of color and frequently incorporates found objects. Then she uses a heat gun to fuse all layers together into richly textured translucent surfaces and elegantly geometric compositions. “My favorite color is a rusty red-brown,” she states, “and my favorite found objects are old, rusted pieces of metal.”
Along the other wall of the gallery, she is exhibiting “signs”—which she describes as a body of work using words to signal injustices in our world or to write about love in our lives. “I started using words after 911, when I went to New York: all over lower Manhattan were handmade signs saying, ‘Love is the answer.’ I thought that was foolish, so I made art that also said, ‘Love is not enough,’” she explains. More recently, she has made protest signs and relishes the opportunity to speak out.
Each work—whether dating from 20 years ago or completed last month—is what Katz calls a constellation, a cluster of ideas and materials forming a composition. They also reveal how she thinks and sees and works in her studio, with disparate parts and pieces all coming together to take shape and “fit” snugly like a puzzle. “Family, generations, relationships all wiggle their way into my consciousness saying, ‘Hello!’” she says.
Art Forum Online and Expanded Online Presence
In an Art Forum Online on Thursday, February 17 at 7:30 pm, Katz will discuss various themes in her work. These include her use of found objects collected through years of dumpster diving, searching woods and beaches, and gifts from friends who know of her fondness for rusty metal and weathered wood. Other themes in her work include combining photographs of water with mixed media and abstract images to create diptychs or triptychs, and exploring the balance of circles and squares, based on the theory of proportion in Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing Vitruvian Man. Katz also will invite several other artists to discuss themes in their work, and then welcome questions and discussion.
This online event is free and open to the public. Click here to see a video recording of the forum. This program is supported in part by a grant from the Amherst Cultural Council, a local agency, which is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.
With CONSTELLATIONS, a 20-year anniversary and retrospective exhibition with clusters of verbal and visual constructs, Sue Katz looks back on two decades at Gallery A3. Some of the mixed media works date from the earliest days of this cooperative contemporary art gallery, while others were completed late in 2021, and have not been shown previously.
A founding member of A3, Katz devotes one wall of the gallery space to a retrospective of her mixed media work using encaustic, which is composed of beeswax, resin, and pigment. She melts the wax to apply layers of color and frequently incorporates found objects. Then she uses a heat gun to fuse all layers together into richly textured translucent surfaces and elegantly geometric compositions. “My favorite color is a rusty red-brown,” she states, “and my favorite found objects are old, rusted pieces of metal.”
Along the other wall of the gallery, she is exhibiting “signs”—which she describes as a body of work using words to signal injustices in our world or to write about love in our lives. “I started using words after 911, when I went to New York: all over lower Manhattan were handmade signs saying, ‘Love is the answer.’ I thought that was foolish, so I made art that also said, ‘Love is not enough,’” she explains. More recently, she has made protest signs and relishes the opportunity to speak out.
Each work—whether dating from 20 years ago or completed last month—is what Katz calls a constellation, a cluster of ideas and materials forming a composition. They also reveal how she thinks and sees and works in her studio, with disparate parts and pieces all coming together to take shape and “fit” snugly like a puzzle. “Family, generations, relationships all wiggle their way into my consciousness saying, ‘Hello!’” she says.
Art Forum Online and Expanded Online Presence
In an Art Forum Online on Thursday, February 17 at 7:30 pm, Katz will discuss various themes in her work. These include her use of found objects collected through years of dumpster diving, searching woods and beaches, and gifts from friends who know of her fondness for rusty metal and weathered wood. Other themes in her work include combining photographs of water with mixed media and abstract images to create diptychs or triptychs, and exploring the balance of circles and squares, based on the theory of proportion in Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing Vitruvian Man. Katz also will invite several other artists to discuss themes in their work, and then welcome questions and discussion.
This online event is free and open to the public. Click here to see a video recording of the forum. This program is supported in part by a grant from the Amherst Cultural Council, a local agency, which is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.
