Inside Art with Michael Rose - AS220 Features Exciting Exhibitions in January

Wednesday, January 11, 2023

Michael Rose, Art Contributor

 

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PHOTO: Michael Rose

 

As 2023 gets underway, the promise of great art-viewing is on offer across the galleries of AS220 in downtown Providence. For those who love paintings and collage, viewpoints from four different artists shape current exhibitions on view through January 28. Exploring these shows is a great opportunity to start the new year in an artful way.

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In AS220’s Project Space at 93 Mathewson Street, artist, professor, and curator Kirstin Lamb is the subject of the exhibition Pictures of Pictures, which features a series of paintings that often serve to enumerate the materials found in an artist’s studio. Kirstin’s well-defined images of creative ephemera are enjoyable and stimulating. They make viewers consider artistic processes and the spaces where artists make their work.

 

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PHOTO: Michael Rose

 

Speaking of what she hopes viewers will take away from her exhibition, Lamb says, “I haven’t shown my studio wall pictures in a group yet, so I was really hoping to see them in a group and show them to my community. I hope that viewers take away a celebration of the studio and art making, as well as a celebration of image-making. I’m going to quote the last part of my artist statement, which really says it better than I can now: I feel a need to lionize the project of the artist, all artists, especially at a moment of great precarity and conflict. My love of studio as a refuge, bunker, or some might say dubious ivory tower, is equally tempered by what I feel is an interest in the concrete way studios suggest individual and collective wishes and dreams.”

 

Lamb continues, “So in essence, I hope folks will have the same wonder I do looking at great collections (like the Nature Lab or the RISD Museum here in Providence) but be able to find a way to make them theirs, reorganize them into personal categories of thinking and making.  I organize things visually to make my own new narratives and relationships, an artist’s curation of sorts.”

 

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PHOTO: Michael Rose

 

Some of the works in Lamb’s exhibition are based very literally on her own studio space, capturing her own collections of inspirational or reference materials. One image in the series, which focuses on butterflies, was the product of a partnership with the Wassaic Project Artist Residency. Through this piece, Lamb aimed to show students how to organize scientific information visually. The results of all her work are an exhibition that shows off the artist as organizer, cataloguer, and creator.

 

Adjacent to Lamb’s show, in the Reading Room at 93 Mathewson Street, artist Vinnie Ray is featured in a tightly assembled exhibition of colorful abstractions that merge painterly expression and textured collage to evoke color and energy. Round forms and brushy marks draw viewers in and act as a counterpoint to Lamb’s representational work allowing for new aesthetic connections to be made.

 

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PHOTO: Michael Rose

 

Down the street, in AS220’s Main Gallery at 115 Empire Street, works by painters Sara Breslin and Tyler O’Grady can be found. Breslin is showing inventive and fantastically illustrative figurative images. A 2014 alumnus of the University of Rhode Island, Breslin describes her work as focused on empowering mental health while celebrating feminine and queer energies. Breslin’s art is well-made and shows off acute technical acumen. Bright tones and shaped panels are employed expertly, making for eye-catching treatments of figures, each with their own story.

 

Across the room, RISD graduate O’Grady is exhibiting well-choreographed images that examine often overlooked urban details. The shadows cast by electrical conduits over clapboards or vines growing over bricks are the types of subjects to which he turns his brush with dazzling effect. In a series of smaller works on paper, O’Grady’s preferred scale diminishes but the power of his aesthetic remains the same. Looking at O’Grady’s paintings will encourage visitors to reexamine the urban environment and look for beauty and grandeur in the tiny details around them.

 

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PHOTO: Michael Rose

 

Recent openings for these exhibitions showed off the excitement of another year of art in the Providence community. Dense groups of patrons and supporters could be found throughout all of AS220’s galleries, with a number of artworks already noted as sold. In its first shows of the new year, Providence’s staple arts organization is coming out of the gate with strong offerings that will undoubtedly inspire a renewed passion for the visual arts in Rhode Island.

 

AS220’s current exhibitions continue through January 28, 2023. Gallery hours are Thursday - Saturday from 12-5 pm or by appointment. For more information on programming at AS220, visit www.as220.org.

 

Details on Kirstin Lamb can be found at www.nitsrik.com. Vinnie Ray can be found at www.vinnieray.art. Sara Breslin’s work can be found at www.sarabreslin.com, and Tyler O’Grady’s paintings can be found at www.tylerogrady.com.

Michael Rose is a multi-talented fine art professional based in Southern New England. Since 2014 he has served as the gallery manager at the historic Providence Art Club, one of the nation’s oldest arts organizations. Through his current freelance work he advises collectors and artists, provides appraisal services, teaches, and completes curatorial projects.

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