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Email PageA Summer Cocktail
June 26, 2008- August 1, 2008
Monica Banks, Howard Kalish, Karen Kunc, Jenny Nelson, Annamaria Suppa, Joanne Topol.
Tria Gallery
547 W 27th St Monica Banks Nestology (2007) |  Howard Kalish shell dance (2007) |  Karen Kunc the wanting pool (2007) |
 Jenny Nelson Halo (2008) |  Annamaria Suppa falling animals (2007) |  Joanne Topol. Beach Creatures (2008) |
The works in Tria Summer Cocktail vary in terms of medium and style, but are united in their undeniably playful quality. Each presents the viewer with its own type of innocent joy; some conjuring up childhood memories of trips to the beach, or the feeling of a hot summer day with grass underfoot, others the simple and almost innocent thrill of viscerally connecting to a vibrant color or compelling arrangement of geometric shapes. In the dog days of summer, this “Summer Cocktail” is intended to provide viewers with some respite and to impart a cool, colorful and joyful experience – a visual popsicle, if you will.
Monica Banks is probably best known for her permanent installation “Faces: Times Square”, a sculptural work that runs 166 feet along the fence on the traffic median between Seventh Avenue and Broadway in Times Square, New York City. In addition to numerous site-specific installations such as this, Banks is also known for her marvelously creative studio work, including a series of curtains in which abstract and non-objective shapes connected by a web of thin wire hang from a rod, where their “relationships with each other and with the shadows they cast add up to a screen of beatitude.” She has also been hard at work on some three-dimensional pieces, including “Nestology,” which she describes as “a cloud of moments - a frenzy of beads, wire, jewels, letters, sequins, found objects, and little constructions comprising the thousands of little decisions that go into a work of art, and life.”
Banks lives and works in East Hampton, New York with husband Philip Schultz, recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and their children. She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the northeast.
Howard Kalish states that most of his sculptures are open – that is, they can be seen through, and “the juxtaposition of the forms against each other, and the background, changes as one walks around them.” Since the pieces are polychrome, the colors overlap, intertwine and generally play off of one another. The fact that this aspect of his work is dependent upon the setting is gratifying to Kalish, since he says it is “serendipitous and unplanned.”
Trained at Cooper Union and the New York Studio School, Kalish has been a teacher at the National Academy of Design for over 15 years, and at NYU for six years. Over the past three decades he has participated in countless gallery and museum exhibitions throughout the country.
Karen Kunc states that, as an artist/printmaker, her work addresses issues of “the landscape and our natural surroundings.” Her Nebraska heritage, daily experiences and viewpoints in the landscape of the plains clearly inform her work, as do her extensive travel, artistic interpretations and “contemplation on larger issues of the eternal life struggle, of endurance and vulnerability, growth and destruction.” In her art one sees natural forces at work, “landscape or space, both wild and cultivated, intimate and unknowable…” She is interested in the span of time it takes to wear away a canyon, build a mountain, the formation of the earth and, ultimately, the shaping of our world. Her hope is that these larger concepts “are provoked by viewing her work with a poetic and intelligent sense of wonder.”
A master woodcutter and printmaker, Kunc has also been a professor of art for decades, and in that period of time has shown in literally hundreds of museums and galleries. Tria is honored to be presenting her work in “Summer Cocktail.”
Jenny Nelson explains that, although her early artistic training was focused on the classical and representational, it has always been her natural instinct to depict her surroundings in abstract forms. More of her paintings evolve as “intuitive reactions to her surroundings, be it interior space, or landscape.” She applies many layers of paint, using gesture and her internal color sense to evoke a king of sensory memory in her work. Traces of previous layers remain visible, allowing colors to interact in ways she had not anticipated. The product is, therefore, both conscious and unconscious, with a “very personal abstract language” emerging.
Nelson attended Maine College of Art and received her BFA from Bard College. She lives and works in Woodstock, New York.
Annamaria Suppa refers to her own “icons” as “symbolic traces of the primitive form,” which she describes as born from the need to “shout” the meaning of life grasped in “its most poetical strength.” She attempts to extract meaning from existence by converting her own experiences into shapes. Her seemingly spontaneous renderings convey strength, violence, and beauty all at once. On her canvases past, present and future converge. The result is powerful; the message universal.
Suppa lives and works in Italy. Over the past 20 years she has had over a dozen solo exhibitions throughout Europe, and has participated in countless group and museum exhibitions.
Joanne Topol creates her paintings by using acrylics and mixed media on paper, board and canvas. The results are visually striking images with bold, symbolic designs and sophisticated palettes of vibrant colors and earthy mineral tones. Topol’s pieces, with their strong geometric shapes and powerful colors, are compelling and altogether agreeable.
In addition to her accomplishments as a visual artist, Topol is a research scientist, having received a Ph.D. in molecular genetics from the California Institute of Technology. Parallel pursuits of art and science began during her undergraduate years at Brown University and continued at the University of Michigan. While pursuing her doctorate at Caltech, Topol also continued attending art and design classes, and since 2000, has devoted herself full-time to her painting career. Topol lives and works in Southern California, where her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions for the past eight years. Tria Gallery specializes in contemporary painting and mixed media by established and emerging artists. In addition to artwork on exhibit, the gallery maintains an inventory of select works by its featured artists. Tria’s three directors, Carol Suchman, Paige Bart and Latifa Metheny, are committed to presenting artists with compelling bodies of work, and ones whose stories, should, in their opinion, be told.
Tria is located in the heart of Chelsea, at 547 West 27th Street, Suite 504, and is open to the public. Hours are Wednesday – Saturday, 11:00-6:00. Tria Summer Cocktail runs from June 26 through August 1, 2008. For more information please visit www.triagallerynyc.com.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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