honeyjones
The Dream
unfolding and revealing itself the 3rd of April 2021
Welcome to the dream. I'm not sure it's all it's cracked up to be. We speak of dreaming in many ways. We dream of a better life; if only things were different in another presumably better existence, an alternate set of conditions.
Or, perhaps, the dream is a goal to be realized.
Then there is the sleep dreaming, the sub and under world in which it seems we labor all day to suppress any harsh reality of existence, and keep it together until we rest, and the dreaming unfolds.
And the cosmic dreaming...if we are the reality, what is the sub reality...or are we always simply dreaming?
A dreamer escapes and a dreamer plans. A dreamer daydreams.
Conception, an idea, will go one way with a guiding hand, toward a light, or come undone as a runaway train in a bombardment of images and pulsations of daily sensory experiences for which there is never enough space or time to fully understand. The sky is falling.. birth of metaphors..
I recently had the most wonderful dream about Stanley Tucci. We got along so sweetly. I had no idea that I was in love with Tucci. I'm sure one therapist and one scientist together could explain away how this happened..but I don't care about that.
All this is to say that this particular welcome starts with a polished bronze sculpture created by Memy Ish Shalom; a vision of two souls joined at the hip in a dance, no arms needed. I am you..you are me..you cannot keep anything from me, my conscious, because we are dreaming the same dream..
Dream on and be drawn in by Memy Ish Shalom's Merging, and the complex surrealist mashups of Michael Wilson, the delicate overlain imagery of Thomas Rutigliano, Mark Sirdevan's powerful and resonant testaments to the human condition and migrant realities, the ripe and sublime photography of John Anthony Rizzo, and the en pointe and intoxicating movement and color work of Cécile Ganne.
-Julie
honeyjones
Merging, polished bronze, 30.5” x 7” x 6"
Memy Ish Shalom
ARTIST STATEMENT
As a sculptor, I strive to capture motion and to express sensual and spiritual experiences as well as to respond to deeply disturbing violations of human rights. I aim to transform these experiences into abstract and figurative static objects. I utilize a wide range of natural and exotic wood, to combine, in a unique way, a variety of colors, patterns and textures of the natural material. I have also been working with clay and bronze.
BIO
Memy Ish-Shalom is a sculptor working primarily in wood and bronze. Born in 1960 and raised in Jerusalem, Israel, he relocated by the company he worked for, to the USA in 2002, and later emigrated and settled in Newton, Massachusetts. It was in 2013, while still pursuing a high-tech career as a CEO of a publicly traded software company, that he started sculpting in his free time. His passion to create art grew and evolved significantly. By the end of 2014, he ended a 30 years career in technology, and since then is focusing entirely on his art. In 2019 he began exhibiting his artworks.
Cécile Ganne
Born in the medieval French city of Carcassonne, I spent my childhood in the lush Dordogne Valley in southwest France. My earliest and most vivid childhood memories are of walks through woods and fields with my family.
Both artists, my grandparents taught me how to see and capture the fleeting coolness of nature’s small quirky moments: a light or a juxtaposition of unexpected textures. They instilled in me this awe of nature’s vibrancy. These seminal experiences trained my eye to capture the warm chaos, the harmonies, emotions that move us through natural spaces, depths and colors.
Painting for me is an intuitive transcription of a wave of emotion that traverses me when I encounter a view that strikes my soul. These views often take the form of landscapes but I think of landscapes as a loose word for any type of horizon where subjects emerge and engage the onlooker. For me, in fact, each landscape, sometimes imagined, re-imagined, or even dreamed, is a window of experimentation with different materials, shapes, colors, and textures.
Painting is an opportunity to work out the puzzles that I see at the center of each composition as well as the ones in my soul. Reorganizing space, mixing colors as well as the physicality of applying paint are my way of practising mindfulness. Approach this state of lightness allows me to create timeless compositions that will bring serenity to art collectors. Art therapy and logotherapy are an extension of my visual work.
John Anthony Rizzo
John started his career in Boston, Massachusetts where he studied and taught photography. His early work as a Documentary Photographer earned him a Massachusetts Council for the Arts and Humanities Photography Fellowship ( now the Mass Cultural Council ) for documentation of professional wrestling and a National Endowment for the Arts Project Grant documenting the Fort Point Channel and the Leather District of Boston. .*With a New York agent and a desire to live on the West Coast John found his way to Portland, Oregon where he enjoyed a successful career as an Advertising and Editorial Photographer.
Presently John enjoys the contrast of living in both the Piedmont region of Italy and Boston, MA. Although John continues to work with his advertising and editorial clients his focus is on personnel projects and projects directed at social issues that speak to his passion and his politics.
John’s work has been shown in numerous galleries, installations and Museums throughout the United States and Europe.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
Thomas Rutigliano resides in Beverly, MA and is currently a candidate for a BFA in 2021 with a concentration in Photography/Video/Film at Montserrat College of Art. His work is a deep understanding of how to navigate the winding hills and blurred lines that lay within the hearts and minds of our memories.
Artist’s Statement
Art is a way of making sense of the world. These days we are assaulted by a vortex of images depicting national and global crises, from the Covid 19 pandemic to racial and economic injustice; from the insurrection against our democracy to geopolitical instability; from climate change to the economics of people on the move. People disappear. Places disappear. Businesses, homes, cultural institutions disappear.
How do we understand it?
The paintings that I have in The Dream, the current show at honeyjones, are from the series MIGRANTS. They are an idiosyncratic meditation about people on the move, their psyches fragmented, their bodies adrift in an unstable world. Dream, reality, aspiration, and nightmare become entangled.
In his book Exit West, the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid tells an intimate human story about experiences shared by countless people on the move fleeing violence, poverty, intolerance and suppression. Instead of depicting migrants as a horde, a swarm, or a mob, I chose also to show the individuals and the interior landscapes that these people need to navigate. In this way I hope to make identification and empathy with their travails more accessible.
Mark's bio and credits can be found here
Michael B. Wilson
Bio
The B in Michael B. Wilson is for my maternal grandfather, Bruce. I was born in Loveland, CO in 1955 and grew up in the nearby village of Berthoud, CO. In high school I studied for two years in the "Famous Illustrators Artists' Course by Mail." I spent the disco years as a hippie, painting and studying art at Humboldt State University in Northern California, spent a year on the island of Paros, Greece and graduated from the Boston Museum School in 1988, sharing first place in the prestigious 5th Year Traveling Fellowship.
Artist's Statement
I make art in attempt to create order out of all of the beauty and chaos that’s happening to us all at once, giving form and visual poetry to the onslaught of visual stimuli and conflicting emotions and absolute uncertainty.
The past five years, more or less, mark a return to my life as a surrealist painter. I paint images of contrasting elements: i.e. abstraction/realism, organic/geometric, dynamic/static, infinite/temporary, in order to get beyond the visual world and into the subconscious.
Much of realistic painting over the centuries has had the aim of capturing a moment in time, while most of what we see, and experience now seems to be the opposite. We’re constantly having our attention pulled one way then another, being interrupted by traffic, phones, people behaving unpredictably, Netflix, Amazon and constant advertising everywhere, all the time. And that's just normal life.
Then comes the unexpected and often inexplicable: light bends so we see a ship floating in air above the sea, historical landmarks burn to the ground in bright orange flame under deep blue skies, and the streets of our mightiest cities stand stark in their emptiness as hospitals and cemeteries are overflowing.