Time and Motion
Category: Barbara Mink
Art in Tompkins County: Then and Now II
Gallery artists open the new year with art that reflects Ithaca’s past and present. State of the Art will celebrate Tompkins County Bicentennial with half of our artists having shown their work in January, and the other half in February.
This month’s artists: Eva Capobianco, Gurdon Brewster, Daniel McPheeters, Jane Dennis, Janet Sherman, Margaret Reed, Margy Nelson , Shirley Hogg , Erin Deneuville , Barbara Mink , Patty Porter , Connie Zehr , Stan Bowman, Mary Ann Bowman
Drawing Space
Spend the weekend with Laurie Anderson
But start out at State of the Art!
We’ll be hosting a pre-performance reception at State of the Art from 6-8pm. Come join us for a wine tasting from Bet the Farm, Aurora, NY, and lively conversation.
Then Sunday check out the Artist Panel
Sunday | September 22 | 2:00pm-4:00pm Museum of the Earth with a reception in the Museum to follow.
Laurie Anderson is a world-renowned performance artist whose recent work, Dirtday! is a look at politics, theories of evolution, families, history, and animals set against a detailed and lush sonic landscape.
Dr. Roald Hoffmann, the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters Emeritus at Cornell University and 1981 chemistry Nobel laureate, is also a writer of poetry, plays, and essays.
PRI’s Artist-in-Residence, John Gurche, is a world-renowned paleo-artist who combines his knowledge of anatomy and paleontology with artistic craftsmanship to recreate vivid worlds of past life based on bones, fossils, and other remains.
The discussion will be led by Barbara Mink, artist, founder, and artistic director of the Ithaca-based nonprofit Light in Winter Festival from 1999-2011 and member artist of the Ithaca-based nonprofit State of the Art Gallery.
This program is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Timelines
I have chosen a radical new direction for my current work. My previously muscular, vigorously chromatic, and heavily layered paintings have evolved in the direction of the spare, the muted, and the geometric. Using unprimed canvas and linen into which the paint soaks, as well as floats above, I am taking a new measured and mathematical approach in which the neutral palette complements natural linen; the intentional shapes and less intentional color masses speak to decisively black lines. Juxtaposing the large with the small, line with color, square with circle, intuitive with cerebral, I strive to construct a new world of inventive and playful, but always purposeful, content.
Event Horizons
Mink says this body of work is the culmination of her thinking about connections between painting and science.
“Ten years ago I founded an annual winter festival which features performers in both the arts and sciences, so thinking about creative synergies is often on my mind. Painting has always been a part of my life, but this past year I tried an experiment: framing my work with concepts in physics and math.
At first I veered strongly toward rather literal connections but I soon became uncomfortable with the self consciously didactic results. I ended up naming the works in “Event Horizons” more playfully, so the titles touch only lightly on the paintings.
With a nod to the Romantics and Abstract Expressionism, my work rests on the energy of the gesture, the visible trace of the process, and the coherence of carefully controlled elements, with textures and densities ranging from thickly layered to ephemeral.”
State of the Art is located at 120 W. State Street in Ithaca. Hours are Wed. – Fri., 12-6pm and Sat. & Sun., 12-5pm. The gallery is ADA accessible and there is curbside parking available. Contact information for the gallery is 607-277-1626 and www.soag.org.