Eileen Doktorski explores segments of our natural and cultural landscape that we consciously seek to avoid. The artist recently trekked to a landfill in Salt Lake City, Utah to confront the gross realities of our consumer-obsessed, disposable society. Her installation, Artifacts of Affluence: Landfill Fragments is a small summation of the artist's profoundly effecting trip. The pedestals placed on the gallery floor hold fragmented castings that Doktorski made at the landfill site. The casts, made from mixed materials such as bronze, gleam under the ceiling spotlights. Their lustrous surfaces reveal disturbing imprints of decomposed food, cow carcasses, broken toys, crushed plastic bottles, electrical sockets, books, and brand-new items still in their packaging. The two color photographs accompanying the landfill fragments provide a context for the works. Set against a majestic, mountainous backdrop, the expansive landfill terrain is a sea of half-buried garbage. Plastic bags, diapers, bicycle tires and other household items appear on the surface, waiting for an earthmover to submerge the now valueless items beneath another layer of dirt. Doktorski's projects bring the subject of our collective waste into view for close inspection.

Sound Change (2010)

Sound Change, an installation by Jeff Slomba is a series of investigations concerned with acts of selective preservation in response to the shifts occurring in our natural and built environments. The artist manipulates the scale and context of common forms such as seashells, cassette tapes, speakers, and concrete blocks only to de-familiarize them to the viewer. The large-scale horsehoe crab and conch shells overwhelm the sculpture, suggesting their extreme unnaturalness or artificiality. The artist reveals their structural arrangements as being dynamic, layered, and malleable forms whose narrative continues to trace cultural production, while the overarching narrative comments on the potential invasion of Long Island Sound by the Veined Rapa Whelk--an imported, migratory species that has changed the ecology of the Chesapeake Bay since its arrival. The ambient sounds include movements of cars and trucks along Interstate 95 as well as echoes of the Atlantic oyster drill. Slomba’s contemplative work questions the very nature of “place,” and the structures and ecologies that inform it.

Big Ears, 2009, Acrylic on canvas

Artistic Syncretism: Artistic Dream Paintings, 2008, Acrylic on canvas

Eagle Mask, 2008, Acrylic on canvas

Warrior Dance, 2006, Acrylic on canvas

David Barton’s figural paintings celebrate cultural curiosity in vivid fashion. His works are visual interpretations of stories told to him by a friend who traveled extensively in Central Africa on anthropological field trips for a book she was writing on syncretic religion (primarily the interaction of Islam and Christianity on local Animist religions). Although Barton began illustrating his friend’s stories with veracity, he gradually incorporating elements of his own making. Imaginary ritual masks, dress, and accessories began infiltrating his canvases that recall the style of French Post-Impressionist painter, Henri Rousseau. Barton’s emphasis on geometry, flatness, and the decorative engage with the rhetoric of Modernist painting rhetoric yet his paintings reject the primacy of abstraction.

CT-based painter Peter Konsterlie explores notions of trauma and loss through paintings and drawings that comprise his ongoing body of work, “American Medical Series.” The works in this exhibition are a reaction to a loved one’s medical treatment and illness. In these paintings, Konsterlie explores different techniques of mark making, ranging from the spontaneous, visible in his gestural strokes and drips, to the controlled, seen in areas of intricate linework. Juxtaposing the technical precision used in anatomical drawing with the emotional content of color, Konsterlie’s work hovers in between the clinical and the fantastic.

Trained as an architect, Wes Heiss's work explores the relationship between form and function, the animated and the inanimate, and the controlled and the absurd.  In "Under Contract," Heiss reacts to the gallery's raw and industrial architecture, and intervenes in the gallery to create a new site-specific installation that reveals a construction job gone horribly wrong.  Broken ceiling tiles, cords, tools, and partially functioning construction lights litter the floor.  Above, missing ceiling tiles leave ominous gaping holes, lights flash intermittently, and an S-shaped section of ductwork descends from the ceiling like a slithering snake.  Heiss's staged intervention has an eerie atmosphere, which is heightened by the incessant bellowing of recycled air being pushed, and then trapped, in the duct-work overhead.  The pressure of the air forces the metal "skin" of the duct to expand and contract, creating unlikely sounds from an otherwise silent structure.  Futile and dysfunctional, Heiss's work speaks to the failing romantic notions about the power of man-made objects.  Using both everyday and highly fabricated objects such as tools, suspended ceilings, electrical cords, and ventilation ducts, Heiss reacts to the systems, structures, and social politics of a place to fuel his transformative installations.

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