The New Big is Small

The New Big is Small is a collaborative exhibit where contrast of scales is taken to the extreme. Small works deal with psychic, expansive space in the confines of inches. Large works take the inches of those artists hands and measure them in feet—intimacy at maximal magnification. Alternately abstract, surrealist, conceptual and sensual, the artists here invite you to size us up and join the conversation.

Jennifer Amadeo-Holl works in the historic Fort Point district of Boston. She has received a NEFA Award, a NEFA-Benton award, a Trustman Fellowship, the Harvard McCord Arts Prize, and a Swedish Institute Fellowship. Her work explores the complement of abstraction and representation and the relationship between individuals, the animate and inanimate. She sees painting as a physical and philosophical practice, one which examines the nature of reality, the relationship between mind and matter, and the interplay of fact and value. She is drawn by the mystery of why the inanimate, including painting itself, should so often and so urgently feel sensate. She finds the world simultaneously mundane and fantastical, and therefore sees the incorporation of imaginary imagery as native to reality; that is, the ordinary is the imaginary. Her hope is to make formidable but tender, paradoxically harmonic paintings that may be inexplicable and yet speak.

Judith Page lives in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York. She received Individual Artist’s Fellowships from the Gottlieb Foundation in 2002, from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 2005-06 and 1998-99. Notable exhibitions include The Photograph as Canvas, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; Disarming Beauty: The Venus de Milo in 20th Century Art, Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, FL; Peace Tower at the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Memoirs of a Beast, Wake Forest University, Winston -Salem, NC; and Holes of Truth, Massry Center for the Arts, Albany, NY. Her recent solo exhibition at Lesley Heller Workspace in New York City was reviewed in the September issue of Sculpture. Page says that her "art emerges from a Gothic sensibility, a place where beauty and horror exist in close proximity, where innocence encounters depravity, where the spirit is consumed and revived from moment to moment."

Tom Wojciechowski is a visual artist working in a variety of media; he produces paintings, drawings, installations and books in addition to his large-format photo-based projects. The photo-based work usually involves some a subversion of the photographer's craft, or an experimental approach to the hardware, software, and traditions of photography. He organized/curated a group show of immersive miniature cycloramas at Art at Twelve in 2009. In 2008 he received an FPAC grant for public art, installing a one hundred foot long fence banner in Fort Point, Boston. His work has been exhibited in numerous group shows and solo shows in venues like libraries and corporate/theater lobbies. Thomas holds a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MFA from California College of Art in Oakland.

Charles Yuen is a Brooklyn painter with an extensive exhibition record in commercial galleries, museums and universities. Grants awarded include the Adolf and Esther Gottleib Foundation (2011), Joan Mitchell Foundation (2006), and a NYSCA Artist in Residence (1984). Reviews of Yuen's art have appeared in numerous publications including Art in America, the New York Times, Time Out, Brooklyn Rail, Cover, Art Papers, House and Garden, as well as many community papers and culturally oriented blogs. Viewing art as a project connected to a social and civic vision, Yuen has also participated community based activities including being a founding member of Godzilla, an Asian American arts organization. Inherently iconoclastic, his art champions personal, human-centric values as rationality and poetics coexist.

The New Big is Small:
2011/2012 guest juror: Randi Hopkins

Fort Point Arts Community Gallery
300 Summer Street Boston MA 02210
617-423-4299 • gallery@fortpointarts.org
November 7, 2011 – January 6, 2012
Reception: Thursday, November 17, 2011 5:30–8pm