River House Arts is honored to present Tremble, a group exhibition of three outstanding artists:  Gianna Commito, Lane Cooper, and Sarah Kabot.  The exhibition opens with a public reception on April 18, from 6-8 pm and runs through May 31, 2019.

 

Curated by artist Charles Tucker, Tremble explores the fleeting moments preceding or accompanying the act of creation, the unfiltered response to an imagined condition; anticipation of what will happen or what might be. Each of these artists pull into the world their own threads of expectancy, hope, or visions that telegraph, transfer and alter the viewer’s perceptions. Working with elements of discernment, they succeed in referencing the observable world while utterly transforming it.

 

For  Gianna Commito, these references are the patterns and conditions of urban architecture and the built environment.  In her uniquely textured paintings of casein on panels primed with marble dust, she renders her daily experiences and the complexities of the contemporary landscape in formal explorations of line, shape, surface, dimension, and color built through striking interwoven rectilinear layers. As New York Times chief art critic Roberta Smith observed of Commito’s paintings, “the effect is of looking into a broken kaleidoscope, its elements askew in a shallow space. Sense cannot be made of this carefully worked out confusion and the shadowy hall-of-mirrors puzzles it creates, but the modest scale keeps the eye engaged, on intimate terms. And each painting seems to have a different spatial conundrum, a different array of entrances and blockages, which is no mean trick.”

 

Intricately layered, measured lines that frustrate and obscure figurative elements on the canvas are a hallmark of Lane Cooper’s paintings.  Focusing on the ultra-thin membrane between the immaterial and the material, the artist’s optical effects riff on images sourced from popular culture.  Her paintings explore the ways in which fragments from our perceptual experiences and memories are pieced together to form meaning; a meaning that is in the artist’s view, always shifting, filled with extraneous noise, and because it is fundamentally fragmentary, always just out of reach.

 

Sarah Kabot creates works that emphasize the overlooked, forgotten, or hidden structures that frame and shape our perceptions in a media saturated world.  Using images from her vast collection of printed New York Times and the Plain Dealer, she looks for distinctions in the mundane elements of a variety of objects and environments. She then accentuates these parts using mirroring, replication, repetition and amplification to illustrate how they influence and inform our perception of reality.   

 

    

 

About the Artists

 

Gianna Commito has been included in exhibitions at Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; The Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH; Lehman College Art Department, New York, NY; Webster State University, Ogden, UT; MOCA Cleveland, Cleveland, OH; National Academy, New York, NY; and the Drawing Center, New York, NY; among others. Commito is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Ohio Arts Council Award; the Cleveland Art Prize; Artist in Residence at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY; and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. In 2018, her work was featured in the inaugural edition of the FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art in Cleveland, OH.  Commito received a BFA from The New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, Alfred, NY and an MFA from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA. She currently lives and works in Kent, Ohio where she is Associate Professor in Painting at Kent State’s School of Art.  She represented by Rachel Uffner Gallery in New York.

 

Lane Cooper’s work has been presented in venues ranging from Birmingham, AL, to Madrid, Spain. In 2009 she participated in a residency at The Banff Centre located in Alberta, Canada, and in the fall of 2010 she was an artist-in-residence at Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ, where she exhibited as part of the 2011-12 season. She holds a master's degree in art history with an emphasis in contemporary art and an MFA in painting. She has been teaching since 1989, and since the spring of 2001 she has taught full-time at the Cleveland Institute of Art  Cooper obtained her MFA in Painting from the University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa), an MA in Art History from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a BS in Studio Art from the  University of North Alabama.

 

Sarah Kabot has shown nationally and abroad, at institutions including the Akron Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Drawing Center in New York, and the Peabody Essex Museum.  Honors include a recent residency at the Hambidge Center in Georgia and several past residencies include the Vermont Studio Center and the Headlands Center for Art.  She has been the recipient of several grants and prizes including a Cleveland Arts Prize for Mid-Career artist in 2017, a 2016 Creative Workforce Fellowship, and 2015 and 2010 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards. Additionally, she was a finalist for the prestigious West Prize (Philadelphia, 2010), received the 10th Annual Dave Bown Prize, and was a competitor in BRAVO’s 2011 reality television show Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.  Her work is in the public collections of the West Collection, The Cleveland Clinic, and the Progressive Corporation. Her work has been reviewed in journals including Sculpture, The New York Times, and the Village Voice. Kabot is a graduate of the University of Michigan where she earned her BFA. She received an MFA in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She currently lives and works in Cleveland where she is Associate Professor and Chair of the Drawing Department at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio.

 

Charles Tucker (curator) is an artist, researcher, and educator currently serving as Head of Sculpture at Bowling Green State University.  Prior to BGSU,  Tucker taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art where he served as Head of Installation and Sculpture.  He holds an MFA  from the University of Alabama, a BFA from the University of South Alabama, and a BS in biology and geology from Livingston University.