Euphoria
March 3-April 2, 2023
At Alice Gauvin Gallery, 43 York Street, Portland, Maine
Gallery hours for this show are Fridays 2-6PM, and Saturday & Sunday 10AM - 2PM
See review in Portland Press Herald
A pop-up show curated by Ryan and Rachel Adams. This guest exhibition features works by Rachel Adams, Ryan Adams, Zack Atkinson, Leon Benn, Gabe Bornstein, Sophie Cangelosi, Bee Daniel, Half Full, Karen Gelardi, Hannah Hirsch, Chanel Lewis, Spenser Macleod, Hector Magaña, Raquel P Miller, Chel, Kelly Rioux, Will Sears, Holden Willard, and Kevin Xiques.
“19 artists, diverse in practice and background, assembled at Alice Gauvin Gallery. Each individual tasked with showing us their perception of Euphoria through their visual identity. Like any good high-school movie, we see the magic happen when unlikely characters converge in one space with the goal of finding common ground through conversations and play. Nestled within the greyest months, the show hopes to ignite ones own Euphoria.” —Rachel and Ryan Adams
SIDEWALK is a fringe exhibition and project site where the private domestic realm meets the public suburban street in an intentional curatorial project shared with local pedestrians and art viewers in South Portland, Maine. SIDEWALK hosts an artist gardener each year to create an installation spanning Maine’s 152 day growing season, and hosts a series of exhibitions on two utility poles viewable from a 152 foot long sidewalk. Beginning in 2023, the project will include a soil building demonstration and an observational nature drawing workshop. SIDEWALK sparks conversations and shared learning about natural systems and forms; resiliency and exchange; and relationships to place and community.
2010
Two recent groups of Karen Gelardi's studies of nature (she calls it "botanical propaganda") harness a bold and painterly craft aesthetic among the rough wood benches and baskets of lush melons and gourds in the open industrial space that also serves as a popular restaurant and farmers' market in downtown Belfast…
…Ten "Banners" are raised like flags in the space, varying in scale and elaboration. Installed casually, the works are deliberately wrinkled and creased, highlighting their connection to utilitarian textiles. The banners are more like fabric drawings, with brightly hued cotton and wool marks jumping from earthy raw linen. The formal elements are often homage to Matisse's later cut-outs, stark and monochromatic organic shapes defined by sharp lines, but Gelardi's forms are even further distilled. Their simplicity allows them adaptability in reception, at once referencing a perforated leaf and a high-rise, the lines of routes or rivers spliced from an atlas, or a totem.
In "Banner #2" six minimalist floral forms harkening to Andy Warhol's 1970 flower prints pop from the dusty linen in oranges, reds, and deep purples. The fragmented shapes are figural, denying strict representation. One larger-stemmed element hovers over the rest, both a lily and a swallow with wings extended. Other shapes are circular fallen petals, with whisker-like stripes ripping through them.
While Gelardi's forms are lovely and sophisticated in themselves, the depth of the work is lent by her connection to craft and to the weight and texture of the textiles she uses. Stitches and knots are left exposed, and rips and tears in the materials provide a raw freshness that the works would lack were they meticulously clean. Fabrics are patchworked or layered where the artist decided to manipulate a form already sewn onto the linen canvas.
Gelardi's compositions are whimsical, but find a tension in directly engaging an edge or being flush to one side. "Banner #7" sits on the bottom edge of the canvas, pointing to the unevenly cut borders. In a fleshy palette of hot pink, maroon, and deep brown, a collage of elemental forms conjures body parts and seed pods. The pieces are engaged and interacting here, becoming head, torso, limb. This, coupled with a horizon line, makes this work the most narrative and active in the show. "Banner #12" pushes the compositional boundaries the farthest, also emphasizing Gelardi's sensitivity to color relationships. Two polygons overlap like a jagged Venn diagram, one raw linen and the other a bright crimson, playing backdrop to a graphic brain coral-like shape that bleeds from a sunflower yellow to a candy pink.
Three "Drawing Constructions" augment the banners in the gallery. Composite sculptural two-dimensional works comprised of photocopied graph-like scribbles, rice paper, and paper tape on recycled chipboard, these works feed Gelardi's organic infatuations through a series of technological filters and processes. Using a similar additive vocabulary of layers and patchwork, as well as a casual roughness, the resulting works are colder bitmapped or pixelated black-and-white derivations of her warmer nature-inspired textile work. They provide the architecture to her rambling garden.
October 2019
Helicase: New Work by Karen Gelardi
Rockland, Maine
Interloc is proud to present HELICASE, a solo exhibition of new work by artist Karen Gelardi.
Gelardi, who lives and works in South Portland, Maine, has focused on resiliency; using handmade and industrial production techniques, she creates systems of pattern, modularity, assembly / disassembly, and embraces the variation and mutations that arise in her process.
Of this body of work, the artist writes:
The scientific term helicase is the closest I can find to the creative impulses I follow in my work—to unzip, reproduce, transform and grow imagery into something that has a palpable life force.
Just as helicases are enzymes that unzip base pairs in DNA to make a copy of a part, my work begins with observational drawings that are deconstructed to become templates and components for subsequent works. I modify base materials into something new while retaining their original impulsive character.
Subsequent drawings, paintings, patterns, prints, collages, sculptures, and dioramas are made with a mix of fine art, craft, and industrial production techniques from ink on paper, to textiles, plywood, photocopies, and dye sublimation printing.
... The hope is that the work models a generative and resilient system. In HELICASE I am showing new work and honoring several years of visual research and exploration.
Interloc (formerly Steel House Projects and Interloc Projects), now located in Thomaston, Maine, is a multidisciplinary art space providing access to contemporary artists, thinkers and technologists through exhibitions, workshops, talks, events and more. Co-directors Alexis Iammarino and Maeve O’Regan are pleased to be working together to curate and build the programming for Interloc.
Panels is a series of papier maché modular components, groupings, and installations produced between 2009 and 2013. Components have been exhibited in various configurations between 2010-2017.
Exhibit at 37A Gallery in 2011
Botanical imagery moves from one surface to the next through silkscreened prints, soft sculptures, a large organically shaped oil painting on wood panel, soft ground etchings, and multi-color pieced fabric “paintings”. The addition of platforms, boardwalks, and paper mache panels position these works in conversation with a built environment. The works explore animism and resiliency through an ecosystem of forms and materials.
NEW YORK, NY – Coleman Burke Gallery is pleased to present New Paintings + New Factories, a two-person exhibition by artists Meghan Brady and Karen Gelardi. On view from March 4th-April 16th, 2010, this show brings together the work of two artists whose art, each in its own way, synthesizes a do-it-yourself, hand-made ideal with a rigorous, forward-looking aesthetic that is both abstract and socially oriented at the same time.
Karen Gelardi’s collages, fabric assemblages, works on paper, and editioned knitted prints are unique expressions of a common interest in exploring and redefining the traditional boundaries between the natural world, the work of the hand, and more creative and responsible approaches to industrial production. Rooted in her love of drawing from nature, her Shaker-like dedication to simplicity and elegance in the design and small-scale, custom-produced manufacture of everyday objects, and what she admiringly refers to as the “resilience” of natural forms, her art is a playful yet earnest exploration of, testament to, and advocacy for the principle of adaptability.
Based on a drawing made from nature—the bough of a flowering plant, for instance—Gelardi will then put it through its paces, filtering the drawing through various media and production processes to “play out in a visual way,” as she puts it, a model for both aesthetic discovery and a leaner, more efficient use of limited resources. The outcomes of this process--which can be as various as a knitted, 3D “print” (in which she employs a professional knitter to create limited edition artworks, synthesizing and reassigning accepted notions of piece work and traditional printmaking); a large-scale collage of photocopies made on a surface comprised of recycled cereal boxes and other chipboard containers; or appliqués hand-stitched on raw linen (to test the use of this venerable cloth as both a “craft” medium and a “fine art” medium, and to tweak the noses of those who remain hidebound to either camp)—are as delightful to look at as they are inspiring examples of smart, creative ways of seeing production practices evolve in response to our current needs.
Above all, by allowing an image to “ricochet across different media,” to use her description, Karen Gelardi’s work is primarily a formal investigation in which the purely visual and sensual aspects of each artwork—its color, form, composition, and materials—are foremost. Hers is also a project, moreover, that invites us to sort through the similarities and differences between her various bodies of work to discover common threads and interconnections, taking this experience one step farther by suggesting the important relationship of artworks to everyday life; not just drawing from it but serving as an example of how aesthetic practices can serve as a model for greater efficiency, adaptability, and creative problem-solving in meeting basic human needs--not least of all our need for beauty.
Shown here are some of the works included in the exhibit by Karen Gelardi.
2006 Exhibit at Space Gallery in Portland, Maine
Two two-person shows in Belfast, Maine with artist Anna Hepler in 2017. Perimeter Gallery at Chase’s Daily and Waterfall Arts.
For more than a decade Karen Gelardi and Anna Hepler have worked together, sharing an interest in textiles, and printmaking, and making work that crosses the boundaries between two and three dimensions. Seesaw, two shows in Belfast Maine, will highlight their rich and intertwined language of form, surface, and process with sculptures made from ceramic, fabric, paper, and images both sewn and printed. Now based at opposite ends of the Maine coastline, with Belfast as a perfect mid-point between their studios, this exhibition explores the parallel and overlapping evolution of their work.
Remote smocker and panel maker for Andrea Zittel’s Smockshop and Panelshop projects 2007-2010
2004 installation at the Map Room, Portland, Maine
