Monday, March 25, 5-7PM
Maria Providencia Casanovas
Inspired by the most immediate experiences and activities of daily life, Maria Providencia Casanovas creates images from the relationship she establishes with her living and working space to explore issues related to how we build identity with regard to others. It addresses the dichotomy of you/me, and the negotiations that we establish between them in order to build our sense of uniqueness. In this project she focuses in the area of workspace – The Studio –exploring primarily The Studio as a private and intimate space for experimentation to internalize and find refuge from outside interferences.
Casanovas graduated from Belles Arts, Barcelona University, Spain, with printmaking as a major, and obtained an MFA in Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York. She has participated in exhibitions in locations such as Barcelona, Madrid, New York and Chicago. Awarded residencies include MacDowell Colony, New Hampshrie, and Frans Masereel Centrum, Belgium. She has been received awards three times from CONCA and an EADC Art Grant in Spain. She lives and works in New York City.
Lisa Hamilton
Using simple tools and materials commonly found in a painter’s studio, artist Lisa Hamilton constructs images, sculptures and short videos that question the limits of perception, the transmission of meaning and the relationship between the spectator and the visual object. In recent investigations, she engages the formal language of abstraction, color theory and the psychological dynamics of seeing to examine the point where observation and participation meet. Here, she proposes, is the critical site where form yields content. In her work, experiments in perception, intellectual inquiry, emotion and material invention converge to generate meaning through the experience of looking. In her search to articulate ideas in concrete form, Hamilton has invigorated and expanded the contemporary discourse on abstraction.
Trained formally as a painter at Cooper Union (BFA, 1996) and Hunter College (MFA, 2003), Hamilton was the recipient of a Fellowship in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Art Action Kyoto and The Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has had solo exhibitions in New York and Kyoto, exhibited her work at the National Academy Museum, the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, and in exhibitions in Tokyo, Berlin, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Mexico City amongst other locations. Hamilton’s work as been reviewed in Art in America, The New York Times and The Brooklyn Rail. Originallyfrom Atlanta, Hamilton has lived and worked in New York City since 1992.