June 6 - 29, 2008

Opening Reception: Friday, June 6, 5 - 8 PM

Featured Artists Exhibit: Forms and Spaces
Lauren Silver	Phyllis Trout
Kathie Gatto-Gurney

Group Members' Exhibit:
Tim Allen	Marjorie Sayer
Laura "Lola" Baltzell	Lori Schreiner
Carolyn DiNicola-Fawley	Robin Stronk
Cary nelson	Susan Wadsworth
Scott Nelson	Lauren Watrous
Matthew J. Peake	Tim Wood

Forms and Spaces: Featured Artists' Exhibit
Highlights Objects, Relics & Rituals

The Windham Art Gallery is pleased to present Forms and Spaces, a Featured Artists' Exhibit with work by Kathie Gatto-Gurney, a WAG artist-member and two guest artists, Lauren Silver and Phyllis Trout in the front gallery. All three artists share an interest in the organic forms and shapes inspired by ritual objects, relics, and the body's movement through space. Simultaneous with this show will be a group exhibit--part of a May/June exhibit featuring the work of WAG's artist-members, in the back gallery. June's exhibiting members are: Tim Allen, Carolyn DiNicola-Fawley, Cary Nelson, Scott Nelson, Matthew J. Peake, Marjorie Sayer, Lori Schreiner, Robin Stronk, Susan Wadsworth, Lauren Watrous, and new members, Laura "Lola" Baltzell and Tim Wood. These exhibits run Friday, June 6-Sunday, June 29, with an opening reception on Friday, June 6, 5:00-8:00 PM during Gallery Walk.

WAG artist-member, Kathie Gatto-Gurney, who also curated Forms and Spaces, brings her background as an improvisational dance artist and choreographer to her work as a ceramic sculptor. The intuitive body, which informed her movements in dance, inspires her stoneware sculptures, as well. "With my hands, a few tools, and my inner and outer eyes, I pound, flip, squeeze, stretch, smooth, and carve clay, allowing the organic process to guide my discoveries." Gatto-Gurney, who holds an MA in Dance from NYU, has studied with Ric Campman at the River Gallery School, as well as with Alan Steinberg at Brattleboro Clayworks. She was first introduced to clay by Phyllis Trout, who is a also guest artist in this exhibit. Gatto-Gurney will be exhibiting a number of ceramic stoneware sculptures whose abstract, organic forms and shapes bend, twist, and intersect very much like bodies in motion.

Lauren Silver, an invited artist for this exhibit along with Trout, is a ceramic sculptor, who relocated from New Jersey to Dorset, VT several years ago. Her recent work, ceramic objects reminiscent of shells and fossils, is informed by her childhood growing up near the Jersey shore, as well as her experience as a Fulbright Fellow to Cyprus in 1992, where, with her affiliation to an archeological research institute, she became deeply affected by Bronze Age pottery, fossils and bones. A ceramics instructor at Burr and Burton Academy in Manchester, VT, Silver also has taught at Parsons School of Design, among other places, and received a BFA from Parsons School of Design in New York and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. Silver, who has exhibited her work in numerous galleries and museums throughout the U.S. and Europe, says,"Organic structures speak to me with great expressive force. I would like my pieces to instill a personal response, yet harbor universal issues that transcend cultural climates and specific times, so that they may become objects of contemplation and initiate new thoughts and perspectives."

As Phyllis Trout, a Brooklyn artist who will exhibit monotypes from her recent Benedict's Bardo Series, explains, "The bardo is an intermediate consciousness, a transitional and liminal state. It is the midway between waking/dreaming and dark and light." Like Gatto-Gurney, the body's rituals are an essential part of her process, because for Trout, "the printing process is physically demanding and invigorating. I begin every print with a plate covered completely with ink. I work through a subtractive procedure: by wiping, scraping, and diluting the ink, the images appear and dissappear. I balance intention and accident while allowing spontaneous visual events to occur." Trout was introduced to printmaking while studying with noted artists, Martin Puryear and Stanley Lewis. Trout, who has received two Third Century Faculty Grants to travel and study art in England and Italy, has been a resident fellow at the MacDowell Colony, and teaches at the New School University as well as at the Friends Seminary in New York. Her work has been exhibited in the US and abroad, and she was the curator of an exhibit, New York Printmakers, for Central College in Pella, IA.

WAG artist-members Tim Allen, Carolyn DiNicola-Fawley, Cary Nelson, Scott Nelson, Matthew J. Peake, Marjorie Sayer, Lori Schreiner, Robin Stronk, Susan Wadsworth, Lauren Watrous, and new members, Laura "Lola" Baltzell and Tim Wood will exhibit paintings and prints in the back gallery.