2012 Viktor Valášek, Ekaterina Smirnovanova, Lisa Rosenstein, DA/T Joel Janowitz
2012 Goetemann Artist Residency
This is the 8th year of the Goetemann Residency Program. The quality of the applications submitted continues to rise and there has been an increase in our geographical range. Applicants have come not only from the Boston area, state of MA and New England, but now there are many more national and international candidates. Choosing only 3 from this list caused us to examine more carefully candidates who best serve the colony’s interest in diversity of stylistic orientation, career level, and understanding of the mission and objectives of our community of Rocky Neck.
Distinguished Artist/Teacher: Joel Janowitz
Joel Janowitz, painter and printmaker (www.JoelJanowitz.com) was selected to be the Distinguished Artist/Teacher in residence as part of the Goetemann Residency program of the Rocky Neck Art Colony (RNAC). Joel Janowitz has exhibited widely, with over 30 solo shows. From January to March of this year he participated in a two person exhibition at the Art Institute of Boston. His work has been collected by numerous museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and Harvard University’s Fogg Museum. In 2008 he received his third individual Artist’s Fellowship from the state of Massachusetts. Other awards and honors include an Artist Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and two artist grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Janowitz has taught painting and drawing at Wellesley College, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He is currently teaching at the Art Institute of Boston.
May 31-June 29: Ekaterina Smirnovanova
Las Ramblas 40″ x 52″
Ekaterina Smirnova, a Brooklyn based artist, started painting in a Russian art school in Siberia in 1991. Her style has been further developed at The Art Students League of NY, where Ekaterina has been a member since first moving to the United States in 2006. Watercolor, her main medium, and etchings are often exhibited at art shows around New York and the Northeast. In the past 4 years, Ekaterina has received various awards in juried shows including from The Salmagundi Club, Allied Artists of America and Brooklyn Waterfront Artist Coalition (BWAC). Currently she is a Junior Scholar and a member of The Art Committee at The Salmagundi Club.
Sunset over Barcelona Watercolor on rough Arches paper 40″ x 52″, 1.2012
Artist statement: Water – it can range from a reflective puddle to an opaque fog, a delicate water drop to a torrential down pour, a blinding snow to a patch of black ice. I want to harness that diversity and explore watercolors from many under-appreciated perspectives. I want to experiment with big paper, unconventional textures, and intense shadow and contrast. I want to prove that watercolor is as dynamic and versatile as water itself.
July 8 -August 4: Lisa K. Rosenstein
Cut me Loose
Lisa Rosenstein, a graduate of the Corcoran College of Art and Design and from Washington, D.C., is a multi-media artist whose recent work has focused on a unique approach to using a limited means toward achieving a great variety of evocative imagery. Using the reductive capability of white paint and found objects, she has created intimate yet powerfully meditative and reflective works,which she has described as “altars”.
“For the past three years, I’ve been working exclusively in White with a focus on shadow, texture, pattern and dimension. This work evolved into 3-d and recently has left the canvas and gone to the floor in the shape of handmade, unstructured “nets” which I can hang on the wall as free-form sculptures.”
Neutral Networks
Artist statement:
Life is chaotic, complex, noisy,
and at times painfully full.
These paintings are a reflection of my need for peace and quiet.
Using nothing but white paint and found objects
I hope to created a space of
contemplation, solitude,
and a visual opportunity for slowing down.
September 9 to October 6: Viktor Valášek
bez nazvu / untitled; acrylic on fiberboard; 180×280 cm
Painter Viktor Valasek is a native of Czechoslovakia and has a Master’s Degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He studied at Cooper Union in NYC in 2009 and his work from that time was included in an Exchange Students Exhibition. He has had numerous solo and group exhibitions including at Trafo Gallery and AVU gallery both in Prague. He is currently a resident artist at Meetfactory, a center of contemporary art in Prague.
Artist Statement: Even though I have been recently working on a body of work that is more abstract, most of my work is figurative. I am trying to comment and depict my own surrounding, including cultural stereotypes and memories from my own nation’s collective consciousness. It is a view which is only possible after a person leaves his own culture and looks back from the ‘other’ location. At once, one feels trapped within his or her own stereotype. This is who I am. This is who I am expected to be. We are expected to conform to the view imposed by ‘them’ on ‘us’. I am balancing on the edge between doing a good show – as ‘expected’ and self-reflection. The ‘folklore’ otherness of Central European post communist contemporary art is the product which is delivered to the spectator, yet it comes with a self-critical edge. Is it myself, or is it the image of myself, as defined by others? The most recent abstract paintings are different not only in the attitude but also in the whole visual impact on the viewer. By covering the space of the painting with a symbol of thinking, I am also stepping out of the previous stereotypes.
