Sharp Hands Gallery Summer 2022

CURATORS’ NOTES

We started Sharp Hands in 2020, but somehow the year twenty-twenty two feels like twenty-twenty, too. In the US we’re still entrenched in the aftermath of the 2020 election, around the world COVID is here to stay while new and old viruses emerge on the horizon, and now there’s a war raging in Ukraine. Our Summer show finds us in this world of further flux. We (the artists, the builders, the kind, and the bold) continue to fight for a better future while looking back on warmer memories. We’re trying to move beyond our comfort zones and to find comfort at the same time. We focus on the positive and stand up against the negative. To cut, and shift, and glue, and invent new visions is what we’re after. Our Sharp Hands moving swift and hopeful. Join us as we stop time together. As we scrap together a new world on paper.

American artist (and editor/publisher of the mind-blowing Plastikcomb Magazine) Aaron Beebe’s stratified supersaturated vintage papers vibrate like shattered dreams of billboards.

The color-spackled paint & photo collages of Pacific Northwest violinist Sharon Wherland disrupt your sense of depth with lively brush marks while playing with tone and value. Sometimes her thoughtful touch creates a melody of movement and sometimes they create a mirage.

Denmark’s Anne Misfeldt’s foxed bundles and loose strings display like a collection of visual poems, memories found in old cameras, to create a sense of wonder between modern viewers and bygone artists.

Anna Savina embraces textured minimalism with a monochromatic, ethereal palette, referencing her home in Ukraine while she copes with very recent displacement.

Daria Zoria, also from Ukraine, creates abstractions with a nod to nature and its wildlife. Fragmented images, organic blocks of color, and delicate drawings reminiscent of crewel embroidery rest on somber black backgrounds.

Margot de Korte’s signature landscapes, informed by her Dutch surroundings, are instantly recognizable; small figures dot muted scenes that give way to an unanticipated use of color. The rips and tears along her horizons highlight the sense of human smallness in the vastness of the world.

Many of these works evoke a sense of memory - memory of place, memory of a moment in time. We can almost smell the vintage magazine ink, the patinaed papers, the fresh oil paint, and we can imagine our fingers running over the tactile torn edges, the jagged cuts, the translucent overlays, the thread, and the way a brush stroke has a different grain than the nooks a palette knife leaves behind.

Thank you for experiencing these creations with us. We hope you enjoy the show, all works are available for purchase with 100% of proceeds going directly to the artists.

Cheryl Chudyk & Kevin Sampsell, curators