Silvermine Guild of Artists’ New Exhibition through Feb. 15

Several of the Silvermine Guild of Artists’ newest members will be exhibiting work through February 15 that explores the territory between two media.  Photography and glasswork, video and sound, drawing and collage, and painting and sculpture are a few of the disciplines that inform each other in this new exhibition.  Silvermine’s new artists are also a surprisingly international group.  Two are Brazilian artists, born in Belo Horizonte; one is from Gunma Prefecture, Japan; another was born and educated in the Croatian capital, Zagreb.  

The Game Dora Tomulic

Silvermine Galleries are open Wednesday through Saturday, 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, call (203) 966-­9700 ext. 20 or visit the website: www.silvermineart.org.  For area event information www.visitfairfieldcountyct.com

Opal Growth ceramic sculpture,_Joan_Zagrobelny

Criteria for new members for the Silvermine Guild of Artists include excellence of technique; cultural or social relevance, clarity and continuity of style, and professional accomplishment.  These artists have exhibited their work regionally and nationally, some internationally.  All are exploring new territory in their particular disciplines or media. They join a distinguished group of professional artists comprised of over 300 members who work in a wide array of media and are represented in prestigious museums and private and corporate collections.

Windows, photography_Cris_Xavier_&_Edhu_Nascimento.

Moshe Bursuker is drawn to photography and blown glass and often explores the relationship between the two.  In some of his work, digital images become patterns that are carved into the glass. His art lighting and his pendant and droplet lighting designs are inspired by nature. Born in Israel of parents who emigrated from Russia, he moved with his family to the U.S. when young and received degrees in sculpture and photography from the Hartford Art School.

 Robert Calafiore was born and raised in New Britain, Connecticut. His first generation Italian-American experience continues to significantly influence his work. Cultural traditions and visual icons of his childhood have merged with a critical interest in the impact of new technologies on our society, particularly social media and communication platforms. He received his MFA in Photography from the State University of New York at Buffalo and his BFA in Photography from Hartford Art School. Currently he lives, works, and teaches in West Hartford, Connecticut. His work is regularly featured in both solo and group exhibitions.

Susan Cox is a Columbia-educated architect who has shifted her focus to smaller objects that evoke larger structures and landscapes, real or imagined.  Her work is a blurring of what is real and what lives in our memories.  A painter and sculptor, she was educated in the fine arts at California State University, Long Beach, and lived in England for 14 years.  She is a resident of Pound Ridge, New York.

 Visual artist Edhu Nascimento was born in Brazil, in Belo Horizonte.  He works in photography and painting “with occasional wanderings into other media.” His work is both evocative and playful. His modus operandi is to reframe and capture, in order to preserve the poetic materiality of a place or point of view. He and artist Cris Xavier have collaborated on the “Windows” series in which they worked separately (with separate cameras) and then edited images together, allowing each of their sensibilities to contribute to the final work.  Cris was also born in Belo Horizonte.  Her work has included “ephemeral skylines” and tree interventions, as well as the “Windows” series.  A painter and photographer, she seeks to displace common perceptions and reflect on transience, impermanence, and the passage of time.  Xavier and Nascimento live in Norwalk, Connecticut.

Painter Kyoshi Otsuka grew up in the mountains in Gunma Prefecture, Japan, and studied in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.  Though he explores nature in an abstract arena, his abstractions develop directly from his experience of the landscape.  In his words, “Water is the elemental aspect/concept, the organic forms of roots and trees, shrubs and flowers, the inspiration.”  His work offers deep color and space as well as a tangible impression of natural form.  He maintains a studio in the ArtsWestchester building in White Plains, New York.

 Gina Piccirilli-Hayden’s textured and life-like ceramics often take their titles from Greek mythology.  She sees her subject as the beautiful imperfection of nature, and she is especially interested in the way the natural world’s strength and frailty parallels human nature. Trained in fine arts and advertising at the Fashion Institute of Technology, she is known as a mural painter as well as a sculptor and ceramicist. She lives in Cold Spring Harbor, New York.

 Ronnie Rysz uses a variety of methods and materials to achieve a distinct style somewhere between futurism, pop and graffiti art. “I distill music, movies, news and advertising into representations of American culture. My mixed media collages, drawings and prints incorporate multiple layers of methodically constructed forms, dense textures, explosive patterns and crisp fluid lines.” Born in Stamford, Connecticut, Rysz studied at The Lyme Academy College of Fine Art and the School of Visual Arts.  He lives in New Haven.

 Michele Shibley is drawn to the human experience of sound.  “We have a psychological response to it,” she says. “My practice involves an investigation into representations of discontent in domesticity, representations of memory, and psychoanalysis. My process is one of viewing daily life as subject matter, commenting on the seemingly every day aesthetic ‘values’ of wifehood and motherhood. My installations have employed sound, video, and objects to question how these ideas can be presented through various media.” Shibley teaches at Springfield Central High School in Massachusetts.  She earned her MFA at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

 Painter Dora Tomulic was born in Croatia and educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.  She explores--in vibrant color--patterns of movement and dynamic systems of chaos.  “I see chaos not as an antonym of order, but as a prerequisite of order,” she writes of her paintings.  She also sees chaos as an infinite source of spatial relations.  Her work has been exhibited in solo shows in Zagreb, Sri Lanka and at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

 Joan Zagrobelny lives and maintains a studio in Newtown, Connecticut.  Like the work of Ken Price, Zagrobelny’s ceramic sculpture is layered, rubbed and abraded, each stage of the making revealing itself.  Pieces appear to strain and twist upward, striving to move past obstacles that block their growth yet, ironically, also create their beauty.  She is inspired by natural objects that maintain their beauty—because of or in spite of the patina of age, erosion, or weathering. Her work has been exhibited in L.A., New York, and Boston.