Mikhail Horowitz and erica kaufman

Saturday, February 8, 2014 at 2pm

The Gallery at R&F Handmade Paints
84 Ten Broeck Avenue Kingston, NY 12401

A $5 donation is suggested. For directions please visit R&F’s website.

Mikhail Horowitz is a poet, performer, paranomasiast, and provocateur whose day job is impersonating an editor at Bard College. He is the author of Big League Poets (City Lights, 1978), The Opus of Everything in Nothing Flat (Red Hill/Outloud, 1993), and Rafting Into the Afterlife (Codhill, 2007), and his performance work has been featured on a dozen CDs, including The Blues of the Birth, a collection of his jazz fables (Sundazed Records), and the anthology album Bring It On Home, Vol. II (Columbia Records). None of this provides any consolation for the fact of his encroaching decrepitude.

erica kaufman is the author of INSTANT CLASSIC (Roof Books, 2013) and censory impulse (Factory School, 2009). she is also the co-editor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards. Prose and critical work can be found in: Rain Taxi, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Jacket2, Open Space/SFMOMA Blog and in The Color of Vowels: New York School Collaborations (ed. Mark Silverberg, Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). she is the Associate Director of the Institute for Writing & Thinking at Bard College.

In the Gallery at R&F:

The Gallery at R&F is pleased to present Gestural Record, a solo exhibition of paintings by Visiting Artist, Kim Bernard. This exhibition will be on view from February 1st – March 22nd, 2014.  Please join us on Saturday, March 22nd, from 5-7 pm for a closing reception and gallery talk by the artist. This event is free and open to the public.

Inspired by the Sumi brush paintings of Zen masters, this recent body of 2 dimensional encaustic works are an attempt to capture movement:  fluid, gestural, spontaneous, whole body movement, as in a dance. The results are sumptuous abstract encaustic paintings that utilize a minimal color palette and repetitive imagery, thick layers of translucent and opaque wax, paper prepared with batik markings and hand rubbed oil stick combined to create multi dimensional panels.  Adopting this approach to mark making, I place the panel flat on the floor, and allow the spiraling, gestural marks to become a record of my own whole body movement, in much the same way that the Zen master allows the ink to flow off the tip of his Sumi, committing to paper the extension of his Chi, as a culmination of summoned energy.  The method that I’ve developed allows me to make marks and “erase” the ones that don’t yield the desired results.

Kim Bernard makes sculpture, installations and encaustic paintings which she exhibits widely at venues including the Portland Museum of Art, Currier Museum of Art, Fuller Craft Museum, Colby College Museum of Art, Art Complex Museum, Saco Museum and UNH Museum of Art.  Her work has been reviewed in the Boston Globe and Art News and featured in 100 Artists of New England. Bernard is the recipient of the 2011 Piscataqua Region Artist Advancement Grant and several Maine Arts Commission Grants.  She received her BFA from Parsons in 1987, her MFA from Mass Art in 2010 and currently teaches at the Maine College of Art and Plymouth State University.  Bernard gives presentations, lectures and offers workshops nationally as a visiting artist but makes her home and work in Maine.