David Abel, Michael Ruby and Steven Seidenberg

Saturday, March 15, 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.

Poet, editor, and bookseller David Abel is the author most recently of the chapbooks Elysian Ellipses and Shawarma Tractor. Three new books appeared in the summer of 2012: Float, a collection of collage texts (Chax Press); Tether, a chapbook of poems (Barebone books); and Carrier, a hypergraphic visual sequence (c_L Books). A founding member of the Spare Room reading series, now in its thirteenth year, with Sam Lohmann he publishes the Airfoil poetry chapbook series. He was an inaugural Research Fellow of the Center for Art + Environment of the Nevada Museum of Art, and is the proprietor of Passages Bookshop; recently he curated the exhibitions Chax Press: Publishing Poetics for Pacific NW College of Art and Object Poems for 23 Sandy Gallery in Portland, Oregon.

Michael Ruby is the author of five full-length poetry books: At an Intersection (Alef, 2002), Window on the City (BlazeVOX, 2006), The Edge of the Underworld (BlazeVOX, 2010), Compulsive Words (BlazeVOX, 2010) and American Songbook (UDP, 2013). His trilogy, Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices (Station Hill, 2012), includes Fleeting Memories, a UDP web-book. He is also the author of two chapbooks, The Star-Spangled Banner (Dusie, 2011) and Close Your Eyes (Dusie, 2013), and is serving as an editor at Station Hill for Bernadette Mayer’s forthcoming collected early books. A graduate of Harvard College and Brown University’s writing program, he lives in Brooklyn and works as an editor of U.S. news and political articles at The Wall Street Journal.

Steven Seidenberg is a San Francisco based writer, artist, and photographer. His first book of lyric, philosophical prose, Itch, was released from RAW ArT Press in January 2014. He is the author of three chapbooks of poetry, including Null Set from Spooky Actions Books, and is co-editor of the poetry journal pallaksch.pallaksch.

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.