Click here to see the opening!
IN-PERSON EXHIBIT: Great Hall Gallery, First Presbyterian Church, 12 W 12th St. @ 5th Ave.
Exhibition Dates: Thursday, January 13th through Sunday, March 20th, 2022    
Thursdays and Fridays 12-4pm and Sundays 12-3pm - COVID protocols may vary - please call ahead
First Presbyterian Church 212.675.6150 • (Vaccination Proof and Masks Required).

The Church, 305 years young has a history of tolerance and open-mindedness and opens its doors for artists to gather and display or perform their work.
FROM THE CURATOR:
SCALE within the artist's practice - Landscapes and Abstraction
Scale refers to a relationship between sizes and is never an absolute measure. I suspect we tend to think of things as being large or small, according to our visible or graspable capacities. The dramatic change of scale in the architecture of Great Hall Gallery itself is the inspiration for  the theme of this show. The gallery's expansive vaulted ceilings connect to an intimate area beneath the mezzanine, and fifteen artists focus on examining what motivates one to construct ideas in varying scales. 
Most artists -  Monique Allain, Marianne Barcellona, Beth Barry, Alli Berman, Walter Brown, Janet Goldner, Susan Grucci, Cassandra Jennings Hall, Shelley Haven, Sandra Indig, Jacqueline Sferra Rada, Shira Toren and Ellen Weider - showcase two pieces of contrasting sizes. Yvette Cohen's work, however, invades the ceiling height with canoe-like shapes that defy gravity creating a spatial dialogue with all the works below the lighting line of the Great Hall Gallery.  Conversely, Pauline Galiana shows a grouping of grand ideas nested inside naturally small-sized labelling tags.
This is the second iteration of the show, which now explores landscapes and abstraction. There is a natural desire to represent large scales when referring to stretches of land, skies or bodies of water. Works of the Grand Canyon  by Haven, an otherworldly Icelandic scape by Barcellona, a misty sky over the horizon by  Grucci and majestic seas by  Barry are featured in various hues of blue. In this same water sphere Sferra Rada uses corroded pier structures as a demarcation of space while Toren's geometric boat gives meaning to her otherwise purely abstract blue ground.  In Goldner's metal wall sculpture, landscape is a meandering trajectory.
Multiple abstract expressions are explored in overlapping ways. Weider places colors in the orbs within a die, while Jennings Hall's repetitive circular markings seem reminiscent of a circulatory system.  Allain's large action painting documents her interaction with a second person and stands in contrast to a smaller geometric palette created only by her. This multifold use of abstraction is also clear to see in Berman's case where tiled pieces of abstract brushstrokes can be endlessly reconfigured as puzzles. In Indig's work, striking colors and jagged lines describe psychological states of agitation and internal struggles. Similar to the bold drawings on Galiana's hand-size ID tags, Brown uses another small household item as a support - the overlooked plastic zippered bags with squished paint inside - pointing to the environmental harm of its overuse.
Cecilia André - Curator

Curator: Cecilia André
NYAC member, artist and guest curator, Cecilia André,
was awarded a 2021 NY Artist Equity curatorial residency and 
invited to be a 2022-2023 Ankhlave Arts Alliance curatorial partner.
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Our gratitude goes to Barbara Sherman, co-chair of "Art at First"
at The Great Hall Gallery in the First Presbyterian Church
Graphic design by Anne Finkelstein.
Image credit: Shelley Haven, "Grand Canyon of Yellowstone 1" (detail), oil on Birch panel, 36"x36".

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New York Artists Circle ­– Our Story
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