Opening Reception – Waxing Poetic

September 14, 2018

6:30 pm - 8:00 pm

Waxing Poetic curated by Katharine Dufault

Opening Reception Friday, September 14, 6:30-8:00 pm
At 5:30 – 6:30 pm there will be an opening of a new sculpture installation in our courtyard by Sui Park

To Wax Poetic is to grow more expansive or expressive lyrically. Growth and transformation is inherent in the verb to wax, and in the creative or poetic process itself. Each of the six New York based artists in this exhibition has created a symbolic language, or aesthetic, using encaustic paint. Encaustic is the ancient medium of bees wax, resin and pigment, applied while molten. Curated by Katharine Dufault, each artist has a number of works selected to demonstrate the breadth of their vision.

Cecile Chong builds up multiple smooth layers of clear/natural wax and transparent colors to create ambiguous landscape spaces. She inhabits them with diminutive figures finely etched into the wax – a woman in traditional Asian garb and a western child in 1940’s style outfit. Her “work address ideas of cultural interaction and interpretation.” She “is interested in how we acquire and share culture, and how world cultures overlap.”

Gene Kiegel builds up a highly textured surface in his monochromatic works. “The wax’s organic nature lends itself to the generation and simulation of organic forms and phenomena” which are both alien and familiar. Kiegel wants to show what is “beneath our hyper-stimulation and oversaturated reality.” He employs the ‘dry-brush’ method – waiting for each brush of molten wax to cool slightly before application.

Melissa Rubins builds up layers of colored wax, transfers and fine etching to create the lyrical and ancient looking works of her ’Fragments’ series. The “series is directly inspired by the shards of ceramics and pottery” found washed up on the beach near her Long Beach studio.

Deborah Winiarski uses fabric and pigmented wax to create raised and textured surfaces which undulate across the surface of her substrate. Beginning with encaustic monotype directly onto the fabric, she then wraps the colored strips across the surface to create richly colored works. “The torn and folded strips provide dimension and color, their edges create line.”

Michael David embeds found objects in the encaustic to create large, powerfully physical paintings with narrative abstraction and spiritual metaphors. Renowned art critic Donald Kuspit has described David’s work, “Michael David may be the most innovative master of immediate surface since the Abstract Expressionists”. Michael ” loves the immediacy of the encaustic process, the physicality” and feels it is “a perfect actualization of himself through painting.”

Katharine Dufault applies the molten wax like paint to create brightly saturated images. In her recent work, areas of color in abstracted natural forms recall plants or flowers. She layers and scrapes to achieve the right balance of color and shape in her compositions. “I want the work to attract the viewer with beauty and simultaneously prompt curiosity. I attempt a modern rendering of the ancient form.”

Exhibition is open September 14-October 22, 2018