Ended
Hot Stuff
Jan 19 – Feb 18, 2018
Joe Fucigna
Joan Grubin
Levan Mindiashvili
Jo Yarrington
Flat File artists: David Ambrose, Joan Grubin, Audrey Stone
Hot Stuff brings together four artists who offer color-focused sculptural installations that address both social and formal concerns. Joe Fucigna, Joan Grubin, Levan Mindiashvili, and Jo Yarrington will transform the gallery into a space where one moves through warm fields of flourescent colors, referencing historical and current issues.
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Joe Fucigna
Joseph Fucigna is a multi-media artist whose work is rooted in process, play and the innate qualities of the materials used. Through experimentation, play and innovation he creates sculptures, paintings and drawings that are known for their power to transform materials, inventiveness and odd but suggestive subject matter. The ultimate goal is to create an artwork that is a perfect balance between suggestive content, and the formal qualities of the material that allow both to be active participants.
Joseph Fucigna received his Masters of Fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He also attended the Triangle Workshop in Pine Plains, NY and worked with the renowned sculptor Sir Anthony Caro and critic Clement Greenberg.
Fucigna is a full-time Professor of Art at Norwalk Community College and is the Chair of the Studio Arts Program. Fucigna has also taught in the Art Department at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Presently, he resides and works in Weston, CT.
Fucigna has exhibited nationally including shows at the Fitchburg Art Museum in Massachusetts, Real Art Ways in Connecticut, the United Nations, Grounds for Sculpture in New Jersey, the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in Connecticut, the New York State Museum in Albany, NY and the Burchfield Art Center in Buffalo NY.
He has had one-person exhibitions at the Fred Giampietro Gallery, Sculpture Barn, Norwalk Community College Art Gallery, Artist Space New Haven and the Bannister Gallery at Rhode Island College.
Fucigna was also a recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts.
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Joan Grubin
Weaving is a form of drawing, of plotting and connecting lines: fabricating a three-dimensional, transparent object using thin strips of paper with differing colors on either side results in a kind of two-sided drawing in space. Experiencing the repetitive, meditative act of weaving has given Joan the uncanny sense of connecting with ancestors across the centuries through gestures that unconsciously invoke early modes of survival – weaving nets, clothing, traps, and forms of shelter.
With the bright airy space of Odetta in mind, Grubin is able to push a new strategy of weaving strands of paper into shapes which, through intuitive engineering, possess a tensile strength that exceeds the strength of the paper itself.
Joan Grubin is a New York-based visual artist and writer. Grubin has shown her work in solo and group exhibitions including the New York Public Library, the Parrish Art Museum, the Weatherspoon Museum, the University of Maine, and the Kentler International Drawing Space.
She was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship In2008, and was a MacDowell Colony Fellow in 2012.
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Levan Mindiashvili
Levan Mindiashvili, in his second major exhibition at Odetta, will debut works from a new project entitled “The Color Of The Sky” in which he examines the issues concerning identity politics. focused on gender bias and the ramifications of marketing this topic. His work occupies the territory between painting and object-making. Pigmented hydrocal tiles either contain charcoal drawings or suggest abstracted found architectural remnants. Photo-transferred images depict often self-portraits, question the gap between the tradition of self-portraiture (critical self analysis) and today's widespread “selfie” culture (narcissistic self-exposure excluding any critical self-observation).
Levan Mindiashvili is a Georgian born (1979) visual artist and independent curator living and working in New York and Tbilisi. He holds his BFA in Sculpture from Tbilisi State Academy of Arts and MFA in Crossed Media at The National University of Arts of Buenos Aires, Argentina.are Commission Grant for Public Art Projects from National Endowments for Arts (New York, 2014) and Emerging Artist of 2011, Movistar Arte Jóven (Buenos Aires, Argentina). In 2017 he served as a guest professor at The Free University: School of Visual Arts and Design, in Tbilisi (Georgia).
His works had been included in recent group exhibitions at The 7th Beijing Biennale, China; Georgian National Gallery, Tbilisi; David & Schweitzer Contemporary, Brooklyn, US; Tbilisi History Museum, Georgia; Arsenal, Kiev, Ukraine; Tartu Art Museum, Estonia.
Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include “Here” at Georgian National Museum, Mestia, Georgia; “Inbetween” at State Silk Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia; The Lodge Gallery, New York, US; "Kiosk" at Odetta, Brooklyn US; “Studies For Unintended Archeology”, The Vazquez Building, Brooklyn, US.
His works are in public collections of Georgian National Museum (Mestia), State Silk Museum (Tbilisi) and National Art Museum of China (Beijing).
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Jo Yarrington
Radioluminescence is the phenomenon by which light is produced in a material by bombardment with ionizing radiation and can be used as a low-level light source for night illumination of instruments or signage or other applications where light must be produced for long periods without external energy sources. Radioluminescent paint used to be used for clock hands and instrument dials, enabling them to be read in the dark.
What is now referred to as the Radium Girls, or Ghost Girls were female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning from painting watch dials with self-luminous paint. The painting was done by women at three different factory sites in the United States, and the term now applies to the women who worked at these facilities. The first, United States Radium factory in Orange, New Jersey, beginning around 1917, the second, at Ottawa, Illinois, beginning in the early 1920s, and the third facility at Timex in Waterbury, Connecticut. The politics surrounding this issue which resulted in a groundbreaking battle for workers’ rights and specifically for women’s rights in the workplace has been both heartbreaking and inspiring. Their story especially resonates with Yarrington's expanding interest in Uranium as an element, and its many properties and functions, from its emanation of light wave particles to its inherent power to both sustain life and to take it away.
Returning for a second major site-specific installation at Odetta, Jo Yarrington’s drawings, photographs, and architecturally-based installations have been shown at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT, Yale University, the Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, the Museum of Glass, WA, Chashama/ Sited at the Donnell 20 W. 53rd, NY, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA, Trinity Museum, NY, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, MA, Artists Space, NY, Artspace, CT, Grounds for Sculpture, NJ, and the William Benton Museum of Art, CT.
2016 exhibitions include Heliotrope at Odetta, Brooklyn, NY, Edition Tools at the Project Space Gallery, SUNY at Oneonta and a solo Containment and Spillage Series, a collaborative exhibition at the Humanities Gallery, Long Island University Brooklyn.
International exhibitions have included Galeria Sala Uno, Italy, Centro de las Artes de Guanajuato, Mexico, Christuskirche, Germany, Glasgow School of Art, Scotland.
Yarrington is a recipient of fellowships from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Cill Rialaig Artists Residency/Ireland, the MacDowell Colony, SIMS Residency/ Iceland, Ucross Residency/Wyoming, the American Scandinavian Foundation,, the Leighton Artist Colony, Banff, Alberta Canada, the Brandywine Institute, the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism.
Jo Yarrington is a Professor of Studio Art in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Fairfield University in Fairfield, CT. She lives and works in New York City.
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Odetta’s Flat Files are curated to tie in with every exhibition. David Ambrose, Joan Grubin, and Audrey Stone have created new works that bring viewers into a more intimate encounter with their work. Opening each drawer in the cabinet presents interactive site-specific installations on a micro-scale, that offer an element of surprise with the breadth of dimensionality and innovation.
