333 Montezuma Arts is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Ellen Babcock, Mary Lee Bendolph, Kay Harvey, Rebekah Porter and Lucrecia Troncoso. The exhibition is entitled Rock Paper Scissors and it begins Friday April 12th with a reception from 5-7 PM at 333 Montezuma Arts. The exhibition revolves around the modernist tradition of assemblage with each artist working from a different and independent point of view. Chance, improvisation, and imagination are merged with very basic materials to make art objects that push and pull between sculpture, drawing, painting, controlled form and abandon.

Apollinaire observed that the materials of assemblage are already "steeped in humanity". Using round fabric, pencil, charcoal, paint, paper, wood, watercolor and found objects, each artist in the exhibition embraces this "steeped in humanity" lode star, deliberately using the hand made and the human touch as a means to enter the inner subjective world.

Ellen Babcock will exhibit sculptures and drawings. in both forms she creates tangible visions that have a dream like presence yet stay rooted in the everyday. Babcock's sculptures mix formal minimalism, fetish objects, surrealism, folk art and classic assemblage to make delicately balanced and beautifully painted free standing human scale figures. These wayward spirits, castaway, not from a forest glen, but most likely, a suburban backyard, are benevolent spirits that echo human innocence and vulnerability. Like a young girl trying to walk in high heels, they are determined to find that illusive grown-upness when they wit become an impressive mysterious force, but for now, they are closer to a memory or a dream.

Mary Lee Bendolph is the senior Gee's Bend quilter and considered, by those inside the Gee's Bend co-operative and by out-side curators, to he the living master of this art form. This Afro-American quilting tradition, that was handed down from mother to daughter for generations, before being 'discovered" by the contemporary art world, has now influenced contemporary American artists across the art spectrum. Ms. Bendolph's quilts in Rock Paper Scissors utilize found materials and commercial fabric that would be outside of the usual taste of folk art curators and anthropologists because it leans closer to a hip-hop Brooklyn and contemporary artists, like Mikalene Thomas than to traditional quilting and the imagined rural Alabama.

Kay Harvey exhibits tom paper collage and assemblage that walk a line between paper sculpture and abstract painting where formal control and elegant minimal shapes are literally torn apart by impulse and chance. Harvey has taken the beautiful and subtle minimalism of her Ice Berg monoprints and ripped them up, leaving ragged edges, splattered paint, and paper fragments, that spill off the wall and jut from the picture plane in 3-cl and vibrant color.

Rebekah Potters new work has a visceral rawness and power. in "Icarus Revisited" and "Silence is the Container of Sound" Potter has eschewed color for the noir of charcoal drawing. Formally she takes quilting and sewn fabric and crosses it with assemblage and charcoal drawing. in "Willful Exposure of Buttons" and " A Map of imperfections", Potter uses the quilting/sewing format to create a skin, that like the human skin, registers blows, cuts, imperfections and scars. For Potter this fabric skin charts inner emotional blows, cuts, imperfections and scars. For us all there intone of and hatred tor, the beautiful imperfections of the flesh.

Lucrecia Troncoso will exhibit new pencil drawings that have the surface density and richness of oil paint or pure pigment. This density takes months to achieve as she marks the paper by pressing the pencil hard to the paper and cross hatching and cross hatching until the surface reads not only fiat but also, by the persistent mark of her hand, into a perceived depth as if looking into an ocean or vista of color. Troncoso uses a minimal rectangular shape of pure color with a void, an unmarked, area of the paper, like a hole in the sky. This void, like the slasher the canvas by Lucio Fontana, changes the minimal surface to add a sculptural dimension.

333 Montezuma Arts
333 Montezuma Ave.
Santa Fe (NM) 87501 United States
Tel. +1 (505) 9889564
info@333montezumaarts.com
www.333montezumaarts.com

Opening hours
Tuesday - Saturday
From 10am to 5pm