November 8 - 23, 2014
Opening Reception: November 8, 2 - 4 PM
Key Projects is pleased to present Plane Talk(ing), a three-person exhibition featuring Richard Bottwin, Connie Goldman and Gelah Penn. The exhibition will focus on sculptures, paintings and drawings that play with how we perceive space. The artists in Plane Talk(ing) explore geometric relationships, folds and shifting planes which intersect and recede. Materials are configured and shaped to each artists’ desired language.
Richard Bottwin’s superbly crafted, geometrically skewed wall sculptures exist uneasily on the wall and thwart gravity’s pull. Surfaces are painted a translucent color allowing for interaction with the wood grain or are simply left unpainted. Connie Goldman’s subtle, monochrome, three-dimensional paintings double over themselves leaving their squareness implied outside of the folds. In Gelah Penn’s drawings, geometry and gestural mark making live side-by-side. Penn disrupts the surface with folds, smudges and other materials, creating a barely contained tumult.
Richard Bottwin has been making constructed wood sculptures and site-specific installations for 40 years and has had his studio in Dumbo, Brooklyn since 1990. Bottwin has exhibited his work in cities across the United States, in Europe and Australia, and has received artists’ grants from New York State and Pennsylvania. In addition to his gallery shows, Richard Bottwin has created site-specific installations in The Sculpture Center, at PS1in LIC and for the Pratt Institute outdoor sculpture collection.
Connie Goldman utilizes the language of reductive/ minimal art to embody the essence of her intellectual and emotional responses to the world. Her work reflects her interests in music, architecture, language, and science, mirroring the most basic of natural phenomena, the contradictory forces of stasis and flux, constancy and change. Goldman holds an MFA in painting/drawing from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BA in psychology from U.T. Austin. She has taught at several Bay Area Universities including San Francisco State University and the San Francisco Art Institute, and is currently a member of the art faculty of the Santa Rosa Junior College. Goldman has exhibited internationally and has work in many public and private collections including the Laguna Beach Art Museum and the El Paso Museum of Art.
Gelah Penn examines the linear language of drawing in sculptural space through installations and works on paper. Her work has been exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at Carl Berg Projects (Los Angeles, CA); Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT); Rowan University Art Gallery (Glassboro, NJ); and Kentler International Drawing Space (Brooklyn, NY). Group exhibitions include the National Academy Museum, Lori Bookstein Fine Art, Lesley Heller Workspace, Smack Mellon, Sculpture Center and Jason McCoy Gallery (NYC); Jancar Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); Clark University (Worcester, MA); Brattleboro Museum (VT); and the Itami Museum of Arts and Crafts (Itami, Japan). Her work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Columbus Museum and Gund Library of the Cleveland Institute of Art, and has been reviewed in numerous publications, including Art in America, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Brooklyn Rail and a feature in Sculpture Magazine. She has received support from the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Her work can be seen currently in the Weatherspoon Art Museum’s Art on Paper Biennial in Greensboro, NC and, in early 2015, in a solo exhibition at Melville House, Brooklyn.