April 18 – May 3, 2015
Opening Reception: April 18, 2015, 3 – 5 PM
Curated by Joan Mellon and Patricia Zarate
Key Projects is pleased to present Runcible Spoon, an exhibition featuring Carol Bruns, Steven Corsano, Rick Klauber, Jodie Manasevit and Heidi Pollard. The word “runcible” was coined by Edward Lear in his best known poem, “The Owl and the Pussycat” (1871):
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
Although “runcible” is a nonsense word, Lear convinced people that such a thing exists. Nonsense, once it is seen as making sense, can have the power to prove there is a rightness to things we once thought absurd, a quality inherent in the work of Bruns, Corsano, Klauber, Manasevit and Pollard.
Carol Bruns achieves this alchemy in her small in size / large in concept three dimensional gold painted paper models—skewed, elegant visions of ordinary and imagined objects—made to be transformed into polished, gilded bronze. Artist/poet Steven Corsano, combining whimsical images with words about disappearance and death, jolts our senses in his ethereal mixed media works on paper bordered with tape as if to hold them down. Rick Klauber employs white cedar shims from a lumberyard—what he calls “found brushstrokes”— onto which, as if by command, he makes abstract strokes of paint scramble into place and find their rightful home. Jodie Manasevit's meticulous and idiosyncratic drawings are made from a selection of pencil, colored pencil, gouache and watercolor. With her light touch of hand and intense focus, she creates imagined worlds that exist as places of thoughtful caprice. Painter and sculptor Heidi Pollard's three dimensional work personifies her ability to perform a kind of magic using familiar materials to create objects which, like Lear's runcible spoon, make us believe in the importance of their nonsensical existence, a feat that elicits involuntary smiles.
About the artists:
Carol Bruns graduated with a Fine Art degree from NYU in 1966. She studied painting and drawing at the Art Students League in New York and Academie de La Grande Chaumiere in Paris. Early in her career she exhibited at OK Harris Works of Art in New York City and has continued to show in New York and Atlanta. She has also worked on numerous commissions with NY architects and designers. Bruns' sculpted figures search for different ways of being human. Her style of making is neither industrial-impersonal nor craft-laborious but invites the materials to engage in a living relationship, moment to moment in a claylike method of carving and adding. The work seeks its roots in modernism and primitivism in order to embody new and forgotten ways of perceiving and knowing.
Steven Corsano lives and works in New York City and East Hampton, NY. He describes his works on paper as, “poetic” and “exuberant and childlike renderings that often include language from dreams and texts; intuitive and soulful distillations of love, loss and the natural world.” Corsano has had one person shows at OK Harris in New York City (2014, 2012, 2009) and Boltax Gallery on Shelter Island (2011, 2009). He has also exhibited in group shows in the US and Ireland.
Rick Klauber approaches abstraction, gesture and geometric color in his ongoing work on canvas, paper, and Shim Paintings. Klauber is a lifelong New Yorker. He studied painting at Bard College and at the same time worked closely with Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell in their studios. Klauber has exhibited here and abroad and is in many public and private collections. He is represented by Howard Scott Gallery in New York City.
Jodie Manasevit is a painter based in Queens, New York. She uses drawing primarily to familiarize herself with ways of organizing space and to develop the forms and motifs which appear in her paintings—colorful, abstract work created with oil on canvas. Following a 2005 solo exhibition at the Worcester Museum in MA, Manasevit abandoned formal abstraction for work which mirrors her internal world of memories, dreams and imagination. She received her BS degree from CUNY and her MFA from Hunter College in 1985 and has been part of the adjunct faculty at Northeastern University since 2000. Before being represented by Berry Campbell in NY where she had a solo exhibition in July 2014, she was represented by Diacono Fine Arts in Boston.
Heidi Pollard lives and works in Albuquerque, NM. Her studio time is divided between making largely abstract paintings and making sculptural objects, mostly from cast-off materials gathered over time. Grants and residency fellowship awards include the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts; CUE Art Foundation; and Roswell Artist in Residence Program. Exhibitions include Tiger Strikes Asteroid, John Davis Gallery, McKenzie Fine Art and Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, NY; Transvagrant@Warschaw Gallery, Los Angeles; Horse Trader Curatorial Projects at Aqua Art Fair, Miami; NM Museum of Fine Art, University of NM Museum of Art, Outpost Performance Space, SCA Contemporary and 516 Arts, Albuquerque. Her work has been reviewed in Art New England and by Peter Plagens in Newsweek online.