Thea Schrack - 2005 Reviews

First Friday Spotlight

By R. B. Strauss
rstrauss@aroundphilly.com

"Introduction '02: Paintings & Sculptures" welcomes a sextet of now talent to Pentimenti Gallery through February 26, with an opening reception on First Friday.

The collective ambience is grounded in the intersection between forms, palette and the sheer act of making art. Curiously, there is a sensibility here that harkens back to Victorian England, with two perfect illustrations being the work of Mary Bennett and Thea Schrack.

The source of Bennett's sculpture is a most contemplative found object, the book. Indeed, her wall hanging pieces are books whose backs are not broken but whose covers are open a full 180 degrees, while the pages between fan outward in a semi-circular fashion, as Ms. Bennett manipulates them in any number of ways.

Schrack's mixed media work fools the eye at first, as it possesses the appearance of paintings. However, her burnished and serene landscapes of a sylvan arbor reality are in fact photographs that she then touches up, with a final addition of thin encaustic for a further distancing. There is an ease here that brings to mind grand manor houses just beyond the reach of the work's edge.

145 N. Second St., 215.625.9990, www.pentimenti.com

Thursday, February 03, 2005

Landscapes from far, near and now

A show in which two of the participating six artists create landscapes with wax ma not sound too promising at first blush, but the show, "Introduction '02" at Pentimenti Gallery is swell and would make a good First Friday stop.

Thea Schrack's beautiful, encaustic-paint-coated color photographs. I'm not sure why I didn't reject these out of hand as just more landscapes, but they seemed to be about memory and the transformation of fact into a kind of dreamscape. And speaking of the transformation of fact, although the image beneath is a photograph, Schrack often paints over and transforms what's beneath to the point where the original photo is obscured and what shows is something entirely new. Most of these paintings use a river as the traditional landscape pathway that draws you in to the wilderness, in this case the Cosumnes River in California that Schrack has canoed, a place that appears to be unmarred by civilization. The breathtaking reflections on the water, the water's merger into the landscape around it are not a new subject. But the work looked fresh, the edges declarations of materiality, the markmaking and brushwork on the images barely visable most of the time, melted into the encaustic method. A painting from a trip Schrack took to France, with the striped shadows cast by a row of cedars on the country path calling Van Gogh and Cezanne to mine, reveals a substratum of handwriting in the layers. (image left, from Schrack's Cosumnes River series.)

"Open Spaces: Contemporary Landscapes" artist show to be gallery's first

By MATT JAMES, Of the Record staff Park City, Utah 2/05

A little less than three months ago, Julie Nester opened her gallery behind the Windy Ridge Cafe. Now, Nester is preparing for her first real show this weekend. It was a bit tough, she acknowledged, finding artists who could get so much work together on such short notice, but she believes the show will be a success.

"The thing about doing a group show is that you can pull work from a bunch of artists," Nester noted. " I thought these three artists would work very well together."

Each one is different and individual, she said, there are common elements to their work. They fall along a spectrum of landscape painting, from more abstract to realistic, and each, of course, has its own spin.

The show is entitled, "Open Spaces: Contemporary Landscapes," and will feature the artwork of Jessica Falstein, Cheryl Kline, and Thea Schrack. It will open this Friday, February 25, from 5:30 - 8 p.m. with an aritists' reception.

On one end of the show, tending more toward realism, a viewer will find Schrack. She portrays her landscapes using color photography printed with archival pigment inks. Those photographs are mounted on birch boards and coated with layers of encaustic wax.

The process gives Schrack a series of works that remind one of views from a foggy window which give impressions of the landscape and even occasionally defined features, a dock on a lake, the branches along a river, trees in a meadow, all visable through wax, but full photographic detail never quite comes into view. Rather, one is left with something more like a painting that a picture, hazy and impressionistic, like a childhood memory or a dim, never witnessed but still idyllic day which never happened outside of a person's imagination, something that was never totally corporeal.

The works are reassuring and peaceful, but still haunting. They started, in California, says Schrack in her artist statement, "In a canoe, mid-January: bare trees / old / overcast / enchanting." From there, they expanded out across the country.

Overall, Friday's exhibit should show the range of landscape seen and painted (and photographed) by contemporary artists. And the high, museum-like ceilings and wide-open spaces of the Julie Nester Gallery will doubtlessly give viewers a change from the cozier, more confined spaces of most Main Street galleries in Park City.

"It's just going to be a different kind of art in a different kind of space," said Nester.

"Open Spaces: Contemporary Landscapes," will open this Friday, Feb. 25 from 5:30 - 8 p.m. at the Julie Nester Gallery, Park City, Utah