Location: APE Gallery

Date: Wednesday May 1st, 2013

Sponsors: Osaka, Paul and Elizabeths

Artists:

Stephen Hannock is an American Luminist painter known for his atmospheric nocturnes, which often incorporate text inscriptions that relate to family, friends or events of daily life. He has demonstrated a unique appreciation for contemporary storytelling within the painting medium. His inventive machine polishing of the surfaces of his paintings gives a characteristic luminous quality to his work. His design of visual effects for the 1998 film What Dreams May Come garnered him an Academy Award®. His works appear in collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Hannock recently received an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Bowdoin College and is represented by the Marlborough Gallery.

Gordon Thorne is a visual artist. He is the Director of A.P.E which he founded in 1977, and the Open Field Foundation, created in 1996.  “I was born in 1941 and ended a totally undistinguished academic career in 1966 with an MFA from the Yale School of Art & Architecture. Since then I have been studying the various ways that things, myself included, evolve. These studies fall into several categories: Liz/the box, The Burning Woman, The Burning Suit/man, The Burning Boat, The Burning House, The Portfolios, The Library. These categories often overlap, and have resulted in my making a fair amount of stuff in the last 45 years, some of it art. All the stuff, including the art, tends to have a story either embedded in it or hiding near by. Stories help me understand the trajectory of life.”

Scout Cuomo moved to Northampton, MA from Dallas, TX in 2002 to attend Smith College. After graduating with a focus on charcoal video animation she returned her roots, painting and drawing. Her current focus is on a body of work in painting called Submerged. Submerged is an ongoing series of work inspired by water. Her paintings relish in the ever shifting, dappled light as it reflects and refracts and plays across bodies immersed in water. In most of the paintings there is a tangible, physical depth created by alternating layers of acrylic paint and epoxy; the viewer can see each delicate, individual coat of paint. Submerged encourages viewers to come close and inspect the surface of paintings and consider the metaphorical dimensionality of water – a source of transformation, vulnerability, and evolution, yet also a place of meditation joy, & escape.

Sophie Wood is a sequin lover and a clown. As a founding member of The Royal Frog Ballet, the ever-elusive Amherst based collaborative performance collective, she writes, builds, performs, and organizes outdoor performance events. She is a poet, dancer, director, puppeteer, playwright, sculptor, parade maker, and freelance farmer. Currently, she is developing a clown show, designing costumes for The Cleveland Museum of Art’s ‘Parade The Circle’ event, and making quilts. Her work (in whatever medium) focuses on celebration, inclusion, transformation, humor, and magic.