Ithaca College

The Handwerker is pleased to welcome back students, staff and faculty from Spring Break The Handwerker is pleased to welcome back the Ithaca College community with the opening of it's exhibition, First Person, Twice Removed, featuring the work of local artists Claire Lesemann, Jessica Warner, and Melissa Zarem.  This exhibtion will be on view at the Handwerker from March 18th-April 12th, 2013.  An opening reception will be held Thursday, March 21, 5:00-7:00 pm.  The artists will speak about their work publicly on Thursday, March 28, 6:00 pm.

The practices of Claire Lesemann, Jessica Warner, and Melissa Zarem negotiate the experience of their environments using abstraction to mediate between real and imagined life.  All use observation in their practice but do not render from it dutifully, straying from the fold of realism with phenomenological intention. Iterated from individual perception, but employed with imagination, thought, emotion, intuition, and desire, the works in this exhibition invite a rich and varied discourse and an array of interpretation. 

Lesemann’s pastel renderings of patterns inspired by photographs of aerial landscapes obsessively trace the interstitial space between objects. Warner’s chaotic paintings depict tumbles of reconfigured piles, confusing the boundary between conventional tropes of still life and landscape.  Zarem’s heavily reworked drawings spontaneously combine color, graphic symbols, and texture, building a rich and complexly layered surface. The pursuit of rendering from perception rather than observation leads each of these artists toward the watery edge of abstraction, with one eye on this world and the other on the next.

All Handwerker Gallery events are free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 10.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m.; Thursday, 10.00 a.m. to 9.00 p.m.; and weekends, noon to 5.00 p.m.. The gallery is closed to the public on Tuesdays unless otherwise specified for an event but can accommodate group or class visits by appointment.

For further information or individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations contact Mara Baldwin at mbaldwin@ithaca.edu or 607.274.3548. Please make requests for accommodations as far in advance as possible.