A Group Show At The Chazen Gallery

 

The Chazan Gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition with works by Dena Haden, Caroline Morgan, Lachlan Turczan, and Max Van Pelt, from February 18 to March 9, 2016. 

Dena Haden is a visual artist that lives and works out of her studio in Berkley, Massachusetts.  She was born and raised on Cape Cod and earned her BFA in Painting from UMass Dartmouth and her MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2008. Dena has instructed painting and design courses for several years at nonprofit organizations and private institutions.  She is the co-founder of Groundwork Creative Space in New Bedford, MA and is the director of the Boston Critique Group, an artist collaborative in the Greater Boston area.   Her artwork has been included in exhibitions nationally and internationally and is part of numerous private collections and public installations.

 In her work Caroline Morgan uses elements of landscape and architecture as starting points in the project of mapping space. She sees all the components of the external world installed together like a 3-dimensional puzzle. In analyzing the world, Morgan tries to simplify it into its essential parts and then rebuild it through formal and material choices. Morgan takes inputs from the natural world and transforms them into a new fragmented surface of abstract shapes, textures, and mysterious breaks in perspectives. 

Morgan intends for the viewer to sense the presence of the landscape in her work, but to be thrown off by the abnormalities.  Approaching the work, the audience hovers between the familiar and the otherworldly. What is viewed or interpreted is an experience within itself and can be determined by the audience every time these paintings are studied.Classically trained, abstract landscape artist Caroline Morgan draws inspiration from the natural world around her. After receiving her BFA in 2012, Morgan has gone on to become a successful international artist. Within the U.S. Caroline has shown in numerous galleries, up and down the east coast. Travel has created new subjects for Caroline to paint all over the globe. Victoria, Canada, however, has become a particular favorite subject within her work. Caroline is also known for her birch tree paintings, inspired by the Adirondacks in the northeast United States.

 

Lachlan Turczan  creates installations, videos and paintings that explore the perception of natural phenomena.  These paintings are documents of visual exercises; research into emmetropia, the relaxed seeing of a faraway gaze where the eyes are focused on infinity.

Lachlan Turczan (born July 16, 1993) is an American artist living and working in Los Angeles, California.  In 2015 he received a BFA degree from RISD where he studied cymatics, the vibrational phenomena created when sound passes through water.  Currently, Lachlan works for WET, the water feature design firm known for the Dubai Fountain and the Fountains of Bellagio.

 

Max Van Pelt utilizes abstraction to realize meaning through the acts and processes of making. His curiosity lies in how sometimes, by means of implicit logic and little more, a set of unfolding relationships can lead eye and heart towards a final form – a vital remnant of attention and intention, of time, place, person, and culture. 

The resulting works are optimistic, places where divergent attitudes, appearances, and forces have a tendency to converge and resolve within the necessities of their cohabitation. The participation of a viewer allows these visual expressions to move from ambiguous to something specific and personal – the production richest in its potential not just to represent ideas, but to evoke them with frequency: regularly, and in appropriate tones.

As Van Pelt responds to these inquiries, he has been making intricate sculptures, exuberant paintings, and hybrid installations that navigate the geometries of architectural, environmental, and emotional space together with the arising inscapes of his imagination. Each piece is a deliberate act of drawing, marking the transition from nascent ideas that exist in the mind towards those that exist in sympathetic resonance with their surrounding spaces.

Maxwell Van Pelt (b. 1989, Boulder, Colorado) is a painter, sculptor, and installation artist currently based in Providence, RI. Max graduated from Dartmouth College in 2011, where his work in sculpture and drawing was awarded the Jonathan B. Rintels Prize for the outstanding undergraduate thesis in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Prior to discovering his artistic inclinations, Max was an archer – a thirteen-time national champion and athlete on the United States World Team. He derives additional passion from exploring his surroundings as an experienced whitewater kayaker and avid mountain bicyclist. Max is represented by Rooster Gallery Contemporary Art in New York. His work has been featured in Big Red & Shiny, on NPR, and by Art in America’s “The Lookout.”