NEW CANAAN, CONN.- On November 3rd, Heather Gaudio Fine Art opened “Room for Play,” a group exhibition featuring works by Ellen Carey, Deborah Kass, Robert Sagerman and Andrés Schiavo. The show will run through January 5th, and a public reception will be held on November 30th, 5-7pm, to coincide with the New Canaan Holiday Stroll.

The artists in this exhibition are working with imaginative and distinct processes to create colorful and engaging visual experiences. Ellen Carey has been a groundbreaking experimental photographer for several decades, producing abstract images through the use of lens-based and camera-less methods. The show will feature her innovative one-of-a-kind “Caesura” photograms from the “Dings and Shadows” series created in light-tight rooms, a technique that harks back to the 19th Century when photography was in its nascent stages. Carey propels this medium to the 21st Century with her imagery, where a striking array of colors become the subject and the object of the artwork. Deborah Kass also acknowledges art historical forebears such as Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha in works that appropriate and reclaim imagery and linguistics. She is known for unabashed expressions and a tongue-in-cheek audacity that are social and cultural commentaries, exemplified in the text-based prints and sculpture featured in the show.

Robert Sagerman combines mysticism and investigation of color relationships in his paintings. He builds up the texture by squeezing individual dollops of paint he has mixed himself, slowly amassing the surface with a deliberate fashion. Sagerman counts and records ever single pigment application and keeps track of the numbers that are typically in the thousands. The practice of counting is a meditation based in medieval Jewish mysticism, a method Kabbalists believed could bring forth divine clarity. Sagerman’s technique makes for richly textured, captivating and mesmerizing color field paintings.

Equally labor-intensive but approaching his creativity from a different context, Andrés Schiavo’s sculptures emerge from his compulsive and obsessive processes. Using colorful pencils as his primary medium, Schiavo makes intricate arrangements that are geometric sculptural forms, at times referencing landscapes or objects found in nature. The works become activated as the viewer gets closer and pulls away from the sharply textured surfaces, the every-day material can take the viewer back to their childhood memories.