EAST HAMPTON, NY.- The Drawing Room is presenting two exhibitions on view through Sunday March 12, 2023: Morandi’s Books new photographs by Mary Ellen Bartley and, Compositions: Laurie Lambrecht, Alison Rossiter and Mel Kendrick. In photography, sculpture or weaving each artist explores temporality and dynamic strategies in their artistic practices.
In their unique methods, Kendrick, Rossiter and Lambrecht create works that slow time, allowing the viewer to see the progression of their decisions. Mel Kendrick carves painted blocks of wood into unique shapes that he rearranges, holding the memory of their original unity in a new composition. In Alison Rossiter’s photographic process she exposes geometric shapes of light onto expired photographic papers with deteriorated emulsion. Laurie Lambrecht’s tapestries reveal their photographic origins in her evocative grids, layering, embroidery and weaving.
Mary Ellen Bartley’s exhibition Morandi’s Books presents altered photographs begun at her residency at Giorgio Morandi’s library in Bologna. At Casa Morandi, Bartley’s initial compositions were quiet still lifes of stacked volumes of art and philosophy books with titles such as Nature Morte and Piero della Francesca. On her second visit, after the pandemic, Bartley was allowed to work in Morandi’s original painting studio with the objects he memorialized. Setting up still lifes on his worktable scrawled with contour lines of his positioned objects, Bartley had a revelatory experience taking her technique in new directions.
Upon her return home, during a residency at The Church in Sag Harbor, she made the radical departure to explore the art of trompe l’oeil over her original photographs. Positioning sheets of vellum, glassine and colored paper on top of her earlier still lifes in a collage; she made a new photograph. Each adaptation of an earlier still life represents two periods of time. With titles such as Ingres Collage, Celluloid Blue Striped Vase and Oil Can Glassine, Bartley offers clues to the interventions. Temporality and composition have long intrigued Bartley; she has photographed collections of books for decades, each with an original point of view reflecting the owners.
Mary Ellen Bartley was born in New York, NY and received her BFA from Purchase College, SUNY. Her photographs are represented in collections across the United States and have been exhibited at The Walker Art Center, the Houston Center for Photography, the Parrish Art Museum, Guild Hall Museum and the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts. Bartley is recognized for the bodies of work she has created in response to library collections. The first of these was a site-specific project completed at the Watermill Center in 2015 entitled Reading Robert Wilson. This culminated in a “book of books” and led to her 2017 residency and installation at The Queens Museum. She has also been awarded residencies at the Penumbra Foundation, the Pollock Krasner Study Center, and the Museo Morandi in Bologna, Italy.
