ARTIST STATEMENT: I have spent the past two decades traveling throughout the country visiting museums, large cities, small towns, national parks, civil war battlefields, assassination sites, graveyards, and national monuments. I am a lifelong student of the vast profundity of American music as well as a glutton for American history, literature, western painting, film, comic strips, and cartoons; all of which have consumed my nights and days. These interests and practices are harvested and used within my process to create intertextuality in the paintings.

Greil Marcus, the American author, music journalist, and cultural critic writes, “There is no theme richer for the American artist than the spirit and the themes of the country and the country's history. We have never figured out what this place is about or what it is for, and the only way to even begin to answer those questions is to watch our movies, read our poets, and our novelists, and listen to our music... America is the life's work of American artists because they are doomed to be American.”

Using Western painting, literature, popular culture, personal memories, history and travel as sources, I’m focused on building a series of paintings that encapsulate characteristics of the human condition, such as life and death, love and loss, evolution and creationism, comedy and tragedy, fame and anonymity, conflict and harmony, and morality and immorality.

Brian Cirmo | Albany, NY

BIO: Brian Cirmo is an internationally exhibiting artist. Solo exhibitions include Where Teardrops Fall, 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, New York, NY; Paintings, Lake George Arts Project, Lake George, NY; Doldrums, the Burrell Roberts Triangle Gallery, Sinclair College in Dayton, OH; Black, the Rice Gallery, McDaniel College, Westminster, MD, and Patterns, Cycles, and Change, Wilson Gallery, Le Moyne College, Syracuse, NY. Group exhibitions include GR Gallery, New York, NY, 19 Karen Gallery, Mermaid Beach QLD, Australia, the Joyce Goldstein Gallery in Chatham, NY; Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts in Boston, MA; The Hyde Collection Museum in Glens Falls, NY; Kellogg Gallery, Cal Poly University in Pomona, CA; and Antenna Gallery, New Orleans, LA.

Cirmo’s work has been featured in numerous publications including Vast Magazine, Lunch Ticket Magazine, the Matador Review, Gambling the Aisle Magazine, and Studio Visit Magazine. Curated exhibitions include Our Heads and Masters of War at Albany Center Gallery; Abstract /'kelCHer/, OCC Art Gallery, SUNY Onondaga, Syracuse NY, and The Roaring Twenties, Joyce Goldstein Gallery, Chatham, NY. Artist Residencies include The Vermont Studio Center, Salem Art Works, and the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency.

Cirmo was born in Utica, NY. He has an M.F.A. from the State University of New York at Albany. Cirmo lives and works in Albany, NY, and teaches at Pratt Munson in Utica, NY.

ARTIST STATEMENT: The scope of my exploration ranges from depictions of shapes evocative of the human body to patterns and delicate correlations that lie between elements found in the landscape to stages of decomposition in Nature. My relationship to the body was particularly shaped by my early career as a professional dancer. This intimate connection as a dancer to my body influences all my perceptions and is central to my work. The treatment of the subjects I work with, landscapes, animals or vegetation varies between intimate, almost obsessive depictions of every element and sensual abstractions. The underlying connection to the body might be barely perceptible or almost overwhelming. This close connection between our environment and our body is particularly relevant today in a world that tends to subjugate the natural world and be alienated from it.

I pursue these goals through works on paper and sculpture. My recent focus in sculpture has been in large scale outdoor pieces that allow me to incorporate the dimension of time as well as environmental elements to my compositions. I am currently weaving the theme of decomposition and transition into the work.

Carole Hallé | NYC, NY

BIO: Carole Hallé is a draftsman and sculptor living and working in Brooklyn.

Born and raised in France, she started her professional career as a dancer.

She then studied drawing and sculpture at the Art Students League of New York and the New York Academy. She also trained as a woodcarver with Bill Sullivan in New York City, the Atelier Goujon in Paris, and as an intern at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

She has been awarded the Nessa Cohen grant for sculptors and print makers and the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation Grant. She has been selected for a studio residency by the Royal Drawing School at Dumfries House and has completed two outdoor sculptures for Cary Hill Sculpture Park and Buffalo Creek Art Center.

ARTIST STATEMENT: Sculpture has always been my greatest interest. Devoting my time and energy, working with a variety of materials and examining an object in relation to light, subject and anything else around it.

Context and subtlety determine the way of rendering, constructed on geometric principles, ambiguity and the subconscious.

My current sculptural work, forged iron, employs traditional blacksmithing techniques, attempting to express poetic ideas in the mind and open the way to creating an expressive abstraction of patterns, imitating life rhythms and motions in nature. My work is not the prevailing conventional wisdom of environmental conditions, but rather a convergence of artistic personality.”

Bill Graziano | Otisville, NY

BIO:

Bill Graziano is an Artist and Educator. He was born 1946 and grew up in Newark, New Jersey. Bill’s first art instruction was with Frederick J. Griffin, a retired architect and artist. He studied at
Pratt University and was friends with many
Artists often summered at the Rocky Neck Art Colony, Gloucester, Mass. He attended Arts High School, the Nation’s first High School for the Arts.
Studied at the School of Visual Arts and received a BA and an MA in Art Education at Montclair University. Bill’s completed graduate work at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and the University of New Mexico and was a Studio Assistant to sculptor Paul Suttmann. For 40 years, Bill was an Art teacher at Pascack Valley High School, in Bergen County, New Jersey where he taught Drawing, Sculpture, Design, Photography, and Art History.
Currently, Bill is a Member of the Hudson Valley Sculptors Society, Art Students League of New York Studied with the Artist/Blacksmith James Garvey and Warwick Drawing Group, Sugar Loaf, New York. Bill was also an Artist Fellow at Salem Art Works, Salem, New York