Due to the overwhelming interest in this year’s New Brunswick Art Salon, Spring 2012 we were forced to split it into two separate exhibitions. The artists that will be featured in Part II are:

• Jane Dell
• Theodosia Tamborlane
• Wade Miller

This event is in part sponsored by:

Reaching from the historical “salon” style exhibition, Spaces Occupied provides local artists with a chance to simultaneously unveil their recent works to both their contemporaries and the public. Since opening its doors in 2008, Alfa has held these biannual Art Salons. Each juried exhibition features new artists and celebrates their exchange of ideas. Central to this group is the careful consideration of space, and the figures, forms and narratives that inhabit it.

Alaine Becker’s pastels on oversized paper deal with damaged people. The psychological drawings combine with pure color to create deeply vulnerable and intimate portraits. Heavy layers and transparencies reflect the subject’s fragility and leave the surface textured with complexities. We are at once familiar with and alienated by these personal vignettes. And with the subject’s identity always undisclosed, the viewer is given the freedom to create their own narrative. Alaine Becker received her BFA from SUNY Purchase in 1981. She recently completed a residency at the Vermont Studio Center and has been exhibited extensively throughout the Northeast Coast.

Alyce Gottesman received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in and has been painting for over 30 years. She captures a unique organic essence in her work by focusing on formal issues, such as space and dimension. Her abstract paintings appear atmospheric. Forms inhabit the space, and a clever play with perspective gives the illusion of spacial depth. In combination with her heavy use of drawing, and subtle yet bold color choices, the viewer becomes absorbed into an imaginary world. The works capture the spirit of nature on an energetic level, by using abstractions to communicate vital messages. Alyce Gottesman lives and works in Montclair, NJ. She currently teaches Art at Bergen Community College in Paramus, New Jersey and is a member of the Young Scholars Program of Newark, NJ.

Carole Krinsky is a self taught artist working primarily in pointillism. Her dot and circle filled acrylic paintings exercise bold color choices and intricate arrangements. Finding inspiration from the aboriginal works native to Australia, her paintings offer universal messages which are powerful and primitive. These confident works convey a broad range of themes, often spiritual and personal in nature. And, each theme is provoked by and changes with the artist’s daily life experiences. Carole Krinsky lives and works in East Brunswick, New Jersey. She is a full time business owner, mother of three, and a student of the Highland Park Academy of Art.

Jonathan Horowitz is both a writer and painter. His heavily conceptual but vibrant paintings combine abstractions with familiar cultural references. Their composition is carefully designed so that movement radiates throughout the canvas. His paintings are the result of countless preparatory sketches, a process which allows him to hone his shapes and designs. Emotion is provoked by his choice of tone, and a dramatic effect is achieved by his use of loud, complementary colors. Jonathan Horowitz lives and works in Highland Park, and has exhibited extensively throughout the area.

This event is in part sponsored by:

Our booth will be in Voorhees Mall behind the Zimmerli Art Museum. We’ll be there between 10am-4pm. Come check out our booth! Our interns have been busy painting our banner and preparing for the event. We plan on having a Communal painting project, where we will have 1 large canvas divided into lots of little squares and our Director and resident artist Vesselin Kourtev will start it off by painting the first square. Visitors can then paint the next square with something related to the previous square. This way in the end it will be like a running comic strip painted by many different people. 

You can follow us live on Twitter the day of the event – http://www.twitter.com/AlfaArtGallery.

Also dont forget to check out the NJ Folk Festival happening at the same time on Cook/Douglas campus. Each year they have ensembles of dancers and singers from a different country perform on the stage and this year it is Bulgarian folk music! Make sure to stop by and enjoy the music and great food from the vendors at the location. For more info go to: http://www.njfolkfest.rutgers.edu/

For those that are not familiar with the concept Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Here are some more:

• Thursday, April 12, 2012, Starts at 9:15 a.m. (SOLD OUT), and 9:30 a.m. (SOLD OUT)
• Saturday, April 14, 2012, Starts at 9:15 a.m. (SOLD OUT), and 9:30 a.m. (SOLD OUT)
• Wednesday, April 18, 2012, Starts at 8:30 a.m.
• Thursday, April 19, 2012, Starts at 8:30 a.m.
• Friday, April 20, 2012, Starts at 8:30 a.m.
• Tuesday, April 24, 2012, Starts at 8:30 a.m.
• Wednesday, April 25, 2012, Starts at 8:30 a.m.
• Thursday, April 26, 2012, Starts at 8:30 a.m.
• Saturday, April 28, 2012, Starts at 9:15 a.m. (SOLD OUT), and 9:30 a.m. (SOLD OUT)
• Tuesday, May 1, 2012, Starts at 9:15 a.m. (SOLD OUT), and 9:30 a.m. (SOLD OUT)
• Thursday, May 3, 2012, Starts at 9:15 a.m. (SOLD OUT), and 9:30 a.m. (SOLD OUT)

Experimental Music Festival resonates in New Brunswick art gallery

Over fifteen innovative acts will perform at the bleeding edge of sound on April 20th & 21st at Omega Sound Fix II at the Alfa Art Gallery, New Brunswick, NJ. The festival began in 2010 when curators Mark Weinberg and Michael Durek sought to fill a void for a spirited festival of new and innovative music in central NJ.

Among the performers this year is spoken word artist, Brick, who was born deaf but now expresses himself with inspirational tones that he has created to cope with adversity. Brooklyn- based experimental trio Prehistoric Horse, and danceable ambient artist $50 trumpet (also hailing from Brooklyn) will be generously sharing their skills on the bill. Avant-garde vets ArtCrime will take the stage on the opening night. And Chester Hawkins, playing as Blue Sausage Infant, will be there from Washington D.C., hypnotizing and stimulating with loops, arpeggiated vibrations, and everything in between.

The local element at the festival promises to be powerful. Blithe(doll), excavating their innovative electro/trip-hop siren calls, will be returning for their second Omega Sound Fix appearance, as will part-techno-part-down-tempo atmospheric laptop guru, Borne. Asbury Park’s rising Wreaths will headline the first night, displaying their warm and mystifying saturated drones. Fairychaser will stop you in your tracks with their heartbreaking combination of ethereal percussion and starkly classic vocal stylings. STRNGLV’s multimedia demonstration of nebulous pulses will take you on a trip to the astral plane, but don’t float away…

…because you don’t want to miss festival curators Mark Weinberg and Michael Durek, who will combine sonic forces on day two for a memorable Trinitron/CloudCloud set. Trevor Pennsylvania and Jim Schmidt’s foray into no-wave, a movement swaying you to the left of the proverbial dial, will take shape as The Summer Dresses. 2673 will intrigue with his blissfully oppressive sound worlds, ranging from barely there zero ambiance to speaker shredding walls of noise static.

Open your mind. Allow these unique transmissions to wash over you. There is water everywhere. This is the Omega Sound Fix. Your perfect prescription awaits. 

Tickets are $6 for one day, $10 for a two-day pass. Doors open at 7 p.m. on Friday and 5 p.m. on Saturday. 

Visit omegasoundfix.com for full line-up and details

Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Omega-Sound-Fix/336522986382754 (share with friends!)
On twitter:   twitter.com/omegasoundfix

Varying in theme and concentration, these oils and mixed media collages expand his body of work to areas previously unrevealed. This group appears especially organic with heavy references to traditionalist styles of the past. A formally taught artist himself, Kourtev is particularly inspired by the ideals of the Symbolist and the Arts and Crafts Movements of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Join us on Saturday, April 14 to celebrate this exciting debut of these never before seen works.
 
Vesselin Kourtev is the Founder, Director and current Artist in Residence at the Alfa Art Gallery. Originally from Bulgaria, he is recognized internationally as an oil painter with a truly unique style. He uses traditional, narrative drawing techniques paired with abstract-expressionist painterly qualities. His works pay homage to artists like Arnold Bocklin and Walter Crane, and incorporate gesture and story telling. Vesselin currently lives and works in New Brunswick, NJ, where he continues to find new inspirations for his work. 

Awards Ceremony: Announcing the winners of the New Brunswick Art Salon 2011 Juried Exhibition
(1st Place: Peter Arakawa, 2nd Place: Darren McManus, 3rd Place: Rita Herzfeld, Honorable Mention: Dara Alter) 

This year’s Alfa Gallery anniversary exhibition present three artists who all create abstractions, but with different approaches to technique and imagery: Chinyee, Bertha (Bert) Thompson and Tony DiBella. Since its emergence as a viable and accepted form of modernist art near the beginning of the 20^th century, abstraction has continued to act as a method of image-making that seems essentially boundless in its diversity and potential to inspire imagination and technical experimentation.  Within the work of the three artists in this exhibition, one can appreciate the flexibility of abstraction to accommodate differing and highly personal sensibilities and interests, yielding particular exemplars of the range of abstract imagery, whether painterly or geometric, gestural or linear, opaque or filled with light.  These artists also demonstrate how, behind the immediate impression of abstraction, sources drawn from the real world may be at work, whether literal or symbolic.  

Over a career spanning more than 50 years, Chinyee’s art reveals a progression of vividly realized themes that are notably diverse yet equally reflective of a coherent, lifelong vision.  While her earliest works show full mastery of traditional Chinese ink techniques and Western realism, her major influence turned out to be Abstract Expressionism.  Within this style, often known for aggressive paint-handling, some artists preferred a refined and somewhat muted manner of expression, using a lighter touch and more delicate and complex manipulation of color.  This style has been called “lyrical abstraction,” and Chinyee’s art is appropriate to this label.  Always exploring and receptive to fresh insights, she moves smoothly from medium to medium, working with oil, watercolor, oilstick, enamel, acrylic, China marker, and collage.  Her abstractions derive in part from both the calligraphic and atmospheric traditions of Chinese art, as well as the Western mode of color field painting.  While her art is basically abstract, Chinyee’s Chinese heritage, in which nature is the primary source of art and philosophy, intermittently affects her imagery.  Open to all sources and sensitive to the feeling of life – or ch’i – which Chinese artists find essential to meaningful expression, Chinyee allows references to nature to suffuse into her work, which might be specific, such as a lotus plant, or general, as in horizontal bands that suggest land and sky.  

Bert Thompson’s work has alternated between abstraction and realism; the current presentation concentrates on a group of abstract paintings she produced between 1992 and 1998.  These works are typified by geometric shapes and divisions, often with large areas of black, gray or white, set off with color forms that are sometimes bright and primary, but frequently muted, rather like rock or sand.  The paint is laid down in impasto, with rich and rather glossy surfaces built up with evident individual strokes.  Accompanying the large major compositional elements such as triangles, rectangles and circles are scatterings of linear motifs that enliven the compositions and resemble graffiti or scratches into the walls of buildings.  Indeed, these abstractions by Thompson are cogent, if surprising, painted reactions to the physical environment of Urbino, Italy, which deeply moved her emotionally and visually.  She has written: “The Ducal Palace had intricately carved marble around all the mantels, doors and window frames – a light and airy feeling.  I found myself absorbing the colors – ochres, umbers, siennas; the textures and the effects I saw…. These I used in my abstractions.”  Thus, these works are to some degree abstract translations of physical structures, with the stucco-like or incised impasto surfaces mimicking the irregular stone of buildings, in refined or weathered aspects.  To these features Thompson may add shapes that seem like symbols or letters, providing further levels of interest to a series of paintings whose individual works are by turns active, mysterious, elegant, and elegiac.

At a quick first glance, the imagery of Tony DiBella might suggest subtly painted abstractions of the color-field variety, perhaps produced by watercolor or airbrush, given their smooth color transitions and flashes of light.  However, inspection of DiBella’s intriguing compositions of hazy color and indistinct forms reveal images made not with paint and brush, but through photography, transforming quite ordinary objects and their details by carefully controlled use of out-of-focus imagery and lighting techniques.  In general, his method involves illuminating an object with ambient light and carefully directed beams from small LED flashlights, then moving around the object and manually changing his camera’s focus, seeking the interplay that will produce a satisfying image.  Colors may be added by reflection of materials placed around or behind the subject.  From time to time, he leaves just enough of his subjects in focus to allow the viewer to comprehend their original physical presence, their solidity, although rarely in amounts sufficient to easily reveal the identity of the objects.  Generally, he titles his photographs not with their true source, but rather with a form or concept suggested by the color miasmas and amorphous shapes in the final composition. For example, The Dove is the result of photographing through a paperweight; Sandbar captures effects derived from a candelabra of square-edged, modern design.  In DiBella’s work, we find the path to abstraction moving straight through the real world, and, via the agencies of technology and imagination, creating a new world of invented form, color, and light. 

Sponsors:

Charlie K hosts the city’s best comedy showcase NO FUNNY BUSINESS… And you can join in the fun for just $5 at the door!

The lineup of comedians this week includes:

• Joe Conte
• Dina Hashem
• Fred Austin
• John Minus
• Craig Sharf
• Matt Jenkins

And we’ve got a very special musical guest this week from NYC: Idgy Dean

Plus this week, Charlie sits down to talk with the latest viral video star, Rutgers’ very own Matthew Ferguson. He skyrocketed to fame and fell back into obscurity in the time it has taken you to read this sentence.

But seriously his viral video already has 700,000 views and caught the attention from CBS and the Huffington Post. Check it out here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJA-Tfbbtdg

Come on down to the Alfa on Thursday Night. What else are you going to do? Cure morning breath and read to underprivileged kids? Then stay home and do it.

Otherwise come out for a great show!

You can also follow No Funny Business on Facebook (www.facebook.com/groups/nofunnybusiness), Twitter (www.twitter.com/NFBcomedy), and on FourSquare (No Funny Business Comedy Show).

About No Funny Business

No Funny Business (NFB) is like no other comedy show you’ve ever seen before. It is an original, live show that is guaranteed to keep things fresh and keep you laughing! NFB seamlessly blends stand-up from the best in local comedy with the staging and sit-down interviews of a late night talk show. Not to mention, NFB will feature live musical acts and special guests from various industries to give its audience a complete night of entertainment. The comedy show has consistently drawn in a large, diverse crowd comprised of students, local civilians, and professionals. So if you are looking for a fun-filled night that won’t break your wallet, where you can let loose, laugh, and even learn something new, then check out No Funny Business in downtown New Brunswick!