KENT, Conn.—The winter exhibition at Morrison Gallery has been extended through Sunday, Feb. 15, and features works by Tim Nerheim-Chereck, Christine Hayman, George Wardlaw, Alice Aycock and George Rickey.
Sculptor Alice Aycock’s early works were semi-architectural sited works, in some instances involving reshaping the earth, such as “A Simple Network of Underground Wells” and “Tunnels.”
She has exhibited in major museums and galleries nationally as well as in Europe and Japan and has had four major retrospectives. Aycock’s public sculptures can be found in many major cities in the U.S and around the world
Her large-scale installations can be found at numerous universities including, “The Miraculating Machine in the Garden” at Rutgers University (1982); “The Solar Wind” at Roanoke College, in Salem, VA; “The Islands of the Rose Apple Tree…” at Western Washington State University, and “Summaries of Arithmetic…” at the entrance to the Engineering Department at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
American self-taught artist and composer Tim Nerheim-Chereck paints bold and energetic momentist abstract landscapes, following in the tradition of abstract expressionism, neo-expressionism and CoBrA movements. His momentist works attempt to understand “the quest for emotional perfection viewed through the lens of memory and the concurrent birth, loss, and grief of the self.” His original works are included in private collections worldwide.
Never confined by categories, American painter George Wardlaw (1927-2019) explored medium, form, scale and color as a lifelong dialogue between abstraction and spirituality. From his Baptist and Native American roots to Judaism, from the rural south to the urban northeast, from painting to sculpture and back again, Wardlaw produced series after series of profound artworks on his quest for creative and spiritual resolution.
In her work, Christine Hayman concerns herself with space. She is interested in how forms are energized by the space around them, especially when incorporated into paintings with vivid contrasting color and thick painterly textures.
Inspired by the natural world, Hayman believes in a process of constant investigation. Trained early on as a classical pianist, Hayman has been greatly influenced by music in her life. Actively involved in theater and dance at the Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati and Baltimore, her creative talents eventually led to her primary focus as a visual artist.
Born in 1907 in South Bend, Ind., George Rickey (1907-2002) spent more than five decades committed to the creation of poetic and precisely calibrated sculptures that he referred to as his “useless machines.”
Designed to be situated in the public sphere, the works are activated by their interplay with the surrounding environment, reshaping the landscape and bringing heightened attention to aspects of light, movement, and composition.
Of all the natural forces, it was the wind’s movement that most captured Rickey’s imagination. He once wrote, “The artist finds waiting for him, as subject, not the trees, not the flowers, not the landscape, but the waving of branches and the trembling of stems, the piling up or scudding of clouds, the rising and setting and waxing and waning of heavenly bodies.”
Morrison Gallery is located at 60 North Main St.; 860-927-4750. It is open Wednesday through Saturday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sunday noon-4 p.m. and by appointment.
