FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Women who Work, Care, and Create
Featured Artists: Elizabeth Ashe, Jacqui Crocetta, Michelle Dickson, Elissa Farrow Savos, Susan Freda, Katharine Owens, Lynda Smith-Bugge, Paula Stern, Emily Tucci
1111 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington DC 20004
Show dates: January 14 – April 27, 2019
Meet the Artists Reception: Wednesday January 30, 5-8 pm
Within the male-dominated art historical field, women sculptors are a rarity — normally working in textiles, decorative and fabric art — disregarded as a lower art form. While some women sculptors working in the “high art” form such as Edmonia Lewis, Barbara Hepworth, Beverly Pepper, Properzia de’ Rossi, Ruth Asawa, and Louise Bourgeois, most of these women are not discussed enough with their male counterparts in the history of art. In the current environment we are striving to showcase our local women sculptors, their works, and their importance to the Global arts scene.
Elizabeth Ashe’s recent sculptures use minimalism – wire and shadow – to examine personal space in our relationship to one another or our environment. Bird sculptures are her metaphor for the migratory nature of living in D.C. or any Sanctuary city. Ashe is the Administrative Director of Zenith Gallery’s non-profit organization, Zenith Community Arts Foundation (ZCAF).
Jacqui Crocetta’s art investigates the human condition through abstraction. Through resilience, hope, and healing, she responds to the stories of women in her community who have faced adversity. Additionally, she focuses on interconnectedness through time in natural environments. One of the works featured in exhibit, Protect. Nurture. Release., emphasizes the complex mother-child dynamic and the idea of letting go & leaving the nest.
Michelle Dickson inwardly contemplates time and mortality to investigate her identity and place in the chaotic ever-changing world today. The cycles of nature, growth, death, and decay are present in Dickson’s series Neither Mine Nor Yours. Additionally, it explores contradiction of environmental devastation by man but the need for survival. The uncertainty and fragility of the environment and the world also exist within our bodies.
Elissa Farrow Savos is inspired by her own personal experiences and emotions, her titles and sculptures reflect the journey of femininity and womanhood. Farrow-Savos’s universal poetic titles provoke emotion in the viewer because they resonate with our private selves. “The stories I tell are about inner worlds revealed – the things that we are not supposed to talk about and perhaps not supposed to feel, about our bodies, our families, and our life’s choices.”
Susan Freda, known for her organic, ephemeral, intricate weaving style, works with form, light, and line to create luminous dresses and shoes. Her fashionable and ghostly dresses have caught the eye of many designers and her work has been featured and collected at NY Fashion Week, Nieman Marcus, and Stuart Weitzman.
Katharine Owens, a self-taught artist, wields her scissors with precision in meticulously designed three-dimensional paper collages that stand out of a two-dimensional surface. Owens is a sculptor in her own right creating structures, people, and places out of paper. Apprenticing under Guenther Riess, she has continued his legacy of three-dimensional paper construction in her own way.
Lynda Smith-Bugge “undresses” trees to reveal their beauty and their imperfections. In doing so, she brings forth rough exteriors and explores rich, hidden interiors, thus shaping fallen trees into works of art with spirit, structure, and timelessness. Lathe-turned symmetrical, mechanical shapes play off organic design. In her view, tree wounds (through their ‘scars’) suggest strength and add expression and history to each of her pieces. Lynda invites you to witness the simple grace of line, texture, and rhythm created by the forces of nature, as presented in each of her works.
Paula Stern’s art is tangible manifestation of her deeply conscious effort to capture personality, corporal existence, and human vigor. Her sculptures honor the creation of the human body, not to idealize the body. Stern sculpts a variety of portraits, fictional characters from Shakespeare, and everyday people in a human form that her “mind’s eye sees.”
Emily Tucci re-purposes what she takes from the environment to advocate for the natural world. Her Trophy sculptures display how ingrained all elements of the creature are with each other, through a focus on their anatomy. Elements of their natural environment are present within the piece, thus showing the integration of the animal within nature.
Now celebrating 40 years in the nation’s capital, Zenith is recognized for its unique mix of contemporary art in a wide variety of media, style and subject. The gallery provides high-quality acquisition, art consulting, commissioning, appraisal and framing services, through its gallery/salon/ sculpture garden off 16th Street at 1429 Iris St NW, WDC 20012. Zenith also curates exhibits at the Eleven Sculpture Space at 1111 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, WDC 20004.