New Members Exhibition and Flights of Fantasy

Three exhibitions have just opened at the Silvermine Arts Center. Work by new members of the Silvermine Guild of Artists will be on view alongside new acquisitions to the Gabor Peterdi International Print Collection, which will include one work from Andy Warhol’s flower series. In Flights of Fantasy and Game Changes, artists Nina Bentley, Kim Hanna, and Jane Lubin explore the hidden truths in myth, fantasy, fairy tales, and games of chance. 

The twelve new members of the Silvermine Guild of Artists excel in a wide range of artistic media, and this year’s New Members show will be an abundant and varied exhibition of sculpture, printmaking, painting, drawing, and book art. Frances B. Ashforth’s prints and paintings are serene meditations on the horizon line and the possibilities of immense open space.

Chris Perry’s deft and astonishing book-art sculptures channel the whimsical and the architectural, while sometimes having an almost animal presence. American Impressionist Dmitri Wright, a long-time master teacher both at Weir Farm and Silvermine School of Art, brings his light-drenched colors to Impressionism’s cerebral tradition. These three join the Silvermine Guild this year along with Pam Ackley, Jennifer Cadoff, Cynthia Davis, Carolina Guimarey, Caroline Harman, Barbara Marks, Zeb Mayer, Ben Rosecrans, and Priya Tambe. On January 24, the Silvermine Galleries will host a New Members Artist Talk at 6pm.

As children, most of us have delved with abandon into enchanting games of illusion, fortune-telling, and supernatural powers.  In “Flights of Fantasy and Game Changes,” artists Nina Bentley, Kim Hanna, and Jane Lubin explore aspects of magical thinking in a cohesive exhibition.  On Feb. 7 at 6pm, the Galleries will host an artist talk with Nina Bentley and Jane Lubin.

Nina Bentley uses humor and irony to delve beneath the smooth surface of society; and yet she sees the joys and mythical elements of relationships.  Her assemblage sculptures relate games to issues we face as we move from childhood to old age. Kim Hanna of Redding mines the Golden Book of Fairy Tales for its diary of symbols including black cats and white owls, crows and kings, beasts and nightmares. Card tricks, fortune telling, tribal and folk art, and the Jungian concept of synchronicity all inform her work. In Norwalk artist Jane Lubin's collages of found images and acrylic painting, fantasy creatures inhabit the gray area between cartoons and real life. Societal concepts of beauty and gender issues underlie her surrealistic and often fanciful images. As an artist, she prizes spontaneity for its psychological import.  With influences such as Max Ernst and Hannah Hoch, Lubin, an M.D. as well as an artist, says "I create images that gingerly nip around the edges of the problem of how, and whether we fit as individuals into a highly organized, complex society."

The exhibition includes two-dimensional work as well as sculptural elements.  Wall and floor space are integrated into a complex game board. Imagined creatures and game pieces cavort in their own worlds, while the works of art reveal concealed truths.

All three January exhibitions run through February 19.