The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Five Points Gallery to present three new shows
TORRINGTON — Five Points Gallery, 33 Main St., Torrington, presents three new exhibitions, opening from 6-8 p.m. Friday with a reception and a chance to meet the artists.
Kasey Ramirez's exhibition in the East Gallery, Red Sky in Morning, features large powerful charcoal drawings and prints. The TDP Gallery showcases Gene Gort's digital media exhibition, Drawn to Code. The West Gallery features Dendrites, a dynamic juxtaposition of new and traditional media by Balam Soto and Mary Ann McCarthy.
An in-person artist talk is set for 6:30 p.m. July 8.
Ramirez said his drawings and prints explore the tension between stability and impermanence. “In my drawings and prints, buildings become a stand-in for humans, a metaphor for man-made efforts to create shelters that are ultimately vulnerable to environmental extremes,” he said.
Ramirez's charcoal drawings depict skeletal structures which contain a sense of rise and collapse, of construction and disintegration that mirrors the precarious state in which humans find themselves in the twenty-first century.
Gort utilizes computer programming as a means to produce drawings. The images generated from computer code create animations, data visualizations, and digital prints.
“I am drawn to the concepts of interactivity, repetition, variability, and unpredictability that the process allows,” he said in a statement.
The exhibition will feature both digital and printed drawings, and also includes an ongoing project titled Weather or Not: Current Conditions, commissioned by Five Points Arts for permanent installation at the new Art Center and as an online web project. The project utilizes real-time weather data collected from a weather tower located on the Art Center property, which Gort reimagines into a live data visualization. The weather project was made possible by a grant from Thomaston Savings Bank.
Balam Soto and Mary Ann McCarthy are both inspired by the Greek word dendrites, which refers to trees found in nature and also to neurons in the human brain that resemble trees; however, their approaches to artmaking are vastly different, according to Five Points.
McCarthy's intricate silverpoint drawings of nature and trees highlight the everlasting power of traditional artmaking. Soto's interactive cube sculpture uses video, light, and the effect of active human presence to celebrate art's everchanging capacity to influence how we think about ourselves and the world around us.
Admission is free. All artwork is for sale. Five Points exhibitions and educational events are free and open to the public. Five Points Respects your masking preferences per CDC guidelines.
Five Points is supported in part by the Connecticut Office of the Arts and is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit contemporary art gallery showcasing professional regional, national, and international visual artists. The gallery presents exhibitions in three renovated exhibition spaces and has earned a reputation as one of Connecticut's outstanding contemporary art venues.
For information about Five Points Gallery, visit www.fivepointsarts.org, or contact gallery director Karl Goulet at 860-618-7222 or kgoulet@fivepointsarts.org.
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Sunday, 1 p.m.-5 p.m., and by appointment; call 860-618-7222.