Marlene Rye "First Date" oil on board 22" x 22"

Windham Fine Arts is pleased to present an all-woman exhibition inspired by Venus, the Roman goddess of love, beauty and fertility! Venus is associated thoroughly with woman, her perception and power. Like the many renderings of Venus’ beauty, this show delights in beauty- not so much in the form of woman, but rather the fruit of women’s artistic labors. Centrally featured are twenty works by Massachusetts artist Marlene Rye. Rye takes on the child-like reverence of the wilderness when creating her works. In the hustle and bustle of everyday life, we so often forget to slow down and truly experience the natural world. Rye’s work reminds the viewer of the mystery and magic of this world. Her abstract landscapes are vividly colored and are at once, vast and intimate. Sheer brushstrokes layer form and color that renders imagery, suggesting the viewer peer through undergrowth and branches, hidden among leaves and grasses. Her work recalls that special place where wilderness is infused with the power and magic that it once held for us as children.

Also contributing to the explosion of spring-like colors are Leslie Bender, Christine Debrosky, Lindsay Frei, Elissa Gore and Emily Thing. Whether the artist recalls memories or invites the audience to create new ones, their works reveal, send messages, simply delight and inspire.

Leslie Bender, born and raised in New Jersey, uses her work to express the emotional, spiritual and intellectual while speaking out on the concerns of the human. Her work does not always contain tranquil images, instead often speaking to the complexities of the human condition. Inspired heavily by Italian director Fellini and his ability to juxtapose the plight of the common man with fantastical, mysterious and magical imagery, Bender seeks to reveal her humanistic themes by combining a myriad of styles and mediums that mirrors what she calls the ‘crazy-quilt’ of the present cultural conditions.

Christine Debrosky, well known for her colorful pastel palette, approaches her work from a temporal place. In her pastel landscapes, she presents to the audience those moments and details that are often overlooked by the world, preferring her compositions to display the “edges” of the day: dawn and dusk. In the shadows and low-angle light, the secret details of a setting are brought to attention as she explores motifs that would be overlooked in the flat, all-consuming light of midday.

Lindsay Frei’s richly detailed works invite the viewer to anthropomorphize neutral, commonplace items. Her subjects are cropped in order to narrow in on a specific moment and section, preferring to concentrate on a part of the whole rather then the scene in its entirety. Creating intimate worlds in her still lives, with a rich but balanced palette, she aims to recreate relationships among inanimate objects that carry human attachments and sentiments.

Elissa Gore’s ethereal, atmospheric landscapes are “meditations on harmony in nature”. The compositions are carefully chosen to reveal a balance between all things; sky and land, water and earth, light and dark. Through her use of mixed media, of color and light, the works are both experiential as well as temporal and exhibit a careful balance between reality and dreamscape while remaining directly representational of her surroundings.

Emily Thing is an abstract surrealist landscape artist whose main goal is to portray the strongest impression made upon her during a particular moment or by a specific subject. She often uses found objects and collage elements to recreate her impressions through memory and experience. Through the light, texture and color of her works, Thing aims to carefully manipulate her work to recreate the purest essence of ‘whole’ that she can, turning a moment in time or a place in memory into a series of deeply personal abstract symbols.

The exhibition opens Memorial Day weekend on Saturday, May 29^th and runs through Sunday, June 27^th. Join us at the gallery for an opening reception on May 29^th from 5-8pm with some of the artists. For more information and a sneak peak at some of the work, check regularly at our website www.windhamfinearts.com. We look forward to seeing you at the gallery as we dive head first into summer with this fun, colorful show!

Jenny