208 Bradford Street € Provincetown, MA 02658 € 508-487-6411

Press Photos are available through downloading the images at the following web address or by contacting the Gallery. http://bertawalkergallery.com/media

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 8/4/05

PASSIONATE & POLITICAL ARTISTS
BURNELL, KAHN/SELESNICK, McCANNA
Opening Friday, August 26, and continuing through Sunday, September 11, 2005

Berta Walker Gallery is proud to announce three one-person exhibitions for three passionate and political artists, opening Friday, August 26, 7 ­ 9 pm, and continuing through Sunday, September 11. They are: mixed media collaborators NICHOLAS KAHN/RICHARD SELESNICK; mixed media and stoneware sculptor THOMAS McCANNA, and painter POLLY BURNELL. As poet Robert Browning believed, "Art remains the one way possible of speaking truth," and these diverse artists bring us their visions of our tumultuous, changing world - from the global to the very local in Provincetown.

POLLY BURNELL

"Provincetown is my Muse"
New paintings on panel

Artists respond to local, as well as global changes in their environments. POLLY BURNELL's new paintings are responses to her local community, Provincetown, more specifically, "so many people leaving Provincetown is the well that these paintings are coming out of," Burnell explains. And, Burnell is the perfect artist to tell this tale. Story has been at the center of her life and work always. Whether her storybook-looking small porcelain sculptures, or in these new oil paintings on gessoed wood panels, Burnell has central motifs that repeat, like characters in an ongoing narrative: "These are town landscapes - with graveyards, the cemetery is almost always in my paintings, with house-things, and water, and almost always a horse."
Burnell's paintings are somewhat reminiscent of the American Regionalists, like Thomas Hart Benson, who believed that hometown reality should inspire art. At the same time, there's also a hint of a Grimm's fairytale - always a story within a story. Her smooth technical application of paint, the rhythmic, almost wave-like/musicality of her compositions, her warm palette, all evoke overall feelings of well-being, almost a quiet, idyllic world; but look again, and there are pictorial references that are like peeps between houses while walking a town lane, that tell "another" story.

NICHOLAS KAHN/RICHARD SELESNICK

"Icebergs and Towers: Backdrops and Props from the Nomadischespuppetheater"
A new collaborative installation

Artists have always made political/social commentary on the world around them. Kahn and Selesnick (both 39), who art critic Eileen Kennedy once described as "the two halves of one artistic soul," follow in the footsteps of some of the greatest artist-humanists in the Western tradition ­ from Bruegel the Elder (16th c.) to George Grosz (20th c.).
Known internationally for their installations of sweeping photographic panoramas and text of purely fictitious worlds and characters that "pretend" to be historically accurate, Kahn and Selesnick put themselves in a history of their making that is intended to bring the viewer to consciousness of the parallels to our times. In this exhibition, Kahn and Selesnick bring us a delicious preview of a much larger work-in-progress that Kahn has described as a "Dadaist/Anarchist puppet show" that portends the collapse of the now world order. Viewing any collaboration of Kahn and Selesnick is akin to participating in an Intellectual¹s game of Twister. Steeped in the literature and art of multitudinous traditions, they continually play with cultural icons, using their established codes while at the same time bending them into outrageous new configurations. (In previous work, they brought us the explorations of the Royal Excavation Corps, a fictitious group of archeologists working in the 1930¹s and 40¹s in the Scottish moors).
In this preview exhibition, we are invited to view several of the 4¹ x 2¹ painted frescos on board (flashe with casein on plaster) that will serve as "back-drops" for a larger installation in the future. In a format that Kahn describes as a "wordless novelŠthese paintings (some of The Tower of Babel, others of icebergs) were made by us in Germany from 1921-23 during the Time of the Great Inflation." Germany¹s decadent decline into fascism mirrors for these artists the decline of American society, which they feel is "on the brink of collapse."
The Tower of Babel in their painted panels "Babel 1" and "Babel 2" are instantly reminiscent of Bruegel¹s tower, painted in 1563 ­ wherein this Dutch master gave his painterly interpretation of the Biblical story of humankind¹s folly and arrogance. Every facet of this preview installation, like all of Kahn/Selesnick¹s collaborations, are embedded with meaning, including puns, visual metaphor, and double entendres. "Babel 1" represents the "twilight moon " or decline of "civilization" with smoking plumes in the background representing the "burning and bombing in Babylon" and "Babel 2" the dawn or early (green) days of Mesopotamia, wherein Kahn and Selesnick allow for a feeling of hope in the future ­ however dim. Will Babel be destroyed or rebuilt? Their paintings of icebergs, Kahn describes as "metaphysical and ominous, silent, still and eerie" in the Surrealist tradition of De Chirico ­ a representation of the horror of both our physical and spiritual decline.
There are "those who are awake and those who are asleep," Kahn, like so many other conscious artists of our time, feels. "Artists and writers are in a sort of a fugue state, seeing the future, while the rest of the public tries to believe that this state can continue."

THOMAS MC CANNA

Emergence: Greener Pastures
New Porcelain Sculptures

Award-winning stoneware sculptor Thomas McCanna¹s socio-aesthetic vision is built upon the confluence of his lifelong love of world cultural traditions and keen political awareness with what he describes as his "love of the decorative." The twelve new pieces in this exhibition continue to focus on McCanna¹s muse, the cow (bovine), representing the Greek Goddess Io, "Nature", the lovely maiden that the god Zeus (Patriarchal capitalism) lusted after, who was perpetually fleeing him until he turned her into a cow to protect her from Hera¹s wrath (Zeus¹ wife). "This has been the basic foundation of what I have honed for at least a decade," McCanna explains.
In this series McCanna departs from his previous works in memoriam to September 11th to works that are described by him as "more about emergence." Some of these bovines shoulder, literally, large vegetables and fruits ­ corn representing "riches," carrots, "folly," and pears "affection," and represent the bio-engineering of food. Others, those that McCanna refers to as his "Woodlands" cows, are wall mounted with fragile mushrooms, Lady Slippers, and Jack-in-the Pulpits that pay homage to the environment. All these bovines possess "three distinct personalities and are made as an ode to women that I know."
Thom McCanna¹s technically masterful and dazzling porcelain sculptures are directly descendent from 18th century European Meissen porcelain animals. Pale and ethereal, these works are repeatedly fired with a salt glaze to give a dry-encrusted look. To emphasize the powerful forms, they are placed on gold-gilded cages as their sculptural base or mounted on tree stumps.
McCanna works in the timeless tradition of sculpture ­ particularly animal form ­ as totem, as a form of religious/spiritual art. "Everything is so lacking these days, (yet) religious art always seems to have meaning. The objects themselves possess an incredible sense of power and meaning," McCanna believes. In the words of Joseph Campbell, "the Indians addressed all of life as a Œthou¹ ­ the buffalo, the trees, the stones, everything. You can address anything as a Œthou," and if you do, you can feel the change in your own psychology." French artist Yves Klein, a favorite of McCanna¹s, encapsulates his feelings about the purpose of art: "Što reawaken the capacities of personal responsibility, and to make the attainment of higher, spiritual, and immaterial qualities, rather than (the production of) ever greater quantities, the goal of human activity."

ALSO on view: "WOLF KAHN Returns to Provincetown", pastels and paintings, through September 11, 2005 (see separate press release)